A Canadian woman has been granted the world's first academic degree in The Beatles, having aced her Master's thesis at Liverpool Hope University on why Canada was so quick to embrace the Fab Four in the early 1960s.
Mary-Lu Zahalan, a 53-year-old music instructor at the Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Oakville, Ont., was handed her diploma at a ceremony on Wednesday in Liverpool before being ushered to the city's Penny Lane — subject of one of the band's most famous songs — for a photo session celebrating her landmark scholarly achievement.
"It's a great feeling to be the first of anything in the world," Zahalan, a 1983 Juno Award nominee as one of Canada's most promising female vocalists, told Postmedia News.
"It's been a really intense 18 months doing the course, then the dissertation, and I'm working full time back home at the college," she said. "So I'm really chuffed — very proud and excited to be the first to get this degree."
Zahalan applied for a spot in the one-of-a-kind program after a rule change in Ontario required college department heads to have a postgraduate degree. The program, formally an M.A. in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society, was announced with much fanfare by the Liverpool university in 2008 and attracted hundreds of candidates from around the world.
"I set about trying to find a degree that would be relevant to the kind of curriculum that I teach," said Zahalan, "and this was the only one that remotely filled the criteria that I was looking for."
Zahalan was one of 12 full-time students selected for the program — headed by Liverpool Hope music professor Mike Brocken — and is the only one so far, to earn her degree.
"There have been over 8,000 books about The Beatles but there has never been serious academic study and that is what we are going to address," Brocken said when the program was launched three years ago. "Forty years on from their breakup, now is the right time and Liverpool is the right place to study The Beatles."
In a statement issued Wednesday following Zahalan's graduation, Brocken said: "Mary-Lu now joins an internationally recognized group of scholars of Popular Music Studies who are able to offer fresh and thought-provoking insights into the discipline of musicology."
Zahalan, originally from Renfrew, Ont., describes herself an "Ottawa Valley girl" who began performing at venues in Ottawa as she pursued her own music career 30 years ago.
The other Juno nominees the year she was a finalist included singer-songwriter Luba and metal queen Lee Aaron. The 1983 winner was rocker Lydia Taylor.
Zahalan said studying in downtown Liverpool, where local lads John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr formed their legendary band in 1960, was crucial to making The Beatles worthy of an advanced academic program exploring the intersection of their music and social history.
Zahalan's thesis explored the "latent post-colonial cultural capital" in Canada that helped music fans in this country embrace Beatlemania nearly 50 years ago.
"Because of the British roots in Canada, we were kind of pre-programmed to accept the Beatles, and we did so a full year earlier than our U.S. neighbours," she said. "I looked at British immigration statistics, and just the fact that we still had the Queen on our currency, and our mailboxes looked like British mailboxes. There's just a British sensibility woven into our society that I think made us really receptive."
In her performing days, Zahalan said she enjoyed singing a version of The Beatles' 1963 hit I Saw Her Standing There — "I would just change it to 'I saw him standing there' — but was barely old enough to remember The Beatles when they were first rocking the pop music world.
"I had two older sisters who were really into The Beatles, so I got introduced to them very early," said Zahalan. "I certainly wasn't a fanatic. I'm not one of those people who has read every book about The Beatles and knows all of their birth dates and intimate details. I just really liked the music, and now I've learned so much about them."
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