‘Blackbird’: The powerful meaning behind Beyoncé’s Beatles cover on Cowboy Carter

Sign as much as Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly publication Now Hear This for the within monitor on all issues music

Get our Now Hear This electronic mail totally free

When Beyoncé’s eighth album Cowboy Carter was launched earlier immediately, it was met with widespread acclaim. In a five-star assessment of the country-influenced file, The Independent’s chief music critic Helen Brown wrote: “It’s a reminder that country music has always been about ‘three chords and the truth’. Beyoncé’s truth shines here with the fierce strength of the Texan sun. Cowboy hats off to her.”

Unusually for a Beyoncé album, the file consists of a few covers. One, her highly-anticipated transforming of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”, is a radical revision of the nation staple that sees Beyoncé warning off, reasonably than begging to, her love rival. As Parton herself put it in response: “Beyoncé is giving that girl some trouble and she deserves it!”

The different cover on the album is far more devoted to the unique, which itself wouldn’t ordinarily be thought of a rustic track. “Blackbird” (which Beyoncé restyles as “Blackbiird” in line with her Act II theme), was written by Paul McCartney and was included on The Beatles’ groundbreaking 1968 double album The Beatles, normally generally known as the White Album. While at first look it could look like an unlikely track to seem prominently close to the beginning of Beyoncé’s 27-track epic, the cover may simply be the important thing to understanding the album as an entire.

McCartney wrote the track in the summertime of 1968, taking musical inspiration from Johann Sebastian Bach’s traditional lute piece “Bourrée in E minor”. Lyrically, nevertheless, he had his gaze turned in the direction of the civil rights motion, which was unfolding throughout the US, notably within the nation’s Southern states. It was a tumultous time. Civil rights chief Martin Luther King Jr had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennesse on 4 April 1968, and his loss of life sparked a wave of riots throughout the nation. Just every week after King’s loss of life, President Lyndon B Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act, which made it a federal crime to “by force or by threat of force, injure, intimidate, or interfere with anyone… by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin, handicap or familial status”.

McCartney had been studying about this social upheaval and was notably moved by the story of the Little Rock Nine, a bunch of 9 African American college students who had enrolled at school in Arkansas in 1957 shortly after faculty segregation was declared unconstitutional.

In a 2018 interview with GQ, McCartney defined: “I was sitting around with my acoustic guitar, and I’d heard about the Civil Rights troubles that were happening in the 60s in Alabama, Mississippi, Little Rock in particular. So that was in my mind, and I just thought it’d be really good if I could write something that if it ever reached any of the people going through those problems, it might kind of give them a little bit of hope.”

He went on to say that he particularly envisioned a younger Black woman rising up within the South, and used the colloquial slang of the period. “In England, a ‘bird’ is a girl,” stated McCartney. “So I was thinking of a Black girl going through this, you know, now’s your time to arise and set yourself free. Take these broken wings…”

Beyoncé’s choice to cover the track together with a quartet of Black feminine nation singers, Tanner Adell, Tiera Kennedy, Brittney Spencer and Reyna Roberts, subsequently makes good sense on an album that sees her stake her declare on the nation style. 56 years after it was written, the track has been taken up by younger ladies from the South who weren’t even born when McCartney wrote it, and so they’ve given it new wings.