LOUISE HARRISON DIES AT 91

George Harrison’s older sister Louise Harrison died at the age of 91 at a Sarasota, Florida nursing home on Sunday, January 29, 2023 where she was receiving hospice care. Tributes poured in on Facebook for the Beatle sister who personally hand-picked members of the tribute band Liverpool Legends.
Louise was known for helping The Beatles break into the American music scene and helping her younger brother with his newfound fame, but was cut off from her brother’s $2.000 per month pension in his will by her sister-in-law and nephew, and has claimed she was never told about her brother’s terminal cancer until the guitarist’s final few weeks of life.
Musician Marty Scott first announced her death on Facebook early Tuesday morning, writing: “It’s really hard for me to get words out at the moment, but Lou meant the world to me. Since the day I met her, my life was changed forever.”
He said they first met “just a few weeks after George passed, and it started a whirlwind of change in my entire world. She’s been my family now for over 20 years.” Scott, of the Liverpool Legends tribute band wrote. “It’s hard for me to explain our relationship, but at times she was truly my sister, sometimes my grandmother, sometimes my child and sometimes my best friend. We spent so much time together, and traveled so many places. She was a huge part of my life and did so many things for me and Liverpool Legends. She opened so many darn doors for us and never took no for an answer. She was a pistol. She literally packed up and moved to Branson, Missouri for me. There are so many great memories and they will always keep me smiling every time I think of her.”
Scott added that “Louise had the biggest heart … She’d give the shirt off her back if you needed one,” he said. “She made so many people happy in her very unique life. Her story really deserves to be told one day.”
Scott revealed he had seen Harrison just a “few weeks ago, and when we said goodbye, I really felt she was saying goodbye for the last time. Lou was completely ready to be off this planet and onto a better place. She passed yesterday painlessly and peacefully. I love you Louise. All of us love you. Rest in Peace and your memory will live on with all of us.”
Another longtime friend, Charlie T. Walsh wrote on Tuesday: “My heart is so deeply hurting this morning. I had the distinct privilege and honor to have had Louise as my dear friend since the 1980s. She was an incredibly loving person who always put others first. I had so many heart-to-heart talks with her. I helped her all I could throughout those many years,” he said. “Her friendship became perhaps the dearest and closest friend I ever had. We had a true spiritual connection.”
Walsh then went on to reveal: “She once asked me to keep the vultures away from her, those that tried to take advantage of her loving spirit. I tried.m I know she is with George and her son Gordon. Rest in Peace my sweet Louise.”
Louise was born in Liverpool, England on August 16, 1931 as the oldest of four children born to Harold Hargreaves (or Hargrove) Harrison (1909–1978) and Louise (née French; 1911–1970). Harold was a bus conductor who had worked as a ship’s steward on the White Star Line and Louise was a shop assistant of Irish Catholic descent.
Their only daughter married young and spent most of her life in the midwestern United States. In the 1950s, she married her first husband, Scottish mining engineer Gordon Caldwell back in the 1950s. Together, they moved to Illinois, and had two children.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, George met a young man named Paul McCartney and together they joined a band called The Quarrymen, which also included John Lennon and would eventually evolve to become The Beatles, featuring Ringo Starr on drums.
As her brother’s band first started making waves in the UK, Harrison helped promote The Beatles in the United States in the early 1960s, writing to various radio and television stations in an effort to help the band break into the American music scene.
Her efforts eventually got the band’s song, “From Me to You,” playing on a radio station in Illinois in 1963 one of the first known instances of the British group hitting US airwaves.
Her brother became the first of the Beatles to set foot in America when he visited his sister in 1963 and reported back to his bandmates about the potential for what would become Beatlemania. In her book, “Lou,” as she was known to friends, describes her efforts to help promote the Beatles, who were already household names in England, and their records in the US.
George later recalled about the trip, “Being the experienced Beatle that I was, I went to New York and St. Louis in 1963, to look around, and to the countryside in Illinois, where my sister was living at the time. I went to record stores. I bought Booker T. and the MGs’ first album, ‘Green Onions,’ and I bought some Bobby Bland, all kind of things.”
Louise would later move to California and then to Missouri.
Months later, when The Beatles would change music history forever by appearing on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” Louise said she traveled to New York to see her brother, and meet John Paul and Ringo. She would also eventually meet George’s then-girlfriend Patti Boyd, for whom he would later write the ballad “Something.”
Louise became incredibly popular in the 1960s when she began supporting and promoting The Beatles. She also published an autobiography titled “My Kid Brother’s Band aka The Beatles!” in 2014.
The siblings remained very close through the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in the 1980s, her brother started paying her a $2,000-a-month allowance for tax reasons. “It was my pension from him,” she explained to DailyMail.com in 2013. “It was his intention make it last my lifetime. He said ‘Given my financial situation, there is no reason on Earth why my sister should ever be in need,”‘ Louise said.
But by the mid-1990s, their relationship started to sour, when George reportedly distanced himself from his sister because he disapproved of the conversion of her old Illinois home into a Beatles bed-and-breakfast called A Hard Days Night.
Louise said she did not own the establishment, but used her name to promote it because the town had fallen on hard times. They finally reconnected when George lay dying of lung cancer at a Staten Island hospital in 2001, and his wife, Olivia, her sister, Linda, and nephew Dhani left them for an hour and a half to reconcile before it was too late.
“George was pretty frail, yet he was also so vibrant,” Louise recalled in a 2002 interview. “His eyes were still bright. He was still George. He must’ve been in pain but he didn’t show it. We reminisced about our childhood and his sense of humor was the same as ever. People always teased him about his stick-out-ears; now his oxygen tubes were hanging over them. He laughed and said, ‘My ears finally came in useful for something.”‘
Olivia, Linda, and Dhani left Louise and George to hold hands and reconcile for almost two hours. As their time together came to an end, Louise said her brother apologized, saying: “You know, I could have been a lot more to help you; I’m sorry.”
He died just 14 days later at a property belonging to McCartney in Beverly Hills, California. But just one year after George died of cancer, she said she was cut off by his widow, Olivia, and son, Dhani. George was reportedly worth $340 million at the time.
She claimed George would not have allowed that if he were still alive, telling DailyMail.com: “George would’ve been horrified knowing I was cut off. It was such a small amount. And I think he left something like $300 million. Let’s put it this way, some people were more into money than I was.”
From there she supported herself by managing the Liverpool Legends, in which she relived the Fab Four’s glory days and told stories about her brother, and of course, John, Paul and Ringo.