John Lennon once said he wasn't 'man enough' to give wife Yoko Ono credit for co-writing 'Imagine'

• When John Lennon released the iconic single "Imagine" in 1971, he was listed as the sole songwriter.
• He later admitted that his wife, Yoko Ono, inspired the concept and cowrote the lyrics.
• "I wasn't man enough to let her have credit for it," Lennon told David Sheff, author of "Yoko."

John Lennon's "Imagine" may be the most celebrated protest anthem in history, but its true creative origins were long obscured by the song's author — or, more accurately, by one of its authors.

When "Imagine" was released as a single in 1971, Lennon was credited as the sole songwriter. However, in David Sheff's new biography, "Yoko," Sheff recounts a conversation he had with Lennon in 1980 in which the former Beatle acknowledged that his wife, Yoko Ono, had cowritten the song.

"I wasn't man enough to let her have credit for it," he admitted. "I was still selfish enough and unaware enough to sort of take her contribution without acknowledging it."

Lennon wasn't a stranger to collaboration — he became a renowned musician as one-half of a songwriting team with Paul McCartney, and many of the biggest Beatles hits are credited as Lennon-McCartney compositions, per an early agreement between bandmates to divide credits equally.

But it wasn't sharing credit that bothered Lennon — it was sharing credit with a woman. As Sheff notes in "Yoko," Lennon once said during an interview with the BBC, "If it had been Bowie, I would have put 'Lennon-Bowie,' you see. If it had been a male."

When it came to "Imagine," he added, "I just put Lennon because, you know, she's just the wife and you don't put her name on, right?"

Sheff conducted extensive interviews with both Lennon and Ono during promotional rounds for "Double Fantasy," their 1980 collaborative album.

Lennon died one month after its release, but Sheff kept in touch with Ono. Over the years, they struck up a friendship and Sheff spent "countless hours" speaking with the enigmatic artist — though he clarifies in the introduction to "Yoko" that she did not pre-read or approve an advance copy of the book.

Throughout "Yoko," Sheff illustrates Ono's impact on Lennon's music and artistic sensibilities. The famous couple originally met in 1966 at a solo exhibition for Ono's art, which included conceptual works like "Play It By Trust" (a chess board with all its squares and pieces painted white) and "Apple" (a literal apple on a stand, meant to rot in real time to symbolize the cycle of life).

According to friends and family interviewed by Sheff, Ono didn't really know who Lennon was, and had little interest in rock 'n' roll at the time.

However, Ono told Sheff that she was impressed by Lennon's audacity when he took a bite out of her apple sculpture. For his part, Lennon said he was impressed by Ono's audacious works that blended irony, hope, and humor.

After their fateful meeting at the London gallery, Ono sent Lennon a copy of "Grapefruit," a collection of her instruction poems published two years earlier. Lennon told Sheff that he kept the book by his bedside.

"I used to read it, and sometimes I'd get very annoyed by it," Lennon said. "It would say things like 'paint until you drop dead' or 'bleed.' Then sometimes I'd be very enlightened by it. I went through all the changes that people go through with her work."

As Sheff points out, the didactic spirit of "Grapefruit" is powerfully felt in the lyrics of "Imagine." In the former, Ono wrote abstract instructions like, "Imagine letting a goldfish swim across the sky" and "Imagine your body spreading rapidly / all over the world like thin tissue." In the song, Lennon sings, "Imagine there's no heaven / It's easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us, only sky."

Ono was apparently responsible for the song's title, concept, and much of the lyricism, while Lennon composed the melody. Sheff describes "Imagine" as "a synthesis of Yoko's philosophy."

Lennon and Ono collaborated throughout their relationship, and Ono's focus on peace and connectivity is core to much of their work — despite the media's racist and sexist depictions of Ono as the "dragon lady" who broke up The Beatles.

After Lennon and Ono married in 1969, they forwent a honeymoon to stage their iconic "Bed-In for Peace," a war protest-slash-performance art piece that was designed to capitalize on the media frenzy surrounding their wedding. They released songs like "Give Peace a Chance" as the Plastic Ono Band, conceived as a conceptual group that included both performers and listeners — much like Ono's conceptual art pieces, which often invited participation from their viewers. Lennon and Ono released multiple experimental albums as a duo, including "Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins" and "Double Fantasy," which won the Grammy Award for album of the year in 1982.

David Geffen, founder of the famed label Geffen Records, told Sheff that Ono's vision — and Lennon's respect for Ono's vision — was the driving force behind "Double Fantasy."

"His motive in recording 'Double Fantasy' was completely romantic in that he wanted the record to show the world Yoko's talents and for his wife to finally get the recognition he felt she deserved," Geffen said of Lennon. "He wanted the light to shine on her. 'We have to take care of Yoko,' he would say to me. 'That is our goal with this record.'"

"Double Fantasy" was released in November 1980. Less than one month later, Lennon was shot and killed while returning home with Ono in New York City.

Ono, now 92, has carried on as a passionate steward of Lennon's music and legacy, from curating an array of posthumous compilation albums to successfully lobbying the city for a "Strawberry Fields" mural in Central Park. The word "Imagine" sits at the center of the mosaic.

In 2017, Ono was retroactively credited as a cowriter when "Imagine" was honored with the National Music Publishers Association's Centennial Song Award. The couple's son, Sean Ono Lennon, said it "may have been the happiest day of mine and mother's life."

"It's one of my mom's most powerful talents: that she has this ability to overcome difficulty with positive thinking," Sean told Sheff. "She really wanted to teach the world to do that. She taught my dad to do that. It's not going to stop a moving train or a bullet. But I think there's something profound about it. And I think it affected the world."

"Yoko" by David Sheff is out now via Simon & Schuster.