Paul McCartney Born: Beatle Who Wrote Pop's Greatest Songs

Paul McCartney was born in Liverpool on June 18, 1942, in Walton Hospital, the son of a cotton salesman and a midwife. His mother Mary died of breast cancer when he was fourteen, an event he later said shaped his emotional life more than anything else. He met John Lennon at a church fete in Woolton in July 1957, when Lennon was performing with his skiffle group the Quarrymen. McCartney impressed Lennon by knowing the words to Eddie Cochran songs and by being able to tune a guitar, which Lennon could not. They began writing songs together almost immediately, and the partnership they formed became the most commercially successful songwriting collaboration in the history of popular music. The Lennon-McCartney catalog includes Yesterday, the most covered song ever recorded, Let It Be, Hey Jude, Eleanor Rigby, A Day in the Life, and roughly two hundred others. After the Beatles dissolved in 1970, McCartney formed Wings, which produced Band on the Run and Live and Let Die, and then sustained a solo career that has continued for more than fifty years. He has written a classical oratorio, a ballet, electronic albums under pseudonyms, children's books, and a vegetarian cookbook. He was knighted in 1997. He has sold an estimated 100 million solo albums on top of the 600 million the Beatles sold collectively. He still tours arenas in his eighties, playing three-hour sets from memory that span the full breadth of his career. He is the most commercially successful musician in recorded history by virtually any measure.