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Only a Branson Song

A chat with Louise Harrison, sister of the Quiet Beatle.

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The Liverpool Legends in their London-esque theater.

Ambassador for the Beatles

Harrison’s story is not one of a woman who is seeking to capitalize on the memory of her famous brother. Her unyielding integrity wouldn’t allow for that. Harrison was there promoting before her brother became famous. The band she’s promoting now? Yeah, she helped to promote the original iconic band that they’re portraying. In fact, she may very well be the only person in history who has helped to promote a band and then 45 years later promoted an impersonation band playing the same songs. This is where Harrison’s history begins to intersect with our collective cultural history. “Nobody knows what my involvement was in the early Beatles days, and I think it’s time maybe somebody does,” Harrison says.

Harrison was born 11 years before George. She was already living in the United States before the Beatles started gaining some success overseas. She had moved to Benton, Illinois with her husband, who was an engineer who designed special-purpose machinery for mining companies. Harrison describes herself during this time as “a timid little ’60s housewife, kind of a Donna Reed type.”

“By that time George had been playing in Germany, and then he got a record contract and Mum starting sending me all the records,” Harrison says. “So being a big sister, I thought, ‘Oh great!’ I had always wanted to be a showbiz type myself. When I was a little bitty kid everyone always used to say to my mum, ‘Oh, she’s just like Shirley Temple. You ought to have her in the movies.’”

Harrison has never been one to sit by and let things happen, especially when it involves family. She felt that she had something to offer the fledgling stars by virtue of living in this country. So she went about gaining as much knowledge as she could on the music industry in America, so she could help Brian Epstein, the Beatles manager, who was pretty green in his own right at the time. “I started getting Cashbox and Billboard magazines. I was reading those magazines and trying to really understand the music business in this country to be able to explain it to Brian,” Harrison says.

So she began a letter-writing relationship with Epstein as an unofficial ambassador of the Beatles in America. “I started writing Brian, and every week I would write a 14-page letter to him spelling out everything I had learned,” says Harrison. Sensing, even so early on, that something special was happening, Harrison saved all of the letters that she received from Epstein. This relatively unknown relationship spells out a one-woman, grassroots effort to promote her brother’s band before they became the biggest band of all time. For the first time ever, Harrison is allowing 417 Magazine to publish one of those letters.

Click here to download a .pdf version of the letter.

The letter, dated July 15, 1963, is addressed to Mrs. L. Caldwell, Harrison’s married name at the time. The most fascinating part of the letter is when Epstein naively notes, “We really are very anxious indeed that their records will eventually ‘break’ in the States.” This understatement is a snapshot in time of a band plugging away on the very cusp of making it, looking for all the help they could get.

With the note, Epstein enclosed three copies of their L.P. and four copies of “From Me To You.” Harrison took those copies and others, and she did then what she does now: She went to work. “I was going from that little place in southern Illinois on trips for a couple hundred miles in every direction to St. Louis, Evansville, Springfield [Illinois], Nashville, trying to find a radio station that would play my kid brother’s music,” Harrison says. “I would say, ‘This is my kid’s brother’s music, and it’s No. 1 in England, and why don’t you play it?’”

Eventually the Beatles would break in the States. On February 9, 1964, not quite seven months after Epstein wrote to Harrison, the band made its famous appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Harrison was there with her distinct backstage perspective. She has a series of photographs on the wall that show her and George outside the theatre. They illustrate her unique involvement in the band’s earliest days in the US. “That was the Saturday before The Ed Sullivan Show, and they had to do the sound check,” explains Harrison. George was very sick with a 102-degree fever, and Harrison was acting as his nurse. “I asked the doctor, and the doctor said, ‘If they want him to be there on Sunday, they’ve got to take care of his health today,” she says. “I took him to the theatre, and of course the minute he came that made all four of them, so the press started going, ‘Do this; do that, and the other.’” That is when they captured the moments now on her wall. In the photographs, it is clear that George is holding a drink. “He had some lemonade for his throat; that’s a straw you can see sticking up,” explains Harrison.

Harrison’s involvement with the Beatles does not end there. As Beatlemania was in full swing, and the public was enamored with the band’s every move, there were many false reports circulating. After calling into KXOK in St. Louis to refute one such story, Harrison got offered a job giving Beatle reports. “Back in those days, I was initially trying to protect the reputation of my brother and his gang because of these silly stories that were getting out,” she says. By the end, however, she was giving 10 Beatles reports a week that were broadcast on 25 radio stations nationwide, including some stations that had refused her Beatles promotions months earlier. “Even my dog, Sheba, became famous,” jokes Harrison.
 

New Beatles, Same Message

These days, Harrison’s recognition comes at the end of the first act of the Liverpool Legends show, when the audience gets to ask her questions. Without fail, someone will ask if the members of the band are actually British. Harrison’s response is always, “They’re from another time and place.” The same can be said of Harrison because she certainly is not just from this time and this place. Her mission is the same as the Beatles. During the show, Louise gets her own moment in front of the audience. “I make sure to stress that what the Beatles were all about were love and peace and getting along with each other rather than frowning,” says Harrison. “And looking at each other with love rather than with fear.” Harrison plans to spread that message farther with a Beatles museum that will be housed in the Starlite Theatre, and she hopes to eventually publish a book that will include all of the letters she received from Epstein.

Even today, Harrison’s brother, George, is not absent from her life. A couple of months ago she had a dream. It was one of those reality-blurring, vivid dreams. Harrison’s eyes tear up as she recalls: “George came to see me, and he said, ‘I’ve got nothing else now tying me down, so I can just be free to do anything that I’d like.’” In the dream, Harrison tried to convince George to move to Branson. “This is a great place, Branson, you’ll be able to go anywhere you like, and if anyone recognizes you, then you can just say you’re one of the Liverpool Legends,” she says, describing the dream. “He says, ‘Yeah, because I am, aren’t I?’ We were laughing and laughing so hard in this dream. When I woke up, I must have cried for about an hour thinking, wouldn’t that have been wonderful if that could have happened?”

While it’s true that those moments with her brother can only happen in dreams these days, in her daily life Harrison has certainly created the next best thing.