This song was written instantly after Dustin Hoffman handed McCartney a Time magazine article with Picasso's last words "Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can't drink anymore" and challenged Paul to write a song to it. McCartney played a single chord and sang the chorus immediately to those lyrics.
Yes, it took a sound-sensitive actor to sense that it might be a poem or a lyric. Yes, it strongly echoes Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," which was released earlier that year and was in the air...take this badge off of me. I can't wear it anymore. And yes, it has a strong Gaelic folk music feeling as well - one can imagine the Chieftains or the Rovers or the Clancy Brothers singing it. But such folk music was one of the 3-4 main feeder streams for country music anyway.
You can imagine Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, or George Jones on this. Someplace along the way, the Liverpool boy absorbed something. Only a hundred miles from the very porous Scottish border or across the water to Belfast, after all.
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