This is the song that fomented the songwriting partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, widely considered the greatest songwriting duo in pop music history. They started writing it in McCartney's living room after they skipped school one day, with Paul writing the majority of this song in September of 1962. The song runs just 2:50 but tells a cohesive story, with McCartney singing about spotting a girl at a dance who wins his heart. It has a happy ending: They dance through the night and fall in love.
McCartney's original line was, "She was just 17, she'd never been a beauty queen," but he and Lennon decided it worked better as "She was just 17, you know what I mean." "It makes more sense, even though you don't know what I mean," McCartney told GQ in 2018. They didn't like the beauty queen line because it was corny and because it suggested that the woman wasn't beautiful, which wasn't the song's intent. When McCartney wrote that line, he'd been thinking of beauty pageants held at Butlin's camps, which are oceanfront vacation (or "holiday," as the Brits like to say) resorts in the United Kingdom.
The Beatles often played this at the Cavern Club, where they often played between 1961-1963. In fact, it was because of the crowd reaction to their live shows that George Martin decided to have them simply record their live show in the studio for their first album. That's why he kept Paul's "1, 2, 3, 4" count at the beginning, which was taken from the ninth take and edited on to the first. The title was originally "Seventeen" until it was changed to "I Saw Her Standing There" for the album.
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