Imagining there’s no countries, no religion, too, was easier to do for some than imagining Yoko Ono would one day get songwriting credit with partner John Lennon for “Imagine.”
But yeah, yeah, yeah — that’s a reality.
“Tonight, it is my distinct honor to correct the record some 48 years later,” said David Israelite, president and CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association at the group’s annual event Wednesday night.
NPR reported: “Just before announcing Ono’s addition, a clip from a BBC interview with John Lennon was played in which he admits her centrality to [“Imagine’s] creation and his “macho” omission of her from its credits.
” ‘Actually that should be credited as a Lennon-Ono song because a lot of it — the lyric and the concept — came from Yoko. But those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution. But it was right out of Grapefruit, her book.”
Lennon added: “There’s a whole pile of pieces about ‘Imagine this’ and “Imagine that.’ … But if it had been Bowie, I would have put ‘Lennon-Bowie,’ you see. If it had been a male, you know. … Harry Nilsson — ‘Old Dirt Road,’ it’s ‘Lennon-Nilsson.’ But when we did [Imagine] I just put ‘Lennon’ because, you know, she’s just the wife and you don’t put her name on, right?”
NPR added: “Ono’s and Lennon’s son Sean, who accompanied his wheelchair-bound mother to the ceremony, wrote afterward in a Facebook post that it was the proudest day of his life, describing tears welling in his mother’s eyes before Patti Smith sang the song.”