Born on this date -- Songwriter / Performer Paul McCartney

from "Writer's Almanac" (Garrison Keillor, Minnesota Public Radio)

It's the birthday of "the cute Beatle," Sir Paul McCartney, born James Paul McCartney in Liverpool, England, in 1942. His dad, Jim, was a cotton salesman who occasionally led "Jim Mac's Jazz Band" on the trumpet and piano; his mum, Mary, was a midwife, often riding off on her bicycle to deliver babies at odd hours. Mary developed breast cancer and died from an embolism after a mastectomy in 1956, when Paul was 14. And when he heard the news, he said, "What will we do without her money?" which he always regretted. In 1957, at a church festival, he saw an older boy, something of a troublemaker, who was singing on stage with his skiffle band. The boy kept getting the words wrong and making up new lyrics as he went along. This was John Lennon, and Paul got a chance to impress him after the show with his mastery of "Twenty Flight Rock." He later recalled: "I also knocked around on the backstage piano and that would have been 'A Whole Lot of Shakin'' by Jerry Lee. That's when I remember John leaning over, contributing a deft right hand in the upper octaves and surprising me with his beery breath. It's not that I was shocked, it's just that I remember this particular detail." Lennon later invited McCartney to join his band, the Quarrymen, and one of music's great partnerships was born.
In addition to being the subject of hundreds of books, McCartney has produced a couple of his own: a volume of poetry (Blackbird Singing Poems and Lyrics, 1965-2001 [2002]), and a children's book, High in the Clouds (2005), about a young squirrel thrust into the adult world by the death of his mother. He's been an art collector since the 1960s, and he took up painting in 1983 after getting to know Willem de Kooning. He's written movie scores and classical music, too, including Liverpool Oratorio (1991), which was first performed at the Liverpool Cathedral, where McCartney had once failed an audition as a choirboy.
He's been a vegetarian and supporter of animal rights since early in the 1970s, and wrote a letter to the carnivorous Dalai Lama in 2008 to convince him to go veggie, since eating animals is incompatible with the Buddhist tenet of nonviolence. "I found out he was not a vegetarian, so I wrote to him saying, 'Forgive me for pointing this out, but if you eat animals then there is some suffering somewhere along the line,'" he said in an interview with Prospect magazine. "He replied saying that his doctors had told him he needed it, so I wrote back saying they were wrong."
He was also the subject of the "Paul is dead" conspiracy theory. In September 1967, a man named Tom called in to a Detroit radio station to report a rumor, which had been circulating on college campuses for some time, that McCartney had been killed in a car accident. He'd died on November 9, 1966 -- or so the rumor went -- and the record company forced the Beatles to replace him with William Campbell, the winner of a look-alike contest. Fred LaBour, a student at the University of Michigan, turned the rumor into an article and embellished the tale even further. He claimed that Lennon, particularly upset at the cover-up of his friend's death, had planted a host of clues in the band's songs and album covers. Suddenly, everyone was an expert in obscure symbolism, and the rumor persisted, even after LaBour admitted his article was tongue-in-cheek. Any references to death or images of red or black were scrutinized, songs were played backward, and album covers held up to mirrors to reveal their secrets. Finally, Life magazine sent a photographer to track down McCartney in Scotland, and the rumors subsided after the magazine's cover story featuring an annoyed, but very much alive, pop star. McCartney released an album in 1993, called Paul is Live,the cover of which poked fun at all the supposed clues.