Love Me Do, the single The Beatles released in Britain on October 5, 1962, paired John Lennon's harmonica with Ringo Starr's drumming, recorded a week before a hired session player retook the part; that retake never made it onto the original pressing at all.

A four-piece band from Liverpool made a record in September 1962. Nobody involved thought it would be remembered.

Parlophone released "Love Me Do" in the United Kingdom on October 5 of that year, credited to Lennon and McCartney, backed with "P.S. I Love You." It climbed to number 17 on the UK singles chart and stopped there. Nothing about that modest peak would have told a record buyer in Liverpool that autumn what was coming. The single that eventually rewrote the pop charts of two continents started out as a middling hit by a band EMI had signed almost on a whim.

Why did the drummer change twice?

The song had already been through one Beatle before it reached record shops. The group cut a version at their EMI audition that June with Pete Best on drums, before manager Brian Epstein's arrangement with producer George Martin led to Best's dismissal from the band and Ringo Starr's arrival that August. Starr, new to the lineup, played on the September 4 session; Martin was not fully satisfied, and on September 11 he brought in a London session drummer, Andy White, for a fresh take, with Starr shifted to tambourine.

Here is the detail that trips up even attentive retellings: the September 11 version, the one with Andy White, is not what went out on October 5. The original pressing used Starr's September 4 take. White's drumming replaced it only on later pressings and on the Please Please Me album the following year, once the black-label reissues took over from the earlier red-label copies. Collectors and discographers still cross-reference matrix numbers to tell one pressing from the other; a tambourine audible under the drums is the giveaway for White's version (Starr is playing both instruments on his own take). The Beatles' official biographer, Hunter Davies, and later researchers such as Mark Lewisohn have laid out the session dates in detail, and both drummers' names turn up attached to the song depending on which chart you're reading, which is exactly the kind of contradiction a listener has no way to resolve from the record alone.

Where did the harmonica come from?

John Lennon opens the track on harmonica, a blues-inflected hook that became one of the record's most recognizable features. He did not invent the sound out of nothing. On June 21, 1962, the Beatles played a bill at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton, across the Mersey from Liverpool, supporting the American singer Bruce Channel, whose hit "Hey! Baby" featured a harmonica part by Delbert McClinton. Lennon, already a harmonica player, picked up pointers from McClinton that night and folded the sound directly into "Love Me Do" within months.

It is a small piece of borrowing, openly acknowledged by the people involved, and it says something about how the early Beatles worked: absorb what was on the radio and the local bill, then rebuild it fast.

Did Brian Epstein rig the chart?

A persistent rumor holds that Epstein bought up thousands of copies of "Love Me Do" through his family's NEMS record shops in Liverpool, padding the sales figures that fed into the national chart. Epstein denied it during his life, saying only that local fans were buying multiple copies at his stores. A BBC documentary years later aired claims from Epstein's associate Joe Flannery that the bulk-buying was deliberate.

No receipts or chart-compiler records have ever surfaced to settle it either way. Given how the UK charts were compiled from a limited sample of shops in 1962, a coordinated buying campaign at that scale would have needed to reach well beyond Merseyside to move the number as far as it moved; the claim has circulated for decades without a document to back it up. Treat the number 17 as real and the explanation for how it got there as unresolved.

What changed after the first pressing

The single's commercial life didn't end with its UK run. Vee-Jay Records issued it in the United States in 1962 to little notice, and it wasn't until Tollie Records reissued "Love Me Do" in April 1964, after Beatlemania had taken over American radio, that the song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. By then the Beatles had already logged three other number ones in the States; the song that first got them signed became, belatedly, the song that topped America too.

That gap between British and American reception is its own small lesson in how differently the same fifteen months can read from opposite sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, "Love Me Do" was a promising opening act, quickly overtaken by "Please Please Me" and "From Me to You." American listeners got it after "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "She Loves You," and "Can't Buy Me Love" had each already topped the Hot 100, so the band's first single landed there as a victory lap.

A record still being sorted out

More than sixty years on, "Love Me Do" gets studied the way a founding document gets studied, mainly for what it reveals about everything that followed. Streaming services and reissue labels still occasionally mislabel which drummer plays on which version, an error easy to make and, evidently, easy to repeat. The confusion isn't a failure of research so much as a reminder that even a band this thoroughly documented left loose threads in its earliest weeks on tape.

The song itself is plain almost to the point of bluntness: a title that's also the whole of its request, repeated over a simple beat until the harmonica returns to close it out. Paul McCartney has said in later interviews that the simplicity was the point at the time; a band trying to get noticed writes something a listener can hold onto after one play. Sixty-some years and two credited drummers later, that part of the record hasn't needed any correcting at all.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Love Me Do"
• The Beatles Bible, "Love Me Do — song facts, recording info and more"
• Rolling Stone, "50 Years Ago Today: The Beatles Released Their Debut Single, 'Love Me Do'"
• Billboard, "Brian Epstein Bought Thousands of Copies of 'Love Me Do' to Boost Beatles Sales, Says BBC Film"
• Mark Lewisohn, The Beatles: All These Years — Tune In (Crown Archetype, 2013)