Why The Beatles Sang 'She Was Just 17' on 'I Saw Her Standing There'
The Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There” includes one of the band’s most iconic lines: “She was just 17/If you know what I mean.” However, Paul McCartney’s original opening lines of the song were very different. Here’s what The Beatles originally wrote — and why they decided that 17 was the right age for the girl in the song.
The original version of the line ‘She was just 17/If you know what I mean’ from The Beatles’ ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ was much different
According to the book The Beatles: A Hard Day’s Write — The Stories Behind Every Beatles Song, Paul McCartney started writing “I Saw Her Standing There” one night in 1962. He wanted the song to appeal to The Beatles’ fans, who were mostly female.
“I didn’t think a lot about it as I sang it to myself,” he said. “Originally the first two lines were ‘She was just 17/Never been a beauty queen’. It sounded like a good rhyme to me at the time. But when I played it through to John the next day, I realized that it was a useless line and so did John. So we both sat down and tried to come up with another line which rhymed with 17 but which meant something.”
Source: cheatsheet.com
