The 10 Best Covers of ‘Something’ by George Harrison

Most music fans agree: George Harrison was under-appreciated as a songwriter during his time with the Beatles. Between 1962 and 1970, the Fab Four released a little over 200 songs, only a small fraction of which were penned by Harrison.

It would not be until the latter portion of the band’s tenure and into the early years of Harrison’s solo career that his talent earned more recognition — 1970’s All Things Must Pass, for example, was one of the best-selling albums of the ’70s and is consistently cited today as a landmark singer-songwriter release. Or you can look at it this way: two of the most-streamed Beatles songs ever were written by Harrison, “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something.”

Appearing on 1969’s Abbey Road, “Something” was Harrison’s very first A-side Beatles single — seven years after the band began releasing music. It was a No. 1 hit in the U.S., as well as No. 4 in the U.K., and almost immediately, fellow musicians recognized its strength and starting covering the song both live and on their own records.

“I realize that the sign of a good song is when it has lots of cover versions,” Harrison would say in The Beatles Anthology. We agree. Below, in no particular order, are the 10 Best Covers of ‘Something’ by George Harrison.

Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra did “Something” his way. He started performing the song live at his concerts not long after the song was released, and also included it on his 1972 album Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 2. “It’s one of the best love songs I believe to be written in 50 or 100 years,” Sinatra said just before performing the show at the Concert for Americas in the Dominican Republic in 1982, “and it never says ‘I love you’ in the song, but it really is one of the finest.” The singer was in his mid 60s then — compared to Harrison, who was 26 when he laid down the original demos of the song — lending it a sort of wisened tone.

Joe Cocker

If there is one person who might be considered the king of Beatles covers, it may be Joe Cocker, who put his own soulful spin on a number of their songs over the years. Harrison actually offered “Something” to Cocker first before recording his own version. Cocker’s rendition came out the month after the Beatles’ did, on his second album Joe Cocker! (That album also contained covers of Bob Dylan‘s “Dear Landlord,” Leonard Cohen‘s “Bird on a Wire” and another Beatles song from the same album as “Something,” “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.”)

Booker T. and the M.G.’s

Booker T. Jones of Booker T. & the M.G.’s was thousands of miles away from the Beatles when Abbey Road was released. It stopped him in his tracks. “I was in California when I heard Abbey Road, and I thought it was incredibly courageous of the Beatles to drop their format and move out musically like they did,” he hold the A.V. Club in 2009. “To push the limit like that and reinvent themselves when they had no need to [do] that. They were the top band in the world but they still reinvented themselves. The music was just incredible so I felt I needed to pay tribute to it.” Pay tribute he did in the form of his own cover of “Something.” It appeared on the 1970 album McLemore Avenue, the cover of which showed the band walking single file across a street like the Beatles on Abbey Road.

Elvis Presley

It’s possible that without Elvis Presley, there may not have been the Beatles. Like numerous budding musicians, Presley was a significant influence on Harrison and his bandmates. “It had an incredible impact on me just because I’d never heard anything like it,” Harrison once recalled. “I mean, coming from Liverpool, we obviously — we didn’t really hear the very early Sun Records. The first record I can remember hearing was probably the big hit by the time it got across the Atlantic. It was ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ – ‘Heartburn Motel’ as Elvis called it.” Things came full circle when Presley performed “Something” on his 1973 Aloha From Hawaii TV special, seen below. A 1970 version was also included on Presley’s 1995 box set, Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The Essential ’70s Masters.

James Brown

“The best one I ever heard was [from] James Brown and he did it in 1972,” Harrison explained in a 1988 interview with MuchMusic (via Far Out Magazine), “but he did [it] only as the B-side of a re-recorded version of ‘Think,’ which is a very old song of his. So it was only on the B-side. I sent him a postcard and said: ‘You should make it the A-side, it’s a killer! It’s really good.”

Shirley Bassey

“I recorded ‘Something’ after I had seen Peggy Lee perform the song on The Ed Sullivan Show in the States,” Shirley Bassey told Record Mirror in July of 1970, about a month before she released an album that not only included her cover of “Something,” but was named after it. (Both the song and LP were Top 5 hits in the U.K.) “I thought it was a ‘communication song.’ I’ve always admired the Beatles’ work anyway — at least until they went a little strange — and I think this George Harrison song is just beautiful.”

Smokey Robinson

In a 1974 interview with Sounds, Harrison was asked about which contemporary artists he liked. “Smokey Robinson,” he replied. “I’m madly in love with Smokey Robinson.” Of course, Harrison’s love of Robinson could be traced back many years — the Beatles had recorded the Miracles’ “You Really Got a Hold on Me” back in 1963 for their second British album, With the Beatles, featuring both Harrison and John Lennon singing the lead harmony vocal. (Harrison and Robinson would later become friends when they both lived in Los Angeles.)

Ray Charles

Sometimes a hit arrives in the lap of a songwriter thanks in part to their thinking of someone else. In the case of “Something,” Harrison had one particular singer in mind when he sat down at the piano, the instrument on which he wrote the song. “It has probably got a range of five notes, which fits most singers’ needs best,” he explained in The Beatles Anthology. “When I wrote it, in my mind I heard Ray Charles singing it, and he did do it some years later.”

It turned out that Charles’ version wasn’t Harrison’s favorite. “As it happened, the song ended up with over 150 cover versions,” he said in a 1979 joint interview with none other than Michael Jackson. “But when Ray Charles did it, I was really disappointed. It was a bit corny, the way he did it.” Still, there’s something captivating about the soul Charles put into this recording.

Sarah Vaughan

This one is a bit more out there than the others, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think Harrison would appreciate an arrangement departure like the one presented in Sarah Vaughan’s cover of “Something.” Vaughan’s version appeared on her 1981 album Songs of the Beatles, and she was accompanied on the track by the Brazilian singer and musician Marcos Valle. David Paich, David Hungate, and both Jeff and Steve Porcaro of Toto also appear on the album.

Norah Jones

Norah Jones has a particularly special connection to Harrison. Her father, the Indian sitarist and composer Ravi Shankar, was one of Harrison’s musical idols. Over the years she’s covered a number of Beatles (and solo Harrison) songs, and is a friend of Harrison’s only son, Dhani, but her 2014 cover of “Something” is especially memorable with Jones’ velvety vocal.

Honorable Mention: Paul McCartney

Frankly we would be remiss if we didn’t at least give an honorable mention to Harrison’s own Beatles bandmate Paul McCartney. For years now, McCartney has been paying tribute to his late friend with live covers of “Something” featuring the ukulele, one of Harrison’s favorite instruments. “Sometimes if you’d go ’round to George’s house, after you’d have dinner, the ukuleles would come out,” McCartney said when he introduced the song at the 2002 Concert for George, held on the one year anniversary of Harrison’s passing. “And one time not so long ago, we were playing and I said, ‘There’s a song I do on the ukulele.’ I played it for him—[I’ll] play it for you now. It’s a tribute to our beautiful friend.”