In 1974, Paul McCartney was already five years removed from The Beatles and yet still just 32 years removed from being a baby boy in Liverpool, receiving the formative musical influences that he’d carry the rest of his life.
Paul would later describe his father, Jim McCartney, as “my musical education,” and that wasn’t just a matter of passing down his old jazz records. The elder McCartney, who’d come of age in the 1920s, was a jazz man in his own right.
“My dad was an instinctive musician,” Paul explained in the book version of The Beatles Anthology. “He’d played trumpet in a little jazz band when he was younger. I unearthed a photo in the 1960s which someone in the family had given me, and there he is in front of a big bass drum. That gave us the idea for ‘Sgt. Pepper’: ‘The Jimmy Mac Jazz Band.’ My dad is sitting there as a 24-year-old in his tux.”
Jim McCartney never became a proper professional musician in the money-making sense; he ended up working as a cotton salesman. But he never stopped playing music either.
“He would play piano at home. We always had a piano,” Paul wrote. “I have some lovely childhood memories of lying on the floor and listening to my dad play ‘Lullaby of The Leaves’—still a big favourite of mine—and music from the Paul Whiteman era; old songs like ‘Stairway To Paradise’.”
On a rare occasion, Jim McCartney would also break out a rather obscure song that wasn’t available to buy on any record, and that no busker would be able to cover. It was his own original tune, titled ‘Walking in the Park with Eloise.’ The vaguely Dixieland-style instrumental number was written at some point in the 1920s, and had remained at-the-ready in Jim’s mind, even if he’d never gone to the trouble of writing down the music.
“He only ever wrote one song, to my knowledge,” Paul said on an episode of Desert Island Discs in 1982, during which he introduced ‘Eloise’ as one of his selections. “I once said to him, ‘Dad, you know that song you wrote?’ He said, ‘I didn’t write a song, Son. I made one up.’ I said, ‘Well, these days, if you make it up, that means you wrote it; you don’t have to physically write it down.”
Fortunately, whether written down or not, Jim had played ‘Walking in the Park with Eloise’ enough times that Paul had memorised it, as well. And in the summer 1974, during a Wings session in Nashville with all-star guests Chet Atkins and Floyd Cramer, Paul got the idea of doing something his father had never had the chance to do: record the song to tape.
This long-awaited peppy rendition of ‘Walking in the Park with Eloise’—recorded mainly as a gift to his dad—was released later that October as a single under a Wings pseudonym, the Country Hams.
Earlier that year, Marvin Hamlisch’s updated recording of the old ragtime tune ‘The Entertainer’—made for the soundtrack to the movie The Sting—had become an unlikely radio hit, so it’s possible Paul saw similar potential for his dad’s song. It didn’t play out that way, but he did still get the pleasure of sharing the recording with Jim, who greatly appreciated the gesture.
Jim McCartney would be gone just two years later at the age of 69.
“Dad was a pretty good self-taught pianist,” Paul later recalled, “but because he hadn’t had training himself, he always refused to teach me. I would say, ‘Teach us a bit,’ and he would reply, ‘If you want to learn, you’ve got to learn properly.’ . . . In the end, I learnt to play by ear, just like him, making it all up. . . . To this day I have never learnt to write or read music; I have a vague suspicion now that it would change how I’d do things.”
