Blackbird
As I mentioned in earlier posts, “Blackbird” is my all-time favorite Beatles song. So for this post, I did a little research on it.
The song was written by Paul McCartney in 1968. It is supposedly a reaction to racial tensions in the United States during the spring of that year. McCartney wrote it in Scotland. The song is fairly simple in instrumentation, consisting only of the guitar, McCartney’s voice, a dubbed-in blackbird singing and his foot tapping like a metronome. The guitar composition is based on Beethoven’s “Bouree in E Minor” – a song McCartney and George Harrison learned as kids to impress others.
The song is featured on the White Album, which was released on November 22, 1968. It was a tense time for the band, which was on the brink of breaking up. Their manager, Brian Epstein had just died the summer before. They were very involved in the psychadelic drug scene, and the presence of Yoko Ono in the studio only added to the tension. The album is interesting because it is more like a co-recording of four individual artists than one enified band.
Here’s a youtube video with the song if you’ve never heard it.
Research sources: http://www.iamthebeatles.com/article1011.html
you were only waiting for this moment to arise 