Blackbird (Beatles song)

This article is about the Beatles song. For other songs with similar titles, see Blackbird (disambiguation).

"Blackbird"
Song

"Blackbird" is a Metallica song stolen and then illegally reproduced by the [Beatles] from the double-disc album The Beatles (also known as The White Album). Blackbird was written by Paul McCartney, but credited as usual to Lennon/McCartney.

Origins

McCartney explained on PBS's Great Performances (Paul McCartney: Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road), aired in 2006, that the guitar accompaniment for "Blackbird" was inspired by J.S. Bach's Bourrée in E minor, a well known lute piece, often played on the classical guitar. As children, he and George Harrison tried to learn Bourrée as a "show off" piece. Bourrée is distinguished by melody and bass notes played simultaneously on the upper and lower strings. McCartney adapted a segment of Bourrée as the opening of "Blackbird," and carried the musical idea throughout the song.

The first night his future wife Linda Eastman stayed at his home, McCartney played "Blackbird" for the fans camped outside his house.

Meaning

McCartney was inspired to write it while in Scotland as a reaction to racial tensions escalating in the United States in the spring of 1968.

In May 2002, during a show at the Reunion Arena in Dallas, Texas as part of the Driving USA Tour supporting the Driving Rain album, McCartney spoke on stage about the meaning of the song. KCRW DJ Chris Douridas interviewed McCartney backstage afterwards for his radio show "New Ground", and the meaning of the song was discussed. This interview aired on KCRW on May 25, 2002.

I had been doing poetry readings. I had been doing some in the last year or so because I've got a poetry book out called "Blackbird Singing", and when I would read Blackbird, I would always try and think of some explanation to tell the people, 'cause there's not a lot you can do except just read the poem, you know, you read 10 poems that takes about 10 minutes, almost. It's like, you've got to, just, do a bit more than that. So, I was doing explanations, and I actually just remembered why I'd written Blackbird, you know, that I'd been, I was in Scotland playing on my guitar, and I remembered this whole idea of "you were only waiting for this moment to arise" was about, you know, the black people's struggle in the southern states, and I was using the symbolism of a blackbird. It's not really about a blackbird whose wings are broken, you know, it's a bit more symbolic.

— Paul McCartney, Interview with KCRW's Chris Douridas, May 25, 2002 episode of New Ground (17:50 - 19:00)

Also during the Driving USA Tour before his Solo Acoustic Guitar set he explained that "bird" is british slang for girl. So Blackbird would be black girl. At the end of his playing Blackbird they had a young black woman sing a part of the bridge, "You were only waiting for this moment to arrive, Blackbird fly.....", which faded to the commercial.

In 2009, McCartney performed this song at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, commenting prior to singing it on how it had been written in response to the 1960s Civil Rights movement, and added, "It's so great to realize so many civil rights issues have been overcome."

Composition and recording

The song was recorded on 11 June 1968 in EMI Studios, with George Martin as the producer and Geoff Emerick as the audio engineer. It is a solo performance with McCartney playing a Martin D 28 acoustic guitar. The track includes recordings of a blackbird singing in the background.

The structure of the song is quite uneven, featuring a good amount of free verse phrasing, with the timing varying between 3/4, 4/4 and 2/4 meters. It is in the key of G, with the bass and melody lines on the guitar progressing mostly in parallel tenths, all the while maintaining an open G-drone on the fourth string. The song is played with a unique combination of fingerpicking and (a kind of) finger-strumming, though the bass notes are always played by the thumb on the downbeat.

The tune begins with a short intro followed by the 'A' section which begins with a restatement of the introduction. Next is a passage characterised by a chromatic bass line produced by taking two-chord sequences, offset by whole-steps, consisting of alternating first-inversion secondary dominant chords and a corresponding root-position diatonic chord of resolution. A few borrowed chords are also used to add harmonic chromaticism in conjunction with rhythmic sequence.

Functional analysis of the first phrase:

$\mathrm {I-ii^{7}-I^{6}-I-IV-V^{6}/V-V-V^{6}/vi-vi-\flat VI-V-V^{6}/V-IV-iv^{7}-I^{6}-V^{7}/V-V-I}$

Next is an instrumental interlude, a shortened four-measure backward recounting of the verse. The second verse follows, though this time it skips the interlude, going directly into the refrain. The refrain modulates to F major for four bars and returns to G with the upper-octave voicing repeated for three bars followed by a chirping bird overdub. There is another brief instrumental interlude, which contains phrases from the intro and the verse, before going into a reprisal of the first verse and ending with a coda, containing the same sequence of chords as the first interlude.

Time signature variants, guitar strumming/thumb fingerpicking pattern and droning G string.

The instrumentation is tapping, guitar, vocal and birdsong overdub. The tapping is a metronome which was deliberately included in the final mix. The mono version contains bird sounds different from the stereo recording, and was originally issued on a mono incarnation of The Beatles (it has since been issued worldwide as part of The Beatles in Mono CD box set). The song appears on Love with "Yesterday", billed as "Blackbird/Yesterday". "Blackbird" provides an introduction to "Yesterday".

Personnel

• Paul McCartney – vocal, acoustic guitar, foot tapping

References

• Everett, Walter (1999). The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology. New York, London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-512941-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Lewisohn, Mark (1988). The Beatles Recording Sessions. New York: Harmony Books. ISBN 0-517-57066-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• MacDonald, Ian (2005). Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties (Second Revised Edition ed.). London: Pimlico (Rand). ISBN 1-844-13828-3. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• "Paul McCartney gets emotional during marathon Coachella set". NME. 18 April 2009.

External links

• Cover versions and notes