"Lady Madonna" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written primarily by Paul McCartney and credited to Lennon–McCartney. In March 1968, it was released as a mono single, backed with "The Inner Light". The song was recorded on 3 and 6 February 1968 before the Beatles left for India, and its boogie-woogie style signalled a more conventional approach to writing and recording for the group following the psychedelic experimentation of the previous two years.
This single was the last release by the band on Parlophone in the United Kingdom, where it reached number 1 for the two weeks beginning 27 March, and Capitol Records in the United States, where it debuted at number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending 23 March and reached number 4 from the week ending 20 April through the week ending 4 May. Subsequent releases, starting with "Hey Jude" in August 1968, were released on their own label, Apple Records, under EMI distribution, until the late 1970s, when Capitol and Parlophone re-released old material. The song's first album appearance in stereo was on the 1970 collection Hey Jude.
Inspiration
In the description of musicologist Walter Everett, "Lady Madonna" is a "raucous rock and roll" song. As such, it heralded the Beatles' return to a more standard form of songwriting after their recent psychedelic productions, a back-to-basics approach that many other artists pursued throughout 1968. According to one of Paul McCartney's neighbours at his farm in Scotland, McCartney previewed the song on a piano during a visit he and Jane Asher made from London in early December 1967. Author Jonathan Gould views the timing as propitious, since the British music press in early 1968 "[began] to tout the idea of a 'rock-and-roll revival' as a corrective to the excesses of psychedelia".
McCartney based his piano part for the song on Humphrey Lyttelton's trad jazz rendition of "Bad Penny Blues", which was released on the Parlophone record label in 1956, soon after George Martin, the Beatles' producer, had taken over as head of the label. McCartney recalled: "'Lady Madonna' was me sitting down at the piano trying to write a bluesy boogie-woogie thing ... It reminded me of Fats Domino for some reason, so I started singing a Fats Domino impression. It took my other voice to a very odd place." Domino's 1956 hit "Blue Monday" conveys the plight of a working man through each day of the week, while "Lady Madonna" does the same from a female perspective.
John Lennon helped write the lyrics, which give an account of an overworked, exhausted (possibly single) mother, facing a new problem each day of the week. McCartney explained the song by saying: "'Lady Madonna' started off as the Virgin Mary, then it was a working-class woman, of which obviously there's millions in Liverpool. There are a lot of Catholics in Liverpool because of the Irish connection." The lyrics include each day of the week except Saturday, which McCartney only noticed many years later: "I was writing the words out to learn it for an American TV show and I realised I missed out Saturday... So I figured it must have been a real night out." McCartney said his inspiration for the song came after seeing a photograph in National Geographic magazine of a woman breastfeeding, titled "Mountain Madonna".
Speaking later about "Lady Madonna", Lennon said, "Good piano lick, but the song never really went anywhere", adding: "Maybe I helped him on some of the lyrics, but I'm not proud of them either way." Author Howard Sounes identifies both a relevance to McCartney's Catholic upbringing, and an autobiographical quality that belies the song's upbeat melody and delivery. He writes: "the lyric is also tender and personal, evoking the image of Mary McCartney as midwife, tending mothers and their babies in Liverpool as she had during Paul's childhood. The phrase 'Lady Madonna' also has a clear Christian meaning, of course, conflating Paul's memory of his mother with the Virgin Mary in what is a boogie-woogie hymn."
Recording
The Beatles decided to record "Lady Madonna" for their first single of 1968. The release was intended to cover the group's absence while they attended a Transcendental Meditation course in India under the guidance of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The sessions took place on 3 and 6 February at EMI Studios (subsequently Abbey Road Studios) in London.