The Beatles Sing Blackbird

According to Wikipedia, "Blackbird" is a Beatles song from double-disc album The Beatles (also known as The White Album). Blackbird was credited as usual to Lennon/McCartney. McCartney was inspired to write it while in Scotland as a reaction to racial tensions escalating in the United States in the spring of 1968.

In May 2002, during a show at the Reunion Arena in Dallas, TX as part of the Driving USA Tour supporting the Driving Rain album, McCartney spoke on stage about the meaning of the song. KCRW DJ Chris Douridas interviewed McCartney backstage afterwards for his radio show "New Ground", and the meaning of the song was discussed. This interview aired on KCRW on May 25, 2002.

"I had been doing poetry readings. I had been doing some in the last year or so because I've got a poetry book out called "Blackbird Singing", and when I would read Blackbird, I would always try and think of some explanation to tell the people, 'cause there's not a lot you can do except just read the poem, you know, you read 10 poems that takes about 10 minutes, almost. It's like, you've got to, just, do a bit more than that. So, I was doing explanations, and I actually just remembered why I'd written blackbird, you know, that I'd been, I was in Scotland playing on my guitar, and I remembered this whole idea of "you were only waiting for this moment to arise" was about, you know, the black people's struggle in the southern states, and I was using the symbolism of a black bird. It's not really about a black bird whose wings are broken, you know, it's a bit more symbolic."
-- Paul McCartney, Interview with KCRW's Chris Douridas, May 25, 2002 episode of New Ground (17:50 - 19:00)

In 2009, McCartney performed this song at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, commenting prior to singing it on how it had been written in response to the 1960s Civil Rights movement, and added, "It's so great to realize so many civil rights issues have been overcome."
The song was recorded 11 June 1968 in EMI Studios, with George Martin as the producer and Geoff Emerick as the audio engineer. It is a solo performance with McCartney playing a Martin D 28 acoustic guitar. The track includes recordings of a blackbird singing in the background.

The structure of the song is quite uneven, featuring a good amount of free verse phrasing, with the timing varying between 3/4, 4/4 and 2/4 meters. It is in the key of G, with the bass and melody lines on the guitar progressing mostly in parallel tenths, all the while maintaining an open G-drone on the third string. The song is played with a unique combination of fingerpicking and (a kind of) finger-strumming, though the bass notes are always played by the thumb on the downbeat. The tune begins with a short intro followed by the 'A' section which begins with a restatement of the introduction. Next is a passage characterised by a chromatic bass line produced by taking two-chord sequences, offset by whole-steps, consisting of alternating first-inversion secondary dominant chords and a corresponding root-position diatonic chord of resolution. A few borrowed chords are also used to add harmonic chromaticism in conjunction with rhythmic sequence.

Functional analysis of the first phrase:

\mathrm{I - ii^7 - I^6 - I - IV - V^6/V - V - V^6/vi - vi - \flat VI - V - V^6/V - IV - iv^7 - I^6 - V^7/V - V - I}

Next is an instrumental interlude, a shortened four-measure backward recounting of the verse. The second verse follows, though this time it skips the interlude, going directly into the refrain.The refrain modulates to F major for four bars and returns to G with the upper-octave voicing repeated for three bars followed by a chirping bird overdub. There is another brief instrumental interlude, which contains phrases from the intro and the verse, before going into a reprisal of the first verse and ending with a coda, containing the same sequence of chords as the first interlude.

McCartney explained on PBS's Great Performances (Paul McCartney: Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road), aired in 2006, that the guitar accompaniment for "Blackbird" was inspired by Bach's Bourrée in E minor, a well known classical lute piece, often played on guitar. As kids, he and George Harrison tried to learn Bourrée as a "show off" piece. Bourrée is distinguished by melody and bass notes played simultaneously on the upper and lower strings. McCartney adapted a segment of Bourrée as the opening of "Blackbird," and carried the musical idea throughout the song.

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