George Harrison's Something became the Beatles' love song that Frank Sinatra called the greatest of its age
the gist
Something is a 1969 Beatles song written by George Harrison for the album Abbey Road. Together with Here Comes the Sun, it showed that Harrison had become a composer on the level of Lennon and McCartney. The song was issued as a double A-side with Come Together and topped the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. It is generally seen as a love song to Harrison's wife Pattie Boyd, and its guitar solo is often named among his finest playing. Because the Beatles had limited space for his songs, Harrison first offered it to Joe Cocker. Since then more than 150 artists have recorded it, making it the second-most covered Beatles composition after Yesterday.
so what
The song marked a turning point in the Beatles' songwriting and gave Harrison a lasting place in the band's canon. Its many cover versions show how far a well-written love song can travel beyond its original recording.
fun fact
Frank Sinatra regularly performed the song and called it the greatest love song of the past 50 years.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · text CC BY-SA 4.0
Illustrative photo · The Beatles, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.
how it works
To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.
so what
A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.
the bigger pattern
Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.
fun fact
In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.
more on this
background
A Corner in Wheat is a 1909 American short silent film which tells of a greedy tycoon who tries to corner the market in wheat, destroying the lives of the people who can no longer afford to buy bread. It was directed by D. W. Griffith and adapted by Griffith and Frank E. Woods from a novel and a short story by Frank Norris, titled The Pit and "A Deal in Wheat". Griffith may have had a real-life inspiration: six months earlier, James A. Patten had actually cornered the market in wheat, and in some cities, the price of bread doubled from five cents to ten, just as in the movie.
In 1994, A Corner in Wheat was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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