Written by Paul McCartney for the Beatles’ 1968 double album The Beatles (AKA “the White Album”) Blackbird isn’t the most obvious song to turn up 55 years later (retitled Blackbiird) on the new Beyoncé album. However, it makes perfect sense for the superstar to cover it on her so-called “country album”, Cowboy Carter. Where casual listeners could be forgiven for thinking Blackbird is a song about a small winged visitor to the garden – the Fab Four’s delicately lovely original does, after all, begin “blackbird singing in the dead of night …” and include birdsong – the song is actually steeped in the civil rights movement and female emancipation, themes that resonate deeply with Beyoncé.
McCartney penned it as a tribute to the Little Rock Nine, a group of students who had faced racial discrimination after starting at the all-white Little Rock high school in 1957. The incident attracted national attention because it was a test case of Brown v Board of Education, a supreme court ruling that said segregation in such schools was unconstitutional. Arkanas governor Orval Faubus didn’t agree and sent in the national guard to stop the students entering the premises. However, after federal troops were then brought in to escort them in, the fledgling civil rights movement had nine early heroes and the attention of the world – including McCartney.
