The Beatles - Get Back

Video of the Beatles singing the song Get Back

"Get Back" is a song by The Beatles, written primarily by Paul McCartney and credited to Lennon/McCartney. The song was originally released as a single on 11 April 1969 and credited to "The Beatles with Billy Preston."[1] It later became the closing track of Let It Be (1970), which was The Beatles' last album released before the group formally split. The single reached number one in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, France, West Germany, and Mexico. It was The Beatles' only single that credited another artist (Preston), although Tony Sheridan had shared billing with The Beatles on his own single "My Bonnie" when issued in the UK in 1962 (and again in 1964).
"Get Back" was The Beatles' first single release in true stereo in the U.S. In the UK, Beatles singles remained monaural until the following release, "The Ballad of John and Yoko."

Composition - Musical development

"Get Back" is unusual in The Beatles' canon in that almost every moment of the song's evolution has been extensively documented, from its beginning as an offhand riff to its final mixing. Much of this documentation is in the form of illegal (but widely available) bootleg recordings, and is recounted in the book Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of The Beatles' Let It Be Disaster by Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt.[2]
The song's melody grew out of some unstructured jamming on 7 January 1969 during rehearsal sessions on the sound stage at Twickenham Studios.[3] Over the next few minutes McCartney introduced some of the lyrics, reworking "Get back to the place you should be" from fellow Beatle George Harrison's "Sour Milk Sea" into "Get back to where you once belonged."[4] McCartney had played bass on Jackie Lomax's recording of the song a few months earlier. For the press release to promote the "Get Back" single McCartney wrote, "We were sitting in the studio and we made it up out of thin air... we started to write words there and then...when we finished it, we recorded it at Apple Studios and made it into a song to roller-coast by."[5]
The released version of the song is composed of two verses, with an intro, outro, and several refrains. The first verse tells the story of a man named Jojo, who leaves his home in Tucson, Arizona, for some "California grass." (Paul's soon-to-be wife Linda had attended the University of Arizona in Tucson.) The second verse is about a sexually ambiguous character "Loretta Martin" who "thought she was a woman, but she was another man." The single version includes a coda urging Loretta to "get back" where she belongs, as well.
The Beatles often played around with their lyrics during recording sessions, as evidenced by Lennon's introduction on the Let it Be album: "Sweet Loretta Fart, she thought she was a cleaner, but she was a frying pan". The album version of the song famously ends with John Lennon quipping "I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition".

Source: Get Back (Wikipedia)