Get Back/Let It Be sessions: complete song list

The following is a complete list of songs performed by The Beatles and Billy Preston during the January 1969 rehearsals and sessions for the Get Back/Let It Be project.

The list is ordered alphabetically, and contains all songs, including presumed titles where brief fragments of unpublished or improvised compositions were performed. There were also numerous miscellaneous jams which are not listed here.

Where the song is not a well-known one in The Beatles’ canon, composer credits or the version upon which The Beatles based their version have been added. In the case of improvised songs, which are marked by an asterisk, the principal composers are noted.

The Beatles during the Get Back/Let It Be sessions, January 1969

Each list item ends with the dates during January 1969 on which the songs were performed.

* presumed title.

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44 thoughts on “Get Back/Let It Be sessions: complete song list”

    1. It’s introduced by Lennon on the tape as Suzy’s Parlour, and they sing the phrase repeatedly in the song. It was copyrighted as Suzy Parker by EMI in 1971, but that doesn’t appear to have been The Beatles’ own title.

    1. It was a one-line improvised tune based around the title – little more than a fragment. Perhaps McCartney retained a liking for the title. That happened quite a lot during the Get Back/Let It Be sessions; ideas bubbled up then went back under, only to resurface again in a different form at a later date.

    1. Much as I respect Mark Lewisohn, his accounts of the January 1969 sessions really aren’t particularly thorough; they offer the merest hint of all the songs The Beatles and Preston played.

      ‘Blues’ was most likely a note scribbled by a tape operator on the day; Billy Preston actually played half a dozen solo songs for The Beatles on 23 January, two of which (Love Is The Thing To Me and Together In Love) have presumed titles. The others were Everything’s Alright, I Want To Thank You, You’ve Been Acting Strange and Use What You Got.

  1. OK, this is out of control. WHERE can I hear these? It’s a crime not to share them with the world. Somebody get on he phone to Paul and Yoko….

  2. For all Beatles fans and anyone interested in the Get Back/Let It Be Sessions I have a full-length promo LP with cover artwork hand-drawn by John Lennon with possible contributions by Paul, George and Ringo. Visit my website for it at http://www.rarebeatlesalbum.com and post any thoughts or insights you have about it. Is the legend of King Lud ever mentioned in connection with the Beatles?

  3. Am I mistaken, or is “Midnight Special” a “traditional” song that was developed over time, largely by prison inmates, with the actual writer or writers unknown. I know Lonnie Donnegan did a version of it but I don’t think he wrote it.

  4. Holy smoke! I can’t believe the amount of songs on this list! To get our hands on these recordings would be priceless!. To play all these songs and not have the magic back again must say a lot about the relationships between the lads at the time. ‘Build me up Buttercup”? I can hear it. It’s interesting to see how many Paul and George songs are on the list that made it onto their single albums – but were apparently not good enough for Beatle albums.

  5. For info: Balls to Your Partner is not by McCartney. It’s a very bawdy pub song called The Ball of Inverness (or of another town, depending on the source). It has a standard first and last verse, and the lads could sing any intermediate verse in any order, with original verses welcome. Google just found me a fine version of lyrics here, as an example. NSFW!

    1. I haven’t a clue if he’s singing “You better move on” or some other line (just after the seven-minute point, if anyone else wants to listen), but I definitely don’t think he was singing the Arthur Alexander song in that clip. I’m pretty sure it’s not Watching Rainbows either.

  6. Dear Joe, according to Wikipedia, John’s “Mind Games” was begun in 1969 and can be heard in the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions and was originally titled “Make Love, Not War”. I appreciate Wikipedia is far from infallible but is there any truth in this?

  7. Amazing work! Thank you guys, I’m just curious what is the main source to help you building this list.

    Just a couple of notes:
    – The alphabetical order misregards the articles, but A Case Of The Blues has been included twice: the first one at the very top of the list, (A), while the second one is following the standard (C). The days are different too: 2 and 7.
    – The daylist included in the Don’t Let Me Down article ( 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30 January 1969) is different from the one shown in this index (2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30).

    1. Hi Marco. Thanks for that. The main sources were the original tapes, and Sulpy and Schweighardt’s book Drugs, Divorce and a Slipping Image. Once I’d written out each day’s song lists (the links on this page) I compiled it into this master list. It took a while!

      I’ve fixed the Case Of The Blues mis-filing. Good spot. As for Don’t Let Me Down, I missed out the early January dates because they were really only rehearsals at Twickenham, whereas the dates later in the month were at Apple Studios. But there may be some inconsistencies when compared with other pages – I did all this some time ago.

  8. “Little piece of leather”, in the list attributed to Lennon as being the author, is actually the song “A little piece of leather”, written in 1965 by Donnie Elbert, Celestine Dallas and Jimmy Dallas. It was a single by Donnie Elbert in 1965, and reissued in 1972. The latter release was a minor hit.

  9. Torchy the battery boy
    Is here attributed to McCartney as being the author, but it is the theme song to a British childrens TV series, which ran from 1959 to 1961. The music and lyrics were written by Roberta Leigh and the song was arranged by Barry Gray.

  10. all this should be released on the50th, but I believe the surviving beatles will only release all things must pass as an outtake and the rest will be the album presented in different ways.

  11. Shouldn’t ‘Well Well Well’ be attributed to John Lennon, not McCartney? Unless McCartney happened to write a song also called ‘Well Well Well’ but it was completely different from Lennon’s?

  12. what a shame due to licensing and permission from other artists and songwriters that we do not get most of these on the 50th anniversary box set of Let it Be. We don’t even get versions of songs being tried out like the super fast version of Get Back.

  13. So you’re saying these five young men came up with all these songs in one month in 1969? Jesus! Most groups couldn’t develop that list in 2 years! What genius! And look at how many became legendary hits. No wonder I’m still enjoying them in my 70’s. They really were all that great. And to think their entire body of work is in twelve albums and several singles, and they changed music forever. I could never understand why people were so fanatical over them when I was young and they were extant. I’m beginning more and more to see why.

  14. “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling” is actually “High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me)”, from the film “High Noon”.

    While this long list of songs seems quite impressive at first glance, one has to remember that many of these songs are just fragments, maybe just a riff, or a line, and not complete performances. The Beatles were obviously working in a “stream-of-consciousness” mode during much of these sessions.

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