Blackbird, The Beatles

Sometimes a song lives in your skin. It gets in there and takes up residence, making a new life for itself as it sheds meaning to your life. “Blackbird,” a later Beatles song, lives in me in this way. 

The first four chords of this song make me exhale as if I’d been holding my breath. Then Paul McCartney starts singing with the rich, clear voice I associate with my childhood, and I feel like I’m being hugged. Maybe I close my eyes. I usually sing along. There have been covers and other versions of the song. Beyonce even recorded a version on her most recent album, the country one, and it’s equally beautiful, though it doesn't hold the under-my-skin meaning for me. 

This is one of the songs I’ve sung to my kids most nights since their birth. I have a black bird tattooed on the inside of my left bicep, even though I hate birds. It's hard to pin down what it is exactly that made it sink so deep into me, so I suppose like all great loves, it's complicated.

Sir Paul came up with the chord progression after listening to something by Bach on the harpsichord. Now that the sound of a harpsichord is in my ear, it’s all I hear. A million years ago, when I played the piano, I learned some Bach Fugues, and looking back at the book, it’s in German, though fugue is from Latin and means “flight” or “escape.” All of them are really technical and rhythmic. They’re like studies, not melodies. It’s amazing that this type of music inspired such a beautiful melody, but if you listen closely, he’s playing a technical style on the guitar and singing a totally different style on top of it. The tapping rhythm in the song is just him hitting his guitar. The song still moves, but the guitar rhythm carries the whole thing forward while he sings these melodious notes above it. High above in some cases. He might be a magician.

I, like so many women before me, am a little bit in love with Paul McCartney. His music makes him seem to be from another world. Interviews with him are usually somewhat disappointing because the way he describes songs using plain language is so much less impressive than the music itself. I’m forced to remember he’s just a guy, not the perfect god I’ve formed in my head, worshiping via “Yesterday” and “Let It Be.”

Sometime along the way, I learned this song was inspired by the Little Rock Nine and Paul McCartney’s empathy for Black Americans during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. It’s a simple song of hope. It’s amazing that the song is so hopeful when the subject matter feels really dark. Why is the blackbird singing in the dead of night? Why are her wings broken? Why are her eyes sunken? Is this weird to sing to toddlers? The context helps answer some of those questions, though I imagine whether or not to sing it to toddlers is still a personal choice. 

But the chords lift you up as the words ask you to do the impossible. Learn to fly with broken wings, see without eyes, live joyfully in a world so intent on your demise or subjugation. Do this because it’s the only way to take back your power from them, the oppressors. Do this because the alternative is to live without hope or music or joy, and that’s not life. That’s existence. 

My choice to sing it to my babies and later boys was not thought through. In the earliest days of our older son’s life, maybe still in the hospital room, I was holding him and realized with some panic that it was expected for me to sing to this child. My mind was suddenly blank and I couldn’t remember the words to any songs. There was nary a nursery rhyme in my head. All that was in there was Nirvana or the Gin Blossoms. Blackstreet? Can’t sing “No Diggity” to a baby. I scrolled through my mental catalog and found my way to the Beatles section, where I was able to recall the words to Blackbird through my mental haze of recent delivery exhaustion and sleep deprivation. I think I tried to hum the guitar chords at first to replicate the whole experience of the song, but over time, it became simplified to just the words. 

I don’t know what the song means to my boys. I remember them hearing it for the first time and not being all that impressed, probably because it made my singing, something they (for better or worse) associate with comfort and love, sound so bad by comparison. I can carry a tune, but I’m no vocalist. What I lack in skill, I make up for in enthusiasm. I do hope, for their sakes, that the song will develop and take on new meaning for them over time, as it has for me and so many others.

Everyone is waiting for a moment to arise. Every person has something they're waiting for, hoping for. All of us can identify with the feeling of lying awake at night, anticipating the future. And this bird, who has so much going against her, is still hopeful. She's still waiting for her moment. She still inspires others to hope for her, with her, that her moment is coming.