Shortly afterwards, his then-girlfriend Linda Eastman, soon to be his wife, stayed over in his London home for the first time. He scribbled down the track as a solo acoustic number and pocketed it. McCartney had written the song after returning from India and was staying in Scotland. But nothing will beat the first time he played the song live. The track has since become one of the band’s most cherished songs and has been widely covered and featured in many of McCartney’s live sets since. The reference has since been seen as a little derogatory but in the context of The Beatles’ work, and especially Paul McCartney’s whose writing wasn’t as visceral as Lennon’s, it stands out as a moment of defiance and political drive. Those were the days of the civil rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about, so this was really a song from me to a black woman, experiencing these problems in the States: ‘Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope.’”Īdding: “As is often the case with my things, a veiling took place so, rather than say ‘Black woman living in Little Rock’ and be very specific, she became a bird, became symbolic, so you could apply it to your particular problem.” The song was inspired by the ongoing civil rights movement in America at the time with the term ‘blackbird’ said to have referenced Black women who were facing oppression at the time: “I had in mind a black woman, rather than a bird. ![]() ![]() However, ‘Blackbird’ had a more than potent message than it first seemed. If you’re sniggering right now, then let us turn your attention to songs like ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘Octopus’ Garden’ which both land with a heavy dose of irreverence. With so much of The Beatles lyrical output flitting between deeply personal expression and wide-ranging a-political motifs, it would be more than easy to think of this track as a simple song about a bird. Lyrically, the song holds far more than it first appears too. The phrase “blackbird singing in the dead of night” operates on a 3/4 signature while the large parts of the remaining song are either 2/4 or 4/4, meaning this track is far beyond the simple ditty it appears. It using some different time signatures which can make the very simple sounding track (just Macca and an acoustic guitar) feel extremely textured. “Bach was always one of our favourite composers we felt we had a lot in common with him… I developed the melody on guitar based on the Bach piece and took it somewhere else, took it to another level, then I just fitted the words to it.” Based on a piece by Bach from his composition Bouree in E Minor, it was a section of music that he and Harrison had practised on guitar, “Part of its structure is a particular harmonic thing between the melody and the bass line which intrigued me,” revealed McCartney to Barry Miles on Many Years From Now. ![]() Although it approached the huge and wide-ranging subject of the civil rights movement, it started out with humbler beginnings and can be traced back to McCartney and Harrison’s childhood music lessons.
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