Blackbird (song)

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For other uses, see Blackbird (disambiguation).
"Blackbird"
Song by The Beatles

from the album The Beatles
Released 22 November 1968
Recorded 11 June 1968
Genre Folk
Length 2:19
Label Apple Records
Writer Lennon/McCartney
Producer George Martin
The Beatles track listing
Music sample

"Blackbird" is a Beatles song from double-disc album The Beatles (also known as The White Album). Blackbird was written by Paul McCartney, but credited as usual to Lennon/McCartney. McCartney was inspired to write this while in Scotland as a reaction to racial tensions escalating in America in the spring of 1968,[1] and (according to Sony/ATV Songs LLC 1968) McCartney stated that he had a black woman in mind when he wrote the song ("bird" being British slang for a woman).

Contents

[edit] 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 Bach's Bourrée in E minor, a well known classical guitar piece. As kids, 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 it to the fans camped outside his house.[2]

[edit] Composition and recording

The song was recorded 11 June 1968 in Abbey Road studios, with George Martin as the producer and Geoff Emerick as the audio engineer.[3] McCartney played a Martin D 28 acoustic guitar. The track includes recordings of a blackbird singing in the background.[3]

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 third 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 characterized 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.[4]

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 an outro, 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".

In 2009, McCartney performed this song at the Coachella 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 realise so many civil rights issues have been overcome. We now have President Obama."[5]

[edit] Personnel

[edit] Covers and cultural references

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Cover performances include:

Elements of the lyrics "take these broken wings and learn to fly" have re-appeared in other pop songs over the years, notably the number one hit "Broken Wings" by Mr. Mister and the Savage Garden song, "Gunning Down Romance" from the Affirmation album. Sections of "Blackbird" were incorporated into The Waterboys' cover of the Van Morrison song "Sweet Thing" on their album Fisherman's Blues, and into the end of U2's "Beautiful Day" during their set at the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park, London on 2 July 2005, as well as some of the shows on the Vertigo Tour. Dynamite Hack references it at the end of their cover of "Boyz-N-The-Hood."

Sarah McLachlan performed it for the soundtrack of the 2001 film I Am Sam.

Quidam (polish band) performed it in the 2006 live album Half Unplugged.

Evan Rachel Wood performed it in the 2007 film Across the Universe.

Charles Manson took the song, along with "Helter Skelter" and "Piggies," as a metaphor for black-white race relations in the United States, which purportedly inspired his murders.[2]

Sara Gazarek wrote a medley of "Blackbird" and "Bye Bye Blackbird" that appears on her 2005 debut album Yours.

Cris Barber covered "Blackbird" on her 2008 album entitled This Moment to Be Free, a line taken from the song.

During live performances, Alter Bridge often plays the intro to the song before their song of the same name.

In the song "Welcome to the Monkey House" on the album of the same name by the Dandy Warhols, in the middle of this roughly one minute song there is line of where Courtney Taylor-Taylor sings, "When Michael Jackson dies, we're covering 'Blackbird.'" On July 31, 2009, after Jackson died, the Dandy Warhols released a cover of "Blackbird" on their website.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Everett 1999, p. 190.
  2. ^ a b MacDonald 2005, pp. 291–292.
  3. ^ a b Lewisohn 1988, p. 137.
  4. ^ The refrain consists of a two-round chord progression: VII (flat) (add9)-VImin(no5)-I7/5(no3)-IV, first time defined to a Imin/3 followed by the IV chord, and second to a I/3 chord, merging to the same chord progression as the interlude.
  5. ^ NME 2009.
  6. ^ The Beatles Connection, King's Singers CD, 1986.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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