Interpolation/Cross-Pollination - John Lennon/Arthur Alexander

As is well known, the first few Beatles records were blends of original Lennon/McCartney compositions padded out with cover versions of songs mostly taken from the American R&B catalog. A particular favorite cover version of mine is "Anna (Go To Him)", an Arthur Alexander original covered on "Please Please Me," with John Lennon taking the lead vocal.
What your hearing is John Lennon coming into his own as a vocalist. This is a 22-year-old man emerging as one of the best singers to ever live. Listening to this song on headphones via the 2009 remastered edition of "Please Please Me," (which retains the original mono mix, so the vocals are all in the right channel), is a wondrous thing - you can hear every nuance of Lennon's phrasing, every tear in his vocal cords when he really belts it out, and the ebb and flow of emotion in the performance is displayed with perfect clarity. In short; it's fucking great. Now a funny thing happens when you listen to Arthur Alexander's original and compare:
In general, Alexander's vocal is much more restrained than Lennon's, his delivery smoother, he lays just a bit behind the beat, taking his time enunciating the lyrics (it should be pointed out that, a rarity in early 60s R&B, Arthur Alexander wrote his own songs - he's singing his own words here).

But pay particular attention to the choruses in the two versions, beginning with the lines "All of my life.." Lennon really lets it rip here. Alexander hold back. Why do I point out this difference? Well, I think it demonstrates something interesting about musical cross-pollination and the influences are absorbed and interpreted across cultural, generational, national, and racial boundaries.

John Lennon, as a white boy from a broken home in a hardscrabble dockworker's town, takes his source of influence, Arthur Alexander (always cited by Lennon, throughout his life, as one of his all-time favorite artists), and uses it to channel desperation. His chorus is the sound of a pained man transmuting the pain of another man, a pain in which he finds shared emotional resonance, and emerging with something new, namely Pop Music, or Rock, or whatever you want to call the global phenomenon that the Beatles kicked off.

But there's another thing at play here. This is the short story of the birth of Rock/Pop: white British, obsessed with black American music, adapt (not to say "steal") the stylistic underpinnings of black American music, and come out with something new that conquers the world. But these kids, these Brits, the Jaggers, the Richards, the Lennons and McCartneys, were completely, naively sincere in their love of black American music. They wanted to be just like their heroes. Lennon desperately wants to be as good as Arthur Alexander, and you can hear it, loud and clear. Lennon's chorus on "Anna" is the sound of a man trying to live up to an idol. In the process he created something new, and kicked a pop-cultural dialogue into motion, a motion that continues to this day.