It’s testament to
Paul McCartney’s extraordinary talent that a song like Mama’s Little
Girl could remain unreleased for nearly twenty years, to turn up as a b-side
that’s little more than a career footnote and yet still be so
hauntingly pretty with it.
Mama’s Little Girl’s like the coy younger sister to the White Album’s Mother Nature’s Son that kept herself out of the limelight; these “sitting with an acoustic in the countryside on a beautiful summer’s day” finger-picking ditties are peppered throughout his career and have always been something he does with such ease. It’s strange in retrospect that it took him so long to decamp to the farm he bought in Scotland in the mid-sixties when the lifestyle fits him so perfectly; I guess he was just to busy being a Beatle to make the most of it.
There’s a whole subsection to Macca's songwriting that full of this stuff - from Heart of the Country to I Lie Around to Calico Skies - that all sound so effortless; they just seem to fall out of him. For anyone else, a track like this would be extremely well-known, but not for him; more’s the pity, really.