Which Songs Did The Beatles Play on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’?

The Beatles played a killer set of songs during their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Some of those songs are still famous and some are not. George Harrison discussed the band’s mindset leading up to their set.

The Beatles played a show tune on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’

According to Kiro 7, The Beatles made their first Ed Sullivan Show appearance on February 9, 1964. The Fab Four started their set with their classic love song “All My Loving.” While The Beatles played the tune during this seminal moment in their careers, the tune is mostly forgotten in the United States and rarely receives play on rock radio.

Then, the band performed a show tune called “Till There Was You.” For context, musical theater had a much bigger influence on popular music during the early 1960s than it does now. The first half of the band’s set closed with “She Loves You,” the first song of the night that’s still really famous in the U.S.

The Beatles played 2 of their most famous tunes next

The second half of the set began with “I Saw Her Standing There.” That track was a crowd-pleaser at the time, but its questionable lyrics about a teenage paramour would inspire nothing but controversy and condemnation today. The set ended with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which is perhaps the defining song of the group’s bubblegum years.

Except for “She Loves You,” all the tunes from The Beatles’ set appeared on the album Meet the Beatles!, which was the group’s first album for Capitol Records. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was released as a single from the album with “I Saw Her Standing There” as its B-side. Both tunes embodied the bubblegum rock ‘n’ roll sound that The Beatles brought to America’s shores during the early 1960s.

What George Harrison thought about appearing on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’

The book George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters features an interview from 1977. In it, George discussed The Beatles’ mindset when they first appeared on the show. “We knew we’d had sufficient success in Europe and Britain to have a bit of confidence,” he said. “And we really needed a hell of a lot of confidence for the States because it was just such an important place. I mean, nobody’d ever made it — you know, no British acts — apart from the odd singer like Lonnie Donnegan.” Donnegan was a skiffle musician who is most known for his cover of the folk tune “Rock Island Line.”

“But Ed Sullivan was, you know, everybody had told us how he was really big,” he added. “But again, we were pretty naive to certain things so that helped at the time. I remember them asking us, did we know who Walter Cronkite was. And I said, ‘I dunno, isn’t he somebody on the television?’ You know, things like that were good because they all had fun — the people asking questions and the press; us being naive and not seeming to care about that sort of thing.”

The Beatles were naive when they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and their appearance is still legendary.