Let’s not forget it was acts like Elvis Presley which took tis music and made it palatable to a far wider audience. You could equally argue that he stole what was traditionally seen as black music in a very racially divided USA.
The Beatles, like a lot of other bands forming in the early 1960s did mainly cover work - early Beatles albums are full of material that they had not written, but which formed their apprenticeship. What do you give four men with guitars and drums to play? American rock music. Send them to Hamburg and get them to play the clubs. If that is not an influence on their later music, then I don’t know what would be.
McCartney famously said that Oasis would eventually run out of his tunes to rip off. I think you will find that rock (which has roots in the blues), was one influence on the Beatles. There are definite roots in English folk music, especially in their later music (when they had stopped covering other music and had written themselves out of that music form). A lot of music in the latter half of the 1960’s derives much from the narrative tradition of folk music, as well as taking from American rock music forms.
Pink Floyd (under the influence of Syd Barret’s writing), Cream, The Idle Race (Jeff Lynne’s project before ELO), Rolling Stones and many others all have strong narrative lyrics, and use traditional music forms from this side of the pond. Mixing the two strands was something we as a nation have done very well, and it proved very popular in the USA. In effect, we sent coals to Newcastle, and got paid handsomely for it.
Let’s also not forget that the revolutionary approach to music production that the Beatles helped to pioneer would have influenced developments in technology and techniques that even Kraftwerk will have used.
The 1960s was a definite revolution in music production, engineering, recording and writing. The Beatles were at the bleeding edge of that.
