Song by Song: "Yesterday" Trivia Quiz

Answer: On the U.K. album "Help!"

"Yesterday" was first released on the Beatles' fifth studio album in the U.K., "Help!" which came out in August of 1965. It was then released as a single in the U.S. on September 13, 1965. The song later appeared on the U.K. EP, "Yesterday," which was released in March of 1966.

In June of 1966, it appeared on the U.S. album "Yesterday and Today." It was not released as a single in the UK until 1976.

Answer: Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney told Rolling Stone magazine that the song came to him in a dream, explaining, "My dad used to know a lot of old jazz tunes. I thought maybe I'd just remembered it from the past." The song was credited to the John Lennon and Paul McCartney writing partnership.

Answer: Scrambled Eggs

The music was written first, and substitute lyrics were used to hold the place of the lyrics until the real lyrics could be written. When McCartney auditioned the song for the producer, he opened it with these lyrics:

"Scrambled eggs
Oh my baby how I love your legs
Not as much as I love scrambled eggs."

The working title for the song was thus "Scrambled Eggs."

Paul McCartney performed the "Scrambled Eggs" version of the song with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" in 2010.

Answer: George Martin

The song's producer, George Martin, arranged the string quartet. Rolling Stone magazine wrote that his arrangement "emphasized lower-octave melancholy, while McCartney's almost whispered vocal reverberated with longing in the big, dark spaces where drums and electric guitars would have been." The quartet consisted of Tony Gilbert and Sidney Sax on violins, Kenneth Essex on viola, and either Peter Halling or Francisco Gabarró on cello.

Answer: guitar

McCartney supplied vocals and played an Epiphone Texan steel-string acoustic guitar, which was later overdubbed with the string quartet for backup. Norman Smith was the sound engineer for the song. The song peaked at number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in 1965. Its 1976 UK release as a single reached number eight on the UK Singles Chart.

Answer: true

More than 1,600 cover versions of "Yesterday" exist today, and Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) reports that in the 20th century, it was performed at least seven million times. The most recorded song of all time is, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, George Gershwin's "Summertime," with over 67,000 different recorded versions.

The hymn "Amazing Grace" is also in the top five.

Answer: Georgia

In the July 2002 article "Old Sweet Songs," Hammond argues that the Ray Charles' version of "Georgia" may be "the mythic dream song that inspired McCartney's" own melody. Hammond doesn't "want to overstate the case for the melodies," but he finds "the same basic phrase structure, where each phrase plays the same basic role in both tunes, and has a similar shape.

There are very strong points of contact at the start and end of the tunes and clear points of contact in the displaced middle sections."

Answer: a shadow

"Yesterday
All my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they're here to stay
Oh, I believe in yesterday

Suddenly
I'm not half the man I used to be
There's a shadow hangin' over me
Oh, yesterday came suddenly."

When "Yesterday" was released as a single in 1965, "Act Naturally" was on the B-Side. The song is often classified as belonging to the "chamber pop" genre of music. Rolling Stone magazine called the song "a frank poem of regret scored and sung with haunted elegance."

Answer: love

"Yesterday
Love was such an easy game to play
Now I need a place to hide away
Oh, I believe in yesterday
Mm mm mm mm mm mm mm."

The 1965 release of "Yesterday" peaked at number one on singles charts in Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. The song has been covered by a myriad of artists from Marvin Gaye, Ray Charles, Merle Haggard, and Elvis Presley to Aretha Franklin, Frank Sinatra and Dr. John. Even Bob Dylan performed the song, in 1970, with George Harrison, despite criticizing the song when it was first released by saying, "If you go into the Library of Congress, you can find a lot better than that. There are millions of songs [like 'Yesterday'] written in Tin Pan Alley."

Answer: false

The song was nominated, but Tony Bennett's "The Shadow of Your Smile" won instead. "Yesterday" was, however, nominated for six Grammys that year, and it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1997. In a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll, listeners, along with music experts, voted "Yesterday" the best song of the 20th century.