Letter B

"Letter B" is a song parody of The Beatles' song "Let It Be," sung on Sesame Street by The Beetles. Richard Hunt provided lead vocals. As the title implies, the song teaches about B words.

Christopher Cerf, who lost his voice at the time, later sung a portion of the song at the Brooklyn Public Library on November 21, 2009.

Notes

When the Beatles' catalogue was still owned by Northern Songs, the company attempted to sue Children's Television Workshop for $5.5 million. They cited that the song too closely resembled "Let It Be." Before the case came to trial, Michael Jackson purchased the Lennon/McCartney catalogue and the suit was dropped. The Children's Television Workshop was only fined $50, which was paid out of Christopher Cerf's own pocket. Paul McCartney, who was not involved in the lawsuit, wrote to Cerf saying that he liked the song.^[1]
On the Count It Higher: Great Music Videos from Sesame Street home video, the segment has MTV-style captions that refer to "Lemon Records" (a parody of "Apple Records"), and also had an album name that would later be released onto CD five years later (Sesame Road); the lyrics to this song were released in the original release of the video.
On the Beatles recording of Let It Be, Paul sang lead and played piano, in this parody, The "Paul McCartney" Beetle played guitar and sang lead vocals while the "John Lennon" Beetle played piano and keyboards.