From the beginning, the Beatles acknowledged in interviews their debt to Black music, apparent in their covers of and written original songs inspired by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Shirelles, and other giants of R&B. Blackbird goes deeper, appreciating unacknowledged forerunners, as well as Black artists whose interpretations keep the Beatles in play.

Drawing on interviews with Black musicians and using the song “Blackbird” as a touchstone, Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith tell a new history. They present unheard stories and resituate old ones, offering the phrase “transatlantic flight” to characterize a back-and-forth dialogue shaped by Black musicians in the United States and elsewhere, including Liverpool. Kapurch and Smith find a lineage that reaches back to the very origins of American popular music, one that involves the original twentieth-century blackbird, Florence Mills, and the King of the Twelve String, Lead Belly. Continuing the circular flight path with Nina Simone, Billy Preston, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Sylvester, Martha Wash and others, the authors take readers into the twenty-first century, when Black artists like Bettye LaVette harness the Beatles for today.

Detailed, thoughtful, and revelatory, Blackbird explores musical and storytelling legacies full of rich but contested symbolism. Appealing to those interested in developing a deep understanding of the evolution of popular music, this book promises that you’ll never hear “Blackbird”―and the Beatles―the same way again.

Available on Amazon, PSUPress’s website, and other major booksellers.

Reviews

“Going far beyond an analysis of the song itself, Kapurch (English, Texas State Univ.; coeditor, The Beatles and Humour) and Smith (English, Texas State Univ.; coauthor, Make Them Cry) place “Blackbird” in a historical context that demonstrates how much of the Beatles’ music and imagery—particularly of the avian variety—comes directly from Black music. The examination of birds and flight in song takes up a significant portion of the book, and the comprehensive scholarship is impressive.”

Read the full review here.

Bill Baars
Library Journal

Endorsements for Blackbird

“Blackbird frequently makes productive connections between otherwise disparate cultural strands, thereby establishing a dialogic mosaic highlighting the ubiquity of bird imagery and its associated competing meanings. Interlinking religion, mythology, folklore, history, and art with chronologies of cross-cultural interpretations encompassing many geographical domains from an underexplored perspective, this book opens new critical space for consideration of race in African American and international Black creative contexts. Blackbird revises and reexamines relationships between the Beatles and Black cultures.”

―Mike Alleyne,Professor Emeritus, Department of Recording Industry, Middle Tennessee State University

“I do not believe this combination of artists and music has been treated anywhere else and applaud the authors for conceptualizing the subject in such an original way. Kapurch and Smith have combined the work of many artists to demonstrate the prevalence of songs based on birds and flight in the African American musical tradition, while also demonstrating the extent to which these same themes have appeared in the Beatles’ oeuvre and Paul McCartney’s solo career.”

―Kenneth L. Campbell,author of The Beatles and the 1960s: Reception, Revolution and Social Change