Do You Know Maggie May?

JACLYN LICCONE
Nov 15, 2016
2 min read

Maggie May by Rod Stewart is one of his greatest hits. It is the song that made Rod Stewart a superstar.

Rod hadn’t even been sure about including it on the album, Every Picture Tells A Story, but the song, proved to have colossal appeal, changing his life.

The song had unexpected success. No one thought that the song was any good until Ray Jackson came into the picture. Ray Jackson was the man who played the mandolin in Maggie May which is the most famous solo featuring that instrument.

Originally he was supposed to play the mandolin in Stewart's other song Mandolin Wind but then Stewart said that he had this other song, Maggie May, that he wasn't sure he was going to use because he didn't have anything good to put at the end of it. So he asked Ray Jackson to make up some mandolin to put in Maggie May.

He put in 2 minutes of improve and then everyone in the recording studio suddenly really liked the song just because of the addition of the mandolin.

There were a lot of fights over money when dealing with this song..

Jackson says that he was shabbily treated by Stewart, going uncredited on the album and being paid just a stingy £15 ($18.65) for his work which is the standard Musician’s Union fee for a three-hour session

In 2003 he threatened to sue Stewart, saying he might have lost up to £1 million ($1,242,400) through not being credited as a writer. The main problem was that the mandolin solo was used in a bank advert, probably netting Stewart and the guitarist £50,000 ($62,120) each in royalties.

STEWART'S SIDE:

A spokesman for Stewart described the claim as ‘ridiculous’, saying it was accepted Jackson played on the song, but not that he had any part in writing it. He said: ‘As is always the case in the studio, any musical contributions he may have made were fully paid for at the time as “work-for-hire”.’

****Maggie May was named after a notorious Liverpool docks prostitute. The song told the story of his first sexual experience, which he said had happened in a tent at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in 1961.