Answer: Yesterday

The Beatles were such a music powerhouse with such a wide range of popular songs over the ten years they were active, we’ll absolutely forgive you if you vacillated between trivia answers before finally just giving up and making your best guess. Collectively, Beatles songs have been covered hundreds of times and you’ve likely heard more covers, in a diverse range of musical styles at that, over the years than you can even remember.

Popular songs like “Help!”, “With a Little Help from My Friends”, “Hey Jude”, and “Come Together” have all been covered dozens of times over the years, and even less popular songs like “Dig a Pony” and “Misery” have had a cover or two.

Among The Beatles’ total discography, however, no other song has enjoyed the same level of cover popularity as “Yesterday”. Between the song’s release in 1965 and today, the song has been covered over 2,200 times by everyone from Ray Charles to Linkin Park.

What’s particularly interesting about the popularity of the song is that within The Beatles group, the song was controversial. It was written by McCartney (credited to Lennon–McCartney), but the only Beatle to appear in the recording of the song was McCartney. Because the song was so unlike their music at the time, the other Beatles vetoed the release of the song as a single in the UK and there was internal tension among the group and the band managers regarding the song. It was clearly a heavily McCartney-influenced piece, but the managers were terrified of presenting it as a McCartney solo for fear of jinxing the group or presenting the band as beginning to break up. The song was not released as a single in the UK until 1976—six years after the band had broken up.