George Harrison

English musician, singer, and songwriter (1943–2001); co-founder of the Beatles alongside John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and the group’s lead guitarist. Harrison’s engagement with Indian classical music, deepened through his study of the sitar under Ravi Shankar, is credited with introducing that tradition to a mass Western audience — most audibly on ‘Norwegian Wood’ (1965) and ‘Within You Without You’ (1967).

The record producer Joe Boyd, who researched Indian music extensively while writing And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, argues the more consequential and lasting Indian influence on Harrison was technical rather than ornamental: it reshaped his slide guitar playing.

In the wiki

• Joe Boyd on the Birth of Rock, World Music, and Being There for Everything — Boyd argues that while ‘Norwegian Wood’ is the most audible instance of Indian influence on the Beatles, the deeper effect surfaces later, in Harrison’s slide guitar work from The White Album and Abbey Road onward, including the solo on ‘Something’. Boyd traces this to Indian scales that fall between the notes of a tempered piano — a discovery he made researching his book — and links it to the same impulse behind blues ‘blue notes’: reaching, by bending or sliding, for a pitch the fixed frets of a piano cannot produce. He suggests Harrison redirected his search for those in-between notes onto slide guitar once he accepted he would never master the sitar as a virtuoso. Tyler Cowen corrects one attribution in the same conversation — the ‘Taxman’ guitar solo is Paul McCartney’s, not Harrison’s — which Boyd says he fixed in his book’s second edition.

See also

• John Lennon — bandmate
• Paul McCartney — bandmate
• Joe Boyd — the producer and author who discussed Harrison’s playing with Tyler Cowen
• Joe Boyd on the Birth of Rock, World Music, and Being There for Everything — the episode