Still looking at some of the top tunes of 1971, we come to today’s classic song of the day, “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” by Paul & Linda McCartney. Apple Records released this single on August 2nd of 1971 and it went all the way to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 just a month later. Billboard ranked it the #22 song overall for the entire year.
“Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” was McCartney’s first number-one single since the breakup of the Beatles the year prior. Much like the second half of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, this song is comprised of several song snippets stitched together in an appealing fashion. Here are the snippets, all different and all with their own catchy melodies:
- The down-tempo opening, “We’re so sorry Uncle Albert”
- The faster-tempo “Hands across the water” section
- A continuation of that section that starts with “Admiral Halsey” and includes the bit about “butter pie”
- The even faster “Live a little be a gypsy get around” part
- Back to the “Hands across the water” section
- Back to the faster bit as an instrumental section at the end
The songwriting is credited to both Paul and Linda McCartney, although there’s no doubt that Paul did all the heavy lifting. Paul also produced and played electric guitar, acoustic guitar, piano, bass, and xylophone. Other musicians on the track included Hugh McCracken on acoustic and electric guitars, Paul Beaver on synthesizer, and Denny Seiwell on drums. George Martin did the orchestra arrangement.
The song was included on McCartney’s Ram album, his second solo album (after the previous years’ McCartney). It yielded just this one true single—although the same New York-based recording sessions also produced the non-album single, “Another Day.”
As to the song’s influences, here’s what McCartney has said:
“I had an uncle—Albert Kendall—who was a lot of fun, and when I came to write ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’ it was loosely about addressing that older generation, half thinking, What would they think of the way my generation does things? That’s why I wrote the line ‘We’re so sorry, Uncle Albert’… As for Admiral Halsey, he’s one of yours, an American admiral.”
That American admiral was Fleet Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, whom McCartney has said was an authoritarian figure who should be ignored. He also said that the “Hands across the water/Heads across the sky” bit refers to him and Linda being British and American.
In any case, “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” was a fun little single, ultimately nonconsequential but still a decent tune (or, more accurately, medley of tunes). It was good enough to win a Grammy Award for Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocals and showed off Paul’s unparalleled melodic sense. (The man knows how to write a catchy melody, that’s for sure.) I certainly liked it at the time.
