The White Album 50 Project: "Blackbird"

This song from the Beatles' White Album is filled with more possible connotations than most people realize.  At its surface, Paul McCartney's "Blackbird" is a gentle acoustic song offering succor to those who feel entrapped and inspiring them to see the truth and learn to fly and be free. "Blackbird" prophesies Paul's Wings album Band On the Run, which would revolve around the ideas of escape, flight and freedom.  It's a song that anyone in despair or on the edge of self-discovery can relate to.  Heck, I even quoted it in my college yearbook entry.   

Except that Paul was apparently targeting this song at a specific demographic.

While touring the U.S. in 2002, Paul claimed that he wrote the song about the struggle for both civil rights and gender rights waged by Negro women (as they were still called in 1968) in America.  See, Negroes are also called blacks, women in Britain are called birds . . . "black bird," get it?  He said he wrote it in Scotland after reading about the racial unrest in the United States.

Because Paul only offered this explanation of his song 34 years after its release, many Beatles fans and rock critics viewed his statement with a heavy dose of skepticism.  And since "bird," like "chick," is quite a condescending term for a woman, many folks felt that Paul's explanation did not ring true because of the clumsy symbolism of the title.  Two other points: Paul would later write a similar song for Band On the Run called "Bluebird," a song having nothing to do with race or with the Buffalo Springfield song of the same name.  Also, Paul on another occasion had a different story of how he wrote "Blackbird" - he said he was inspired to write the song by the sound of a blackbird's call while studying Transcendental Meditation in India. 

Intriguingly, however, Paul did tell Donovan, whose guitar technique inspired this and so many other White Album songs, during a rehearsal session at EMI Abbey Road Studios the day the White Album was released in Britain that he was indeed thinking about the state of race relations in America when he wrote it.  And interpretations of "Blackbird" had pivoted toward racial issues even before Paul said in 2002 that the song was about black American women, though music writer Ian MacDonald dismissed such ideas by highlighting the song's romanticism.  That romanticism, MacDonald wrote in his Beatles book "Revolution In the Head," translates "into a succinct metaphor for awakening on a deeper level."  In other words, pretty much how I heard the song when I first heard it in 1981, the year I first bought the White Album.

One thing that is not in dispute is that the melody and arrangement of "Blackbird" are in the romantic tradition, a place Macca has always been comfortable in.  Paul sings to his solo guitar accompaniment while keeping time with the tap of his foot (which Beatles scholar Mark Lewisohn thought was the sound of a metronome), the chirping of a blackbird coming in at the end.  The melody was derived from Johann Sebastian Bach's "Bourrée in E minor," a classical piece popular with aspiring guitarists that also inspired the instrumental "Bourée" on Jethro Tull's second album.  Perhaps it's too romantic; John Lennon dismissed "Blackbird" outright in 1980, saying he gave Paul a line for the song and adding a left-handed compliment for Paul's guitar playing.  "He's good at that stuff, you know," John said.  "So's John Denver."  Indeed, many people suspect that Paul's efforts to explain "Blackbird" as social commentary are an effort to make himself look as adept at writing such songs as John was.    

I still appreciate "Blackbird" as a romantic and inspirational song anyone can identify with, and it is such a song at heart, but as a song about black women in America, it was a misfire.  There's little if anything in the lyrics that indicates anything specific to black feminism.  The truth is, black American women didn't need to be inspired by the sort of song meant to be played in coffeehouses dominated by white clienteles.  Just a year before, Aretha Franklin made the most definitive black feminist statement ever with her cover of Otis Redding's "Respect," turning a song about an overworked man's pleas to his lady into a song of a lady's liberation.  And in the same year the White Album was released, the Supremes had an American number-one hit single with "Love Child," a song about an illegitimate daughter describing the shame and poverty of growing up outside a family structure and asking (but more like telling) her boyfriend to wait to have sex with her.  Against a terrifying string section and some harrowing vocalizing from the backing singers, Diana Ross's character makes it clear that no child of hers will grow up with the shame she grew up with.  ("Love Child" was a Supremes record in name only; the backing vocals were provided by a backing choral group called the Andantes, not Mary Wilson and Cindy Birdsong.) It's also worth noting that when the Supremes performed "Love Child" on Ed Sullivan's show, they did so not dressed to the nines and with straight hair but in the street clothes and with the short, unprocessed hair common among young black women in the late sixties - a visual statement to match their musical one.  Franklin's and Ross's generation of black American women were more than ready to break free.

Did I happen to mention that "Love Child" knocked the Beatles' own "Hey Jude" off the top of the Billboard singles chart?

To be succinct, it was hardly necessary for Paul McCartney to stand with American black feminism in song; to use modern argot, the sisters were doing it for themselves, with Detroit sisters Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross leading the way.  You might say that Franklin and Ross are "birds of a feather." ;-)

Ultimately, "Blackbird" is still a song for anyone who feels oppressed, personally or politically, who need to be inspired to awaken and be free, which is why it's been covered by a diverse array of artists, too many to mention here.  Kenny Rankin covered it in 1974 in the style of the original Beatles recording but with a slightly quicker tempo, and Paul McCartney found Rankin's cover so moving that he asked Rankin to perform the song at the ceremony for John and Paul when they were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.  (Here's something else I found out about Kenny Rankin; his folkish 1969 cover of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" was played at George Harrison's memorial service.)   Crosby, Stills and Nash recorded a demo of "Blackbird" for a possible record deal with Apple (they ultimately went to Atlantic instead), and they've performed it in concerts, but they've never included a properly recorded take on an album.  (The demo was released in 1991 on the group's box set.)  Others who have covered it include Dionne Farris, Neil Diamond, Sarah McLachlan, and Petula Clark.  The song may have been about black women, but Paul McCartney still wrote a song with universal meaning.

Sadly, for black women in America and for many Americans who don't fit that demographic, freedom and awakening in 2018 seem to be more elusive then ever.  We've gone from waiting for a moment to be free to, as Bruce Springsteen would put it, waiting for a moment that just won't come.