What Once Was Lost: Unfinding and Refinding Music History
Félix Vallotton, Lady at the Piano, 1904. Courtesy the Hermitage Museum.
Most of us have, at one time or another, put something valuable in a supposedly safe place and then forgotten where we left it. Car keys, wallets, eyeglasses, cell phones—whether through distraction or neglect or diabolical misfortune, things disappear. And it’s not just household items. Over the centuries, more than a few of our most precious cultural artifacts have been lost in similar ways. This includes historically significant music manuscripts, a spate of which have turned up in recent years, to the delight of musicologists and listeners alike. Which is to say that sometimes, through an unpredictable combination of knowledge, awareness, sleuthing, and occasional pure luck, lost treasures are, like paradise, regained.
Not long ago, when George Harrison’s widow, Olivia, was rummaging in a piano bench in Friar Park, the couple’s expansive and whimsical Gothic estate in Oxfordshire, she found a long-forgotten folder the late Beatle had left there. In it were twenty years of original documents, including the lyrics of a previously unknown song from the early seventies, “Hey Ringo.” Written as an imaginary dialogue between himself and Ringo, it is something of a lament about the Beatles’ breakup. Although George was as ready to move on as the others, this song sheds light on the close musical relationship between two of the most influential players in rock history.
Olivia Harrison, whom I believe would consider herself a curator of her husband’s legacy, was revising and updating, when she decided to search through previously ignored nooks and crannies for fresh material to include in the book. This February, Ms. Harrison presented a copy of the lyrics to a stunned Ringo at a Los Angeles party commemorating George’s seventy-fourth birthday, expressing hope that he and Paul McCartney would record it. She is said to be searching now for a possible demo tape made by George more than four decades ago that would give his surviving bandmates a key to how lyrics like “Hey Ringo, now I want you to know, that without you my guitar plays far too slow” were meant to be set to music.
