"Blackbird"

Sometimes a Song

At the end of the week which we began with the word “blackbird,” it likely won’t surprise too many of you to learn that Sometimes a Song is … a certain Paul McCartney recording from The White Album. I might have asked Tony to postpone blackbird until spring … but he’d already written his essay for the week! So here we are, not “in the dead of night” but rather more like in the dead of winter, early March in New Hampshire, USA, with plenty of snow on the ground and more ahead in the forecast. But lots of you are living where birds are singing and flowers are blooming, no doubt! So we have for today the lovely song, “Blackbird.”

It’s hard to talk about individual songs from albums recorded in England in the 1960’s and earlier, to judge their particular place on the charts, because the British recording industry did not release singles from in an LP collection. So many of our favorite songs from, let’s say, The White Album or Sgt. Pepper or Let It Be were never released as singles. This changed in the 1970’s, but before then if you liked songs on the Beatles’ albums, you had to buy the LP. So I can’t tell you that “Blackbird” hit the charts, or how long it stayed there. I can say, as evidence of how very beloved the song was and still is, that to date it’s been covered close to 700 times, and counting.

We’ve got Beatles fans here at Word & Song, some of whom can say more about the Fab Four than I will ever know. Some of them may be what are now called “Beatleologists” (no joke there; that’s a thing.) But what I do know is a great song when I hear one. And Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird” is a great song written and sung by a genuine balladeer. Is “Blackbird” a genuine ballad? I think so, though the “narrative” is limited, a contemplation on what the birdsong’s plaintiveness suggests to a person who listens to it. The song is sad, and yet hopeful. Paul said that he wrote it with the Civil Rights movement in the US in mind. But that fact I think says more about his sense of compassion and empathy toward oppressed people than the song itself reveals in the lyrics. Protest songs were being written as folk music for hundreds of years, commemorating specific events. But Paul McCartney was not an historian, as I have said. He wasn’t busy about the business of writing protest songs, but of writing songs about the human condition. And really even “Blackbird” is a song of hope and optimism. There is a tinge of sadness in the melody and the lyric, but that’s not the point of it at all.

I bought a copy of The White Album about ten years after its original release, and of all the songs there, “Blackbird” is my favorite, followed by the jaunty ballad, "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” (also by McCartney), and the wistful “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (by George Harrison; with guest guitarist Eric Clapton). I learned to play the acoustic guitar in the 1970’s, and “Blackbird” is still in my repertoire to this day. It’s a singer’s song.

So here is Paul McCartney’s original recording of “Blackbird,” and it’s an all-Paul version: singing, playing the acoustic guitar (a Martin D-28, and wouldn’t I love to own one of those!), and playing the percussion with his toes tapping and a microphone at his feet. Enjoy!

BY THE WAY: Paul McCartney devoted an album to the American Standards in the 2010’s called “Kisses on the Bottom.” One of the songs he recorded in that collection WAS a little tune I mentioned last in passing last week, which was a big hit for our friend Gene Austin. And that tune was “Bye Bye Blackbird.” So I can’t resist throwing in Gene’s 1926 hit and Paul’s 2012 cover of that song today! If you are not sure about Paul McCartney’s cover of the song, give it a second listen and see if you begin to warm up to it.

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