Lennon said that, while "trying to reach God and feeling suicidal" in India, he wanted to write a
blues song, but was unsure if he could imitate the likes of
Sleepy John Estes and other original blues artists he had listened to in school. In "Yer Blues," he alludes to this insecurity with a reference to the character Mr. Jones from
Bob Dylan's "
Ballad of a Thin Man," and with the third verse, which draws on
Robert Johnson's "
Hellhound on My Trail". Instead, Lennon wrote and composed "Yer Blues" as a parody of British imitators of the blues, featuring
tongue-in-cheek guitar
solos and
rock and roll-inspired
swing blues passages. The half-satirical, half-earnest song mockingly acknowledges the
British blues boom of 1968 and the debate among the
music press at the time of whether white men could sing the blues. According to
Walter Everett, the song's "ponderous earnestness ... belies the composer's satirical tone." In the chorus, Lennon sings, "If I ain't dead already, girl you know the reason why." Beatles biographer Jonathan Gould interprets this to be a "joke [in] that nobody knows the reason why—or, for that matter, what any of these bluesy poetics are really supposed to mean." Gould called "Yer Blues" an example of the "cultural realism" that distinguished the Beatles from their musical contemporaries in Britain: "[T]heir acceptance of the idea that, except as a subject of self-parody, certain expressive modes of
African-American music lay outside the realm of their experience and hence beyond their emotional range as singers." The song is in the key of E major, but like many blues numbers, it prominently features
accidentals, such as G, D, and B. It is primarily in a meter, but as with several of Lennon's tunes, the time signature and tempo are altered many times. ==Recording==