The Only Beatles Song That Featured a Female Lead Vocalist

Across the Fab Four’s entire extensive discography, only one Beatles song featured a female lead vocalist. Interestingly, the John Lennon composition was also inspired by a woman. However, the conversation that sparked the song certainly didn’t paint the woman, who was described by another witness as a “self-important, middle-aged American woman,” in the most flattering light.

Nevertheless, inspiration can come in the unlikeliest of places, and the Beatles’ 1968 track “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” from the group’s iconic white album, is certainly no exception.

The Only Beatles Song Featuring a Female Lead Vocalist

The Beatles were no strangers to bending the rules of gender, perspective, and even reality in general. From “She Said She Said” to “Octopus’ Garden,” the Fab Four proved how adept they were at adopting unique points of view for their compositions. But in “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” they outsourced their character perspectives to a woman already present in the studio: Yoko Ono.

John Lennon’s second wife sang one line alone before the late musician joined her to finish the rest of the verse. Maureen Starkey, drummer Ringo Starr’s wife, also provided backing vocals. A single line might not seem like much at face value, but considering the Fab Four’s propensity for adopting funny voices and personas outside of themselves, the fact that they had Ono perform instead of simply taking on a nasal falsetto themselves was a distinct departure from their usual approach.

Ono served as the voice of the titular character, Bungalow Bill’s mother. Unlike other seemingly abstract Beatles songs like “I Am the Walrus” and “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” the mother and son duo behind “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” were a real-life pair.

The Real Bungalow Bill and His Mummy

John Lennon wrote the lone Beatles song featuring a female lead vocalist after spending time at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (the same man who inspired “Sexy Sadie”). Other ashram visitors included a mother-son duo from America, Nancy Cooke de Herrera and Richard A. Cooke, and actress Mia Farrow, who described Herrera as a “self-important, middle-aged woman” in her memoir.

While in India, the Cookes went out for an elephant ride when a tiger suddenly attacked one of the massive beasts. Richard shot and killed the tiger before returning to the ashram. As Herrera recalled in her memoir Beyond Gurus, “Rik [Richard] told me that he felt bad about it and said that he didn’t think he’d ever kill an animal again. John asked, ‘Don’t you call that slightly life-destructive?’ I said, ‘Well, John, it was either the tiger or us. The tiger was right where we were.’ That came up in the lyrics.”

In the final verse, Lennon sings, The children asked him if to kill was not a sin. Ono joins as the mother, Not when he looked so fierce, before Lennon re-joins with, His mummy butted in. Both Lennon and Ono sing, If looks could kill it would have been us instead of him, before breaking out in the song’s campy, nursery-like refrain.

In David Sheff’s book All We Are Saying, Lennon described Rik as “a guy in Maharishi’s meditation camp who took a short break to go shoot a few poor tigers and then came back to commune with God. It’s a sort of teenage social-comment song and a bit of a joke” (via BeatlesBible).

A joke, maybe, but an interesting female-led oddity in the Beatles’ discography just the same.

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