Over the end of the Esher demo of “Dear Prudence,” John Lennon can be heard explaining the origin of the song: “No one was to know that sooner or later she was to go completely berserk under the care of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. All the people around her were very worried about the girl because she was going insane. So we sang to her.” The girl in question was Prudence Farrow, the 19-year-old sister of American actress Mia Farrow. During the stay, Prudence had locked herself away in her hut at the ashram in Rishikesh, India, where she and her sister were studying Transcendental Meditation alongside The Beatles, Donovan, The Beach Boys’ Mike Love, and others. She was meditating far longer than anybody else, and the others were beginning to worry about her state of mind.
“Prudence Farrow got an attack of the horrors, paranoia, what you’d call these days an identity crisis, and wouldn’t come out,” Paul McCartney recalled. “We all got a bit worried about her so we went up there and knocked. ‘Hi, Prudence, we all love you. You’re wonderful!’ But nobody could persuade her out. So John wrote ‘Dear Prudence, won’t you come out and play…’”
John told Playboy magazine, “Mia Farrow’s sister, who seemed to go slightly balmy, meditating too long, wouldn’t come out of the little hut we were living in. They selected me and George to try and bring her out because she would trust us. She went completely mental. If she’d been in the West they would have put her away. We got her out of the house. She’d been locked in for three weeks and wouldn’t come out, trying to reach God quicker than anybody else.”
For “Dear Prudence,” John deployed a fingerpicking style he’d learned in India under instruction from Donovan, a skilled folk musician who had studied under the likes of Bert Jansch and Davey Graham. Donovan recalled that John was a diligent student: “It’s a difficult style that requires perseverance. When John had it down he was so pleased to find a whole new way of songwriting emerge. That’s what happens to a natural songwriter when you get a new set of performing skills. He immediately wrote ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Julia’.” From: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/dear-prudence-story-behind-song-beatles/
