When the night is dark you always have to go back to the Beatles. Like Beyoncé, who sings Paul McCartney’s Blackbird in the new album Cowboy Carter in a beautiful choral arrangement, and brings home a song born in support of civil rights in 1960s America.
First the story of the Little Rock Nine, the nine black boys and girls who only with the intervention of the army managed to enter the first desegregated high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, while the governor had deployed his national guard to prevent it. It was 1957. On this side of the other century we play with the clumsy tweets of Minister Valditara, with certain segregationist parodies welcomed on talk shows as if everything were normal; those black and white images are still shocking in their restrained ferocity. The boys and girls are never to blame for anything, in Little Rock or in Pioltello.
The time he went to play in Little Rock in 2016 Paul McCartney remembered when he read that news in a newspaper. “For me this is where the struggle began,” he said, and after nearly sixty years he was able to meet two of the girls who entered the class, Thelma Mothershed and Elizabeth Eckford. He personally dedicated the song he had written to them because “if she had gotten there she could have helped them a little.” Black blackbird singing in the night / take back your broken wings and learn to fly, says the lyrics. The sound of the birds that the musician had recorded in the home garden at dawn is added to the recording on the White Album. The awakening, the fragility, the beauty, just like certain nightingales and larks in Schubert’s lieder.
In reality, Blackbird’s dialing times are not that precise. As always when it comes to the Beatles there are rumors and stories, such as that the song was written for an in-law grandmother who hadn’t been too well. Nothing bad, actually. McCartney had probably carried that idea with him for years. Returning from India in 1968 and immediately after the killing of Martin Luther King, he took up the image of broken wings in the blackest night, which seemed so appropriate for the moment. The next verse says: All your life/ you have waited for this moment to be resurrected. The Easter translation is not surprising, in the meanings of arise there is something collective and also spiritual. Arise, after all, is another synonym for woke, why not. When Beyoncé and the choir arrive at the verse about getting up, the arrangement has a polyphonic jolt, to underline the importance of that word.
It’s not all. The most important secret of the song McCartney revealed to Diana Ross, who was speechless. In popular and brisk jargon, bird is a girl. Black bird is therefore a black girl, perhaps one of the little girls from Little Rock: «I wanted to encourage her – the singer continued – to keep trying, not to lose faith, there is still hope». Moreover, the guitar accompaniment is stolen with few modifications to Bach’s Bourree that he and George Harrison played on the guitar to impress their friends.
Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone recalled in a long piece the other day Blackbird’s long road to us, the great intensity assumed in the interpretations of many black performers: the reggae versions of the Pioneers, the disco-funky strangeness of Sarah Vaughan, the piano of Ramsey Lewis, the heartbreaking one of Betty LaVette, the disco-gospel of Sylvester, the diva of You make me feel. As if each one contained the other, up to Beyoncè who sums them all up, because there is always a present in history and the songs serve to remember it. As McCartney said with all possible simplicity: “The bird is symbolic, you can apply it to any of your problems.”
2024-03-30 23:05:54
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