Your Feet's Too Big

Swing era legend and beloved jazz singer "Fats" Waller (Thomas Wright Waller) sang and performed Your Feet's Too Big in the 1930's and 1940's. The song was written around 1929 by lyricist Fred Fisher, a German immigrant who wrote several well known songs, including Peg O' My Heart, with music by Ada Benson, an acknowledged musician who made the transition from classical to jazz. Much later, in 1978, the song appeared in Ain't Misbehavin', a highly successful musical review in New York, which was an homage to the black musicians, like Fats Waller, who created the "Harlem Renaissance" in the swing era. (Ain't Misbehavin' was one of Fats Waller's most memorable songs.) Later, the Ink Spots, an Indianapolis group which, together with the Mills Brothers, helped define R&B as a musical genre and doo-wop as a vocal style, recorded the song. A decade or so later, in the 1950's, Chubby Checker released his own version in more of a rock and roll style. The essential lyrics are:

Say, up in Harlem, at a table for two,
There were four of us, me, your big feet and you
From your ankles up, I say you sure are sweet,
From there down, there's just too much feet!
Yes, your feet's too big!
Don't want ya 'cause your feet's too big!
Can't use ya 'cause your feet's too big!
I really hate ya 'cause your feet's too big!

The song probably came to the attention of the Beatles via the Chubby Checker interpretation, even though his record was not among his best known or most successful. It most likely appeared in Brian Epstein's collection of rare and unusual singles, which Lennon and McCartney liked to audition at Epstein's Liverpool record store. The lyrics must have appealed to McCartney's sense of humor or to Lennon's taste for the offbeat and unusual.

The Beatles put this song in their repertoire during the Cavern Club days as a sort of comic relief number, and carried it over into their days in Hamburg. The Star-Club was really an unlikely forum for what is essentially an African-American comic lyric from the 1920's. Nevertheless, it must have been well-received by the crowd, because the Beatles sang it on their last night in Hamburg, when Adrian Barber (the Star-Club's stage manager) made a slow, reel-to-reel recording of their act. Thus, the song came to appear as track 6 on side one of Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany; 1962, which was released in 1977. The track is just 2 minutes and 16 seconds long.