The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby Was Almost a Different Name (The Father Was, Too)

The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” is one of the Fab Four’s best, but for a brief moment during its inception, the titular character might have had a different name altogether. Sing it with us now: Miss Daisy Hawkins picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been.

As songwriter Paul McCartney later shared, he had a particular affinity for the last name Hawkins. However, after rolling the half-formed idea around in his head for days (or weeks, as these things often happen), McCartney decided it wasn’t quite right.

Luckily, he had plenty of inspiration elsewhere to find the right name.

The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” Was Almost “Miss Daisy Hawkins”

Syllabically speaking, “Miss Daisy Hawkins” would technically fit into the iconic Beatles’ track “Eleanor Rigby.” It certainly sounds like a name Paul McCartney, who often conjured up fictional characters in his writing, would write about. As he explained in a 2021 piece for The New Yorker, he had always enjoyed the last name Hawkins.

“Jack Hawkins had played Quintus Arrius in Ben-Hur. Then, there was Jim Hawkins from one of my favorite books, Treasure Island. But it wasn’t right. This is the trouble with history, though. Even if you were there, which I obviously was, it’s sometimes very difficult to pin down. McCartney mentioned the famous story of him spotting a tombstone for Eleanor Rigby at St. Peter’s Church while wandering around the graveyard with John Lennon. “I don’t remember seeing the grave there, but I suppose I might have registered it subliminally,” he said.

Eventually, McCartney started playing around with different name ideas. By the time he took a rough draft of the song to his piano teacher, he was singing “Ola Na Tungee” over an E minor vamp. (Macca is quite a fan of this “gibberish first, lyrics later” technique, which is how “Yesterday” started as “scrambled eggs, oh baby, I love your legs.”)

How Sir Paul Settled On The Final Famous Name

As Paul McCartney explained in his piece for The New Yorker, the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” was an amalgamation of several older women McCartney used to help and chat with as a teen in Liverpool. The name, of course, was fictional. When Macca finally decided to drop Miss Daisy Hawkins, he began experimenting with the name Eleanor.

“I think,” McCartney mused, “because we had worked with Eleanor Bron on the film Help!, and we knew her from the Establishment, Peter Cook’s club, on Greek Street. I think John might have dated her for a short while, too, and I liked the name very much.” As for the last name, the former Beatle explained that it came from a sign shop that said “Rigby.” “I thought, ‘That’s it!’ It really was as happenstance as that.”

The priest in “Eleanor Rigby” also got a name change in its earliest incarnations. “Initially, the priest was Father McCartney because it had the right number of syllables. I took the song to John at around that point, and I remember playing it to him, and he said, ‘That’s great, Father McCartney.’ He loved it. But I wasn’t really comfortable with it because it’s my dad—my father McCartney. So, I literally got out the phone book and went from McCartney to McKenzie.”

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