Except that the bass is about groove in American Music and it's diaspora. Always was, and hopefully always will be, and you can't separate groove from any conversation about bass. So you can enjoy that herring with a bit burre blanc and some white wine.

One thing I have noticed about music history is we want to make the large leaps in development about one person. For example, Louis Armstrong didn't invent jazz as Ken Burns likes to claim, Miles didn't invent Modal jazz, like the other revisionists like to claim. there were many artists riding a wave going in the same direction and those two just happened to be on the crest of it, and they were the biggest names, so they get all the credit. It's a shame, cause it dilutes the efforts of the artists that helped make those eras so special.

You want me to claim Paul created melodic bass playing. He didn't. Rock n roll and the Beatles did not exist in a vacuum. Like all great artists, they were a product of their musical environment and soaked everything up and spit out what was important to them. There are plenty of examples of melodic bass lines, and because the role of the electric is the same as the role of the double bass, then we should go back as far as we can for examples. Most of that 50's rock n roll was a double bass anyways. Regardless, there are mountains of melodic bass lines through out history, from Beethoven through Jimmy Blanton, Cachao, Slam Stewart, Ray Brown, Mingus...etc. James Jamerson was in that continuum having been a jazz double bassist himself before settling into his Motown gig. It's James who Paul fed off of most. There were plenty of other bassists in England at that time doing busy melodic bass playing including Dave Holland, John Entwhistle and Jack Bruce.

Paul did have a very keen and personal melodic sense that informed all of his music throughout his career, and he played bass using every bit of that, and that was cool. and I already agreed that Paul was an influential bassist, and yes, Gordy did have Motown artists covering Beatles tunes, and yes his melodicism did come back to Motown's sound, but that doesn't mean Paul reinvented the wheel or something. He didn't set any standard for the instrument. The role of the instrument definitely did not change because of the Beatles. He was just the bass player in a band of "four little marching men."

As an aside, one of my hereos is bassist/band leader Juan Formell of Cuba's Los Van Van who took loved the Beatles and well as Motown and funk and transferred some of that melodicism and to son and created Songo. He loved Paul's melodic sense and even his bass lines showed it. But goddamn could he groove.