hey, welcome to 12tone!
you probably know Blackbird as Paul McCartney's hauntingly beautiful tribute to the American
Civil Rights movement, but you might not realize that, underneath the surface, it's a fairly
complex piece of harmonic writing too.
it hides a lot of its more technical elements really well, but trust me, McCartney was not
messing around here.
it starts like this: (bang) and already we've got some things we need to talk about.
first of all, there's this note here.
(bang) it's a G, played on an open string of the guitar, and he plays it after every
single chord in this section.
actually, he plays it after every single chord in the entire song, making it what's known
as a pedal or a drone, where a single note is repeated over and over regardless of the
surrounding harmony.
it sort of fades into the background, becoming an almost rhythmic element that's not really
a part of the chord, even though it seems like it should be.
but if we're not counting it, that leaves us with another problem: he's only playing
two notes at a time, and the smallest chords we tend to use are three-note triads.
sometimes Paul helps us out by filling in the missing notes with the melody, but other
times we just have to guess so, unsurprisingly, not everyone agrees on what exactly he's playing
all the time.
it's tricky, but we'll do our best.
the other thing we need to talk about is the rhythm.
normally we'd expect to see a consistent pattern of accents throughout the song, and for the
most part we do.
everything is grouped in bars of 4 or occasionally 2 beats, except here.
listen to it again and count the beats: (bang) yeah, there's 7.
that's interesting on its own, but more interesting to me is the fact that I didn't even notice
it the first time I listened to the song, and I kinda suspect you didn't either.
ok, maybe you did, but most people don't.
so what gives?
well, instead of thinking of it as 7 beats, let's think of it as a group of 4 and a group
of 3.
now the question is, which is which?
the first four beats (bang) sound like a complete bar of music, whereas the second four beats
(bang) ...do too.
huh.
weird.
anyway, I think that's the secret: we've got two reasonable 4-beat bars, and it's not clear
which of them got shortened to make the progression we hear, so it's pretty easy to miss that
one of them did.
by the time you get to the point where it's obvious a beat got dropped, it's no longer
relevant so you don't really notice.
but enough about rhythms, let's talk chords.
again, ignoring the G pedal, we have this.
(bang, G-Ami-G) it may seem weird to call this a G chord when there's no G in it except
the drone, but he's also singing that note in the melody, so I think this is the best
name for it.
anyway, this section is basically just a big ol' pile of G major, interrupted briefly by
this passing A minor, which just adds a little ornamentation on top of the otherwise static
harmony.
but that's just the beginning.
let's get into the verse.
(bang, C-A7-D-B7-Emi) I'm gonna stop it there for a second.
this bit has two separate parts sort of interwoven together.
the first is these three chords (bang) which are a pretty straightforward progression.
it starts on C major, the IV chord.
different chords in a key have different functions, or jobs, and the IV chord typically has what's
called subdominant function, meaning it introduces instability and leads you away from more consonant
tonic function chords, like the G major from earlier.
after that, the song moves to D major, the V chord, which is a dominant function chord.
these are really unstable chords that point you back to the tonic, but instead of going
to G major, McCartney plays what's called a deceptive resolution, where the V chord
resolves up to the VI minor.
this is also a tonic function chord, so it still provides some rest, but it's not the
actual root of the scale, so it also keeps a bit of forward momentum.
but this isn't just a simple IV-V-VI progression.
instead, before each chord, Paul inserts another one that helps set it up.
this is called a secondary dominant, because it sets up a resolution like a dominant chord,
but it doesn't actually go back to the root of the key like the primary dominant would.
so we have this A7 (bang) which resolves to D major (bang) and this B7 (bang) that goes
to the E minor.
(bang) these add more direction and color to the progression, but they don't change
its underlying shape.
anyway, next we have this bit (bang, Emi-Eb-D-C#dim-C-Cmi) where the E minor moves to an Eb major in
what's called modal interchange, where a chord is borrowed from a different scale.
Eb major isn't in the key of G major, which we're actually in, but it is in G minor, so
we can just steal it to give ourselves a slightly weird but still recognizable sound.
then it goes back down to D major, then C# diminished, then C major, then to C minor,
another example of modal interchange.
we could talk about functions again here, but I think what's going on is even more obvious
than that.
let's strip away the drone and the top note and just listen to the bass movement for this
section: (bang) it starts by walking up a half step at a time, and then it just walks
right back down.
this mirrors the lyrics, where the first half is an uplifting message like "take these broken
wings and learn to fly", whereas the second half is a somber reflection on how, all your
life, until now, you couldn't.
after that, we have this (bang, G-A7-D7sus4-G) which is pretty straightforward.
the G majors are, of course, still tonic function chords.
this D chord may look a little complicated, but in practice it works pretty much the same
as the D major from earlier, making it a dominant function chord that wants to resolve back
to G, and this A7 is, again, a secondary dominant chord that wants to resolve to some sort of
D chord, which it does.
also, starting at the C major and continuing onward, the top note line plays this (bang)
which mirrors the bass's descending half step motion from earlier.
then there's this turnaround (bang, C-Bmi-A7-D7-G) which is almost exactly like the bit we just
looked at, and works the same way. and finally we have the chorus, which starts like this.
(bang, F-Emi-Dmi-C-Bb-C) I've seen some people call this a C major chord because the melody
is hanging on a C for the first part of it, but I think calling it E minor does a better
job illustrating what's happening here, which is that we're just walking down a scale.
specifically, we're walking down a mode called G dorian (bang) which is like G minor but
with a raised 6th degree.
the first time through the progression we end on the IV chord, C major, whereas the
second time through (bang, F-Emi-Dmi-C-Bb-A7-Dmi7) we end instead on an A7, which is still a
secondary dominant for a D chord, but instead of the D major we've been using, it goes to
D minor 7, which is what we'd expect to see in G dorian.
D minor 7 doesn't really work as a dominant function chord, but McCartney uses it like
one anyway, resolving back to this (bang, the intro) and starting over.
how does that work? well, the only note different between D minor 7 and D dominant 7 is the
third degree, and he doesn't actually play either one, so it's kind of unclear which
chord it's meant to be.
the melody briefly sings some F naturals, which implies the minor 7, but it's ambiguous
enough that, combined with the proper bass motion for a dominant resolution, it's easy
to miss.
and I think that's kind of what he's doing for the whole song.
it's full of things that seem fine if you're not paying any attention, but if you take
the time to actually examine them, they're pretty clearly wrong. which, if you think
about it, is a pretty good metaphor for the conditions African-Americans faced in the
1960s, when many laws were still built on the idea of "separate but equal" services,
a friendly-sounding name for blatant discrimination.
so was that metaphor intentional?
maybe.
you'd have to ask Paul McCartney.
anyway, thanks for watching, and thanks to Patreon patron Bart Schuurmans for suggesting
this song!
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