John Lennon

John Lennon (1940-1980), British singer and songwriter, member of the Beatles and one of the most prominent figures in popular music. Lennon was born into a working-class family in Liverpool, England. His parents separated while he was young, and he was raised by an aunt. In 1955, while in high school, he joined his first rock-music group. In 1956 he met bassist Paul McCartney. The two collaborated on songs and formed several bands, including the four-member band that became known as the Beatles in 1960.

Lennon was the Beatles’ rhythm guitarist, lead singer, and driving force early in the group’s career, when it performed raucous versions of such rock-and-roll classics as “Twist and Shout” (1963), based on an arrangement by the American rhythm-and-blues group the Isley Brothers. With McCartney, Lennon formed one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful songwriting partnerships in the history of popular music. Lennon, who attended the Liverpool College of Art from 1957 to 1960, gave the partnership much of its intellectual depth. In the mid-1960s, at the height of the Beatles’ fame, Lennon helped to bring together rock culture and high culture by publishing two collections of poetry, prose, and drawings, In His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965).

In 1966 Lennon met Japanese conceptual artist Yoko Ono, who later became his collaborator, his inseparable companion, and, in 1969, his wife. With her he created albums of experimental music, along with conceptual art projects, such as a highly publicized “Bed-in for Peace,” which the two staged on their honeymoon. To protest the Vietnam War (1959-1975) and exemplify the protest movement’s slogan, “Make Love, Not War,” they spent a week in bed in Amsterdam, and another in Montréal. Lennon continued to sing rock and roll and he recorded some of his best-known songs as a solo artist, starting even before the Beatles broke up in 1970. These songs included “Give Peace A Chance” (1969), “Instant Karma” (1970), and “Imagine” (1971).

In the 1970s Lennon and Ono settled in New York City. From 1975 to 1980 Lennon lived in seclusion, raising the couple’s son, Sean, while Ono managed Lennon’s business affairs. In 1980 Lennon and Ono returned to recording with the album Double Fantasy (1980), which produced a number-one hit on the Billboard magazine charts, “(Just Like) Starting Over” (1980). Later that year Lennon was fatally shot just outside his New York apartment building by Mark David Chapman, a drifter who had gotten his autograph just a few hours earlier. After his death, people around the world observed ten minutes of silence to honor Lennon and his ideals of justice and peace. Lennon was honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991. In 1994 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The film The U.S. vs. John Lennon (2006) traces the singer’s transformation into an antiwar activist during the Vietnam Warand the U.S. government’s subsequent efforts to deport him.