Paul McCartney said The Beatles‘ “Eleanor Rigby” was almost called “Daisy Hawkins.” Subsequently, the unused title inspired another song by a different band. Paul compared the name Eleanor Rigby to the name of a character from “Rocky Raccoon.”
The Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was almost inspired by a name from ‘Treasure Island’
In a 2021 article he wrote for The New Yorker, Paul discussed the evolution of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” “Eleanor Rigby may actually have started with a quite different name,” he recalled. “Daisy Hawkins, was it?” Notably, the original title of “Eleanor Rigby” inspired the title of the Fab Four pastiche “Miss Daisy Hawkins” by the band The Red Locusts.
“I can see that ‘Hawkins’ is quite nice, but it wasn’t right,” he added. “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.”
In The New Yorker, Paul acknowledged “Eleanor Rigby” was an actual woman as well. “It’s like the story of the name Eleanor Rigby on a marker in the graveyard at St. Peter’s Church in Woolton, which John and I certainly wandered around, endlessly talking about our future,” he remembered. “I don’t remember seeing the grave there, but I suppose I might have registered it subliminally.”
Instead, McCartney revealed how he came up with the moniker using names familiar to him. “When I started working on the words in earnest, ‘Eleanor’ was always part of the equation, I think, 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.”
“Rigby” came to McCartney by chance as he wandered the streets in Bristol, England. “[M]y memory has me visiting Bristol, where Jane Asher was playing at the Old Vic. I was wandering around, waiting for the play to finish, and saw a shop sign that read ‘Rigby,’ and I thought, That’s it! It really was as happenstance as that.”
Why Paul McCartney felt the song was different from The Beatles’ ‘Rocky Raccoon’
In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul discussed the way he developed character names. He said he gave Eleanor Rigby a name that was supposed to sound serious. He wanted her name to be “harder.”
Paul contrasted this with the character names from the song “Rocky Racoon.” That song is partly about a woman named Magill, who called herself Lil, but she was known as Nancy. Paul wanted to amuse listeners with Magill’s name. While the song “Eleanor Rigby” has a bit of a Gothic ambiance, Paul described “Rocky Raccoon” as a cheeky spoof of Westerns.
Eleanor Rigby seems like a simple character, but a lot of thought went into her name.
