Billy Preston is the only musician credited on a Beatles single
Get Back came out in 1969 billed as The Beatles with Billy Preston, a credit the band itself requested. John Lennon even floated making the keyboard player a full member, until Paul McCartney pointed out that four people agreeing was hard enough. Preston had already backed Little Richard and Ray Charles.
Preston was born in Houston on September 2, 1946, and grew up in Los Angeles. He never took a music lesson, yet by ten he was playing organ behind gospel singers such as Mahalia Jackson, and at 11 he sang Blueberry Hill with Nat King Cole on television, later playing the young W. C. Handy in a 1958 film. In 1962 he joined Little Richard's band as organist and, while playing in Hamburg, met the Beatles. By 1967 he was in Ray Charles's band.
When the Beatles invited him into the Get Back sessions of January 1969, he played organ and electric piano, work later seen in the film Let It Be and in Peter Jackson's 2021 documentary. Signed to Apple, he released That's the Way God Planned It with George Harrison producing, and he was the first to record Harrison's My Sweet Lord. He played on All Things Must Pass and at the Concert for Bangladesh, and from 1970 he contributed keyboards to Rolling Stones albums including Exile on Main St., serving as their main touring keyboardist from 1973 to 1977.
His own peak came on A&M. The 1972 instrumental Outa-Space, which helped popularise the clavinet in funk, reached number 2, won a Grammy and sold over a million copies. Will It Go Round in Circles and Nothing from Nothing both topped the American chart, the first displacing Harrison's Give Me Love in July 1973, and Dick Clark liked Space Race so much he used it on American Bandstand for years. A 1979 duet with Syreeta Wright, With You I'm Born Again, reached number 4.
The 1980s brought cocaine and alcohol addiction, and in 1991 sentencing on cocaine and sexual assault charges ended a stint touring with The Band. He kept working, performing My Sweet Lord at the 2002 Concert for George to acclaim. Though gravely ill, he got out of bed to record clavinet for a Red Hot Chili Peppers track. He died on June 6, 2006, and was inducted into rock's Hall of Fame in 2021.
Source: Billy Preston
