"Don't Pass Me By": Первая авторская песня Ринго Старра

1968 song by the Beatles

"Don't Pass Me By" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1968 double album The Beatles (also known as the "White Album"). A country rock song, it was the first solo composition written by drummer Ringo Starr.

Starr first played the song for the other Beatles soon after he joined the group in August 1962. During an interview, Starr commented on the songwriting process, saying: "I wrote 'Don't Pass Me By' when I was sitting round at home. I was fiddling with the piano – I just bang away – and then if a melody comes and some words, I just have to keep going. It was great to get my first song down, one that I had written. It was a very exciting time for me and everyone was really helpful, and recording that crazy violinist was a thrilling moment". The earliest public mention of the track seems to have been in a BBC chatter session introducing "And I Love Her" on the radio show Top Gear in 1964. In the conversation, Starr was asked if he had written a song and Paul McCartney mocked him soon afterwards, singing the first line of the refrain, "Don't pass me by, don't make me cry, don't make me blue, baby".

Among contemporary reviews of The Beatles, Record Mirror said that "Don't Pass Me By" had a "carnival atmosphere" and a "'gay Paree' sound", adding that, with Starr's vocal, the track was "very appealing". Writing for the same publication in January 1969, however, David Griffiths said that although he considered The Beatles to be the best album of the past year, the song's arrangement "has quickly palled on me" and "I do tend to jump the needle here." Barry Miles of International Times described "Don't Pass Me By" as "Ringo's C&W number" and a "great song", and highlighted the "excellent fiddle player" and "bag pipe effect". In his review for The New York Times, Nik Cohn recognised the track as "the Beatles five years back, straight ahead and clumsy and greatly enjoyable, backed by a beautiful hurdy gurdy organ and made perfect by Ringo's own vocal, sleepwalking as ever". Writing in 2014, Ian Fortnam of Classic Rock magazine cited "Don't Pass Me By" as one of the four songs that made the Beatles' White Album an "enduring blueprint for rock", along with "Yer Blues", "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Helter Skelter", in that together they contained "every one of rock's key ingredients". In the case of Starr's song, he said that the track was poorly served by the McCartney led arrangement, yet it represented a "southern rock exemplar par excellence" for musicians to come. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of its release, Jacob Stolworthy of The Independent listed "Don't Pass Me By" at number 26 in his ranking of the White Album's 30 tracks. He wrote: "This country ditty from Ringo was written years before the White Album, and – while suitably thigh slapping – doesn’t ever outlive its making up the numbers status".

Personnel per Ian MacDonald and supported by Mark Lewisohn and by the Punkles on their 2004 album Pistol. Fortnam highlights the Georgia Satellites' recording as a version that successfully captured the "full boogie rocking potential" that had been ignored in the Beatles' guitar less arrangement in 1968. Ringo Starr released a re recording of the song as a bonus track on his 2017 album Give More Love.

"A Beginning" is an instrumental piece composed by Martin and intended as an introduction to "Don't Pass Me By". It was instead used as an incidental cue in the Beatles' cartoon film Yellow Submarine and heard right before "Eleanor Rigby". It was included on Anthology 3