“Julia” by The Beatles

"Julia" closes side two of the Beatles' 1968 double album, The Beatles, better known as the White Album, and it's John Lennon alone: his voice, his acoustic guitar, nobody else. He wrote it, though the credit reads Lennon–McCartney, for his mother, Julia Lennon, who died in 1958 at 44, reaching for the childhood he never really got to have with her.

The song was born in Rishikesh, in northern India, where the band had gone to study under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and it was there that Donovan taught him the Travis-picking style that ripples all the way through it. It was the last thing recorded for the album, with George Martin producing and Ken Scott engineering, and in 1976 it resurfaced as the flip side of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da".

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