International Desk, Bangladesh Global: Beyoncé's cover of The Beatles' classic track Blackbird on Cowboy Carter reveals the lesser-known story that inspired Paul McCartney – and holds the key to her album.
When Beyoncé first announced that she would be releasing a country-inspired album, talk quickly turned to whether she would take this chance to not only put her own spin on the genre herself – but on some of its most-loved songs. Hearing Queen Bee take on the Queen of Country Dolly Parton's hit Jolene seemed like a delicious opportunity – with Parton herself dropping huge hints about the prospect. And when the 27-track Cowboy Carter album finally dropped, Beyoncé did indeed deliver – rewriting the lyrics to be less of a plea and more a stark warning ("Your peace depends on how you move, Jolene."). Dolly herself is onboard to introduce the track, saying: "Hey miss Honey B, it's Dolly P. You know that hussy with the good hair you sing about?" – a callback to Beyoncé's 2016 song Sorry and its infamous "Becky with the good hair" line.
But besides the Dolly Parton classic, Cowboy Carter contains another, less expected, cover-version: The Beatles' Blackbird, a song few would have predicted to appear on a country-themed album. With lyrics written by Paul McCartney and released in 1968 as a track on The Beatles – aka The White Album – the song is one of the band's most-loved. On the surface, it's also one of their simplest: a gentle, melancholic folk song about a Blackbird with broken wings "singing in the dead of the night". But the song isn't about a bird at all.
McCartney wrote the song while watching the civil rights movement unfold in the US. In his 2021 book Paul McCartney: The Lyrics, he wrote: "At the time in 1968 when I was writing Blackbird, I was very conscious of the terrible racial tensions in the US… That imagery of the broken wings and the sunken eyes and the general longing for freedom is definitely of its moment."
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