Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand
song by The Who
"Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand" is a song by the English rock band the Who. It was written by Pete Townshend and released on their 1967 album The Who Sell Out. The best known version of the song has an arrangement using acoustic guitar and Latin percussion instruments.
The song has ambiguous lyrics that have been subject to a variety of interpretations. At least five different recordings of the song have been officially released by the Who.
Lyrics and music
Unlike many Who songs from the 1960s, "Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand" recalls the typical pop song convention of praising a pretty girl but does not provide any description of her appearance, focusing instead on Mary Anne's hand tremor. The reason for the shaking is not clear: Mary Anne may have some affliction and/or the song may be, as Chris Charlesworth describes it, the Who's "second great song about masturbation" (after the band's 1967 single "Pictures of Lily"): Steve Grantley and Alan Parker suggest that the reason can be inferred from the line "What they do to a man, those shaky hands." However, some versions of the song use the lyrics: "What they've done to her, man, those shaky hands." Rolling Stone praised the "barely-beneath-the-surface humor of the lyric". Townshend has also introduced the song with "This next one's written in very bad taste", as on Live at the Royal Albert Hall.
The song has a melody described by AllMusic's Mark Deming as "charming" and "a tune you couldn't forget even if you tried". Author John Atkins describes the song as a "delightful pop song in the Everly Brothers mold", while Charlesworth suggests that, regardless of the lyrics, the song "would have been a winner on melody alone".
“Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand” enters the record as song by The Who. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mary, Anne and Shaky can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Mary, Anne and Shaky provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3296136. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1967.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.