"Blackbird" is a Beatles song from double-disc album The Beatles (also known as The White Album). Blackbird was written by Paul McCartney, who was inspired to write this while in Scotland as a reaction to racial tensions escalating in America in the spring of 1968.
The first night Linda Eastman, who would later become his wife, slept over, McCartney played it to the fans camped outside his house. Charles Manson took the song, along with "Helter Skelter" and "Piggies," as a metaphor for black and white race relations in the United States, which helped inspire his murders.
The song was recorded 11 June 1968 in Abbey Road studios, with George Martin as the producer and Geoff Emerick as the audio engineer. McCartney played a Martin D 28 acoustic guitar. The track includes recordings of a blackbird singing in the background.
McCartney revealed 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 Bouree in E minor, a well known classical guitar piece. As kids, he and George Harrison tried to learn Bouree as a "show off" piece. Bouree is distinguished by melody and bass notes played simultaneously on the upper and lower strings. McCartney adapted a segment of Bouree as the opening of "Blackbird," and carried the musical idea throughout the song.
According to Mark Lewisohn, the clicking sound on the track (left channel) which sounds like McCartney's foot tapping is a mechanical metronome.
In the 2006 album Love, "Blackbird" was used as an introduction to the song "Yesterday."
