Memoir in a Melody: The Ballad of John and Yoko

In our Memoir in a Melody series, Biographile writers examine the storytelling of well-known musicians, exploring the autobiographical elements of their famous songs.

Earlier this month, Yoko Ono released Acorn, a follow-up to her 1964 book Grapefruit, published before she met John Lennon, with whom she would be linked long after he was shot to death in 1980.

The New Yorker recently described Acorn as "a hundred haiku-like instructions ('Count all the puddles on the street / when the sky is blue.') accompanied by intricate dot drawings of organic, amoeba-like shapes that twist and turn lightly on the page."

The book's title is a nod to one of Ono's many politically inspired collaborative artistic statements with Lennon, her partner in love and work following their November 1966 meeting, when he visited her exhibition at London's Indica Gallery. By April 1969, the just-married couple sent acorns to international heads of state requesting that they plant them as symbols of peace.

On their honeymoon in Amsterdam, the two protested the Vietnam War with a week-long "Bed-In" for peace, inspired by the nonviolent "sit-in" protests popular at the time. Capitalizing on the media's attention to their marriage, they invited the press into their hotel suite to discuss international affairs, and Lennon immortalized their union in "The Ballad of John and Yoko," released as a single in May 1969 (scroll down for video).

The song skyrocketed to number one on the U.K. charts, but it was banned by some radio stations in the U.S. and Australia on the grounds that its use of the word Christ was blasphemous.

John anticipated that reaction, and in May 1969, he "sent a note to Tony Bramwell, who ran Apple promotions, telling him to keep the words under wraps until the official release," according to Beatles biographer Hunter Davies, who edited and annotated last year's striking collection of nearly 300 letters Lennon wrote to family, friends, lovers, and even strangers over the course of his life. Lennon wrote:

Tony
No pre publicity on Ballad of John & Yoko especially the Christ bit -- so don't play it round too much or you'll frighten people -- get it pressed first.
John

Like many in the collection, the note is accompanied by a winsome sketch. Davies captures its essence, reflective of the broader relationship between Lennon and Ono, with this description:

John and Yoko, happy and cheerful, active and creative, enjoying themselves and doing good for the world, liked to imagine that they were above all the boring, earthly, tedious argumentative office stuff that was beginning to go on underneath them in the Apple offices…

The Ballad of John and Yoko by The Beatles.