The Day John Lennon Was Born
On October 9, 1940, in wartime Liverpool, John Lennon was born — and grew up to write some of the most famous songs ever recorded.
He was born in the middle of a war, in a city being bombed, to a mother who could not keep him and a father who was not there. Eighty-six years later, his songs are still being sung in languages he never spoke.
John Winston Lennon was born on October 9, 1940, at the Liverpool Maternity Hospital in England — named for his paternal grandfather, John "Jack" Lennon, and for the prime minister leading Britain through World War II, Winston Churchill. His mother, Julia Stanley, and his father, Alfred, a merchant seaman, were already drifting apart; Alfred was away at sea, and would vanish from his son's life for decades. John was raised instead by his Aunt Mimi Smith and her husband George, at 251 Menlove Avenue in the Woolton suburb — "Mendips," the house where he spent most of his childhood.
The boy Mimi raised was bright, rebellious, and funny in a way that could cut. As a teenager swept up in the skiffle craze, he formed a band called the Quarrymen. In 1957, at a church fete in Woolton, he met a fifteen-year-old named Paul McCartney — and the most successful songwriting partnership in history was born. The Quarrymen evolved into the Beatles in 1960, and within four years the four young men from Liverpool were the most famous musicians on the planet.
Lennon was the Beatles' sharp edge: the acerbic wit, the nonsense poetry, the songs that turned inward and then outward — "A Hard Day's Night," "Help!," "Strawberry Fields Forever," "A Day in the Life." After marrying artist Yoko Ono in 1969, he turned his fame into a megaphone for peace, staging bed-ins for peace in Amsterdam and Montreal and writing anthems the anti-war movement adopted as its own: "Give Peace a Chance," "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," and above all "Imagine," the 1971 piano ballad that asked the world to picture itself without borders or greed.
He stepped away from music in 1975 to raise his infant son Sean, returned in 1980 with the album Double Fantasy — and was murdered outside his Manhattan apartment building on December 8, 1980, three weeks after the album's release. He was forty.
What endures is not the tragedy but the work: melodies that children learn before they can read, lyrics quoted by presidents and protesters alike, and a simple, stubborn idea that ran through everything he wrote — that imagining a better world is the first step toward building one. Every October 9, the date is marked by fans around the world, from Liverpool to the "Imagine" mosaic in New York's Central Park.
Photo: John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their bed-in for peace in Amsterdam, March 1969, behind hand-lettered signs reading "Hair Peace" and "Bed Peace," photographed by Eric Koch for Anefo, CC0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
