Keys that The Beatles used (now that you've found another key) | Page 3 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

That’s an extremely interesting topic, thanks for bringing it up!

I wasn’t aware that so many Beatles songs are in A or E. Next to developing a favourite key and the handiness of a certain key when it comes to guitar playing or piano playing it is also very important to look at the inspiration the Beatles had in their youth. Because there were no tabs of any song available one had to figure out the chords of a song by ear and if these songs they were inspired by happened to be in one or two keys mostly that would mean that the Beatles would have come across this key a lot when listening to their favourite records and playing along. If this were the case and these keys were maybe A and E, this would partly explain their preference of those keys because you’re always influenced by what you listen to.

Therefore, I looked into the Anthology book and when talking about their favourite music as a teenager John says:

There have only been two great albums that I listened to all the way through when I was about sixteen. One was Carl Perkin’s first or second, I can’t remember which. And one was Elvis’s first. Those are the only ones on which I really enjoyed every single track.

And sure enough, when you look at the keys of every song in these two albums:

Since especially the early albums of the Beatles where you could hear the influence of the music they heard in their teens quite strongly contain many songs in E and A, I think that the influence of their preferred music as a teenager plays a big role in their choice of keys. Later, when they became more experimental and wrote their own songs and discovered their own musical language, you can easily see from the charting the Beatles site that the percentage of songs in E, for example, decreases.

Now, one could wonder why so many of Elvis’s and Perkins’s songs are in A and E. I’ve read something about E being a very common key in Blues and since Rock’n’Roll is also heavily inspired by Blues this would make sense. However, I’ve got no idea why E was popular in Blues. You could probably argue with E being an easy key for guitar players again, though. 

As for the sorting, it will be fascinating to see whether the songs John mainly wrote are more often in E or A since I’ve only focused on John’s favourite album as a teenager. 

The lists are fab, thanks! Sorting by tempo is an interesting idea.

However, I think it would be nice to add the songwriters to the cover versions. I’ve put it in spoilers, if you think it’s unnecessary you can leave it the way it is though.