Beatles – "She's a Woman" (1964)

My love don’t give me presents

I know that she's no peasant

The Beatles owned pop music in 1964.

Their first American hit single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” entered the Billboard “Hot 100” the week of January 25, 1964 – and promptly ascended to the #1 spot, where it remained for seven weeks.

That was merely the first of six #1 singles for the Beatles that year.

Today’s featured song – “She’s a Woman” – was the B-side of “I Feel Fine,” which was the last of those six #1 records.

“She’s a Woman” peaked at #4 – which ain’t too shabby for a B-side.  It was the 19th and final Beatles single to reach the top 40 in 1964.

I can’t imagine that there’s a single one of you who could name all 19 – several of them were extremely forgettable records.

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“She’s a Woman” is constructed on a classic 12-bar blues foundation, with a classic 12-bar blues chord structure: I-I-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-V-IV-I-I.

It’s not really a blues song – the tone isn’t that of a classic blues song, and the lyrics don’t conform to the usual blues model.  (In a classic blues song, each verse is in AAB form – meaning the first line or phrase is repeated twice, followed by a different line or phrase.)

The Beatles covered some 12-bar blues songs, but I can’t think of another early Lennon-McCartney original that has a 12-bar blues structure.

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“She’s a Woman” was the first Beatles recording that was longer than three minutes.

As I’ve noted ad infinitum (if not ad nauseam), the Lennon-McCartney team wrote a lot of what I call “songlets.”  What I mean by that is that they had a lot of ideas for songs that they didn’t fully develop – instead of continuing to work on those song ideas, they just ran down to the studio and recorded them – stretching them to an acceptable length by repeating verses and bridges willy nilly.  

“She’s a Woman” is a good example of a shamelessly stretched Beatles songlet.  The first half isn’t a bad little song – but the second half is simply repetition to no purpose (except stretching the song to an acceptable length to be released as a single.)

Listen to the song with the lyrics in front of you and your eyes on a clock with a second hand.

There’s one verse, and then there’s a second verse, and then there’s a very brief bridge – which sort of falls out of the sky.  At that point, we’re at the 1:20 mark – jump to the end for the ten-second fadeout and you’re up to 1:30, which is half the length of the finished record.

What makes up the other 1:30 of the record?  Filler, plain and simple.  

First the Beatles repeat the first verse.  Then they drop in a guitar solo, which has the same chord structure as the verses, but is only half as long.  Then they repeat the bridge.  And then they repeat the first verse once again.

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If the Beatles had asked me – they didn’t, in part because I was a 7th-grader living in Joplin, Missouri at the time – I would have told them to do the first verse, do the second verse, do the guitar solo, do the bridge, and then repeat the first verse before fading out.  That brings the record down to the perfectly acceptable length of 2:25, and tightens it up nicely.

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Two final observations about “She’s a Woman.” 

First, the bridge is so short – two lines – that it really should be referred to as a “bridgelet.”

Second, the first two lines of that thrice-sung first verse – which are quoted at the beginning of this post – are a classic example of the Lennon-McCartney’s songwriting team’s biggest weakness: clumsy and unimaginative rhymes.  (I think that’s more a McCartney fault than a Lennon fault.)

If you want to defend the use of “peasant” in this song, be my guest.  But I think we all know why that word was chosen: because it was the first thing that came to mind when Lennon and McCartney needed a word to rhyme with “pleasant.”  (I guess “peasant” is a better choice than “pheasant” would have been, but it’s almost as lame.)

Hearing that lazy pleasant/peasant rhyming couplet once is bad enough – having to tolerate it three times is adding insult to injury. 

(Rhyming “jealous”with “as well as” is pretty lazy, too, but we are only subjected to it once – not three times.)

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Click here to listen to “She’s a Woman.”

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: