Seriously, there aren't any. Oddly enough, the only Beatles songs that I really liked turned out to be covers. What would you rather listen to? A knockoff of Carl Perkins or Carl Perkins? And their originals were too much like Broadway show tunes. Being a kid, the Beatles didn't seem that much different from South Pacific, or the Music Man. British blues covers led me back to American blues musicians.
I don't know why I connected the two that way initially, but when we moved to Philly, the kids were not allowed to touch the stereo console, so I listened to the am oldies stations, and they played a lot of doo wop. The most perfect song ever recorded (IMHO) is "I Only Have Eyes For You", by The Flamingos.
There are a lot of great songs in every genre, but nothing comes close to that song.
You're right! Lucky for me, I get a big kick out of show tunes (and the Beatles). And at least you can give Ringo some credit for giving Carl Perkins a second life.
Skiffle was sort of an amalgam of rootsy American sounds, like Leadbelly's, and British dance hall music, their version of Vaudville. Billy Bragg wrote a great little book about it. And the Beatles (and Stones and Herman's Hermits and Long John Baldry and Ron Wood and all the rest of them) came out of the skiffle craze.
I'm reading Atlantic Record's Jerry Wexler's autobiography
Rhythm and the Blues, and it connects a lot of dots between the Brill Building and Memphis and Muscle Shoals and Detroit and LA and New Orleans. Over thirty years of American music evolution, he produced folks like Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Solomon Burke, Dusty Springfield, and Bob Dylan.
Garcia, who covered everyone and everything, said it best: "Any music is better than no music!"
