Paul McCartney says Blackbird is a civil rights song calling on people to ‘keep your faith’

Blackbird, the song featured on The Beatles‘ White Album, was written as a call for people to “keep your faith” according to Paul McCartney.

Speaking to Barry Miles for the book Many Years from Now, McCartney confirmed the song was a civil rights protest track with inspiration pulled from Johann Sebastian Bach. McCartney said: “Part of its structure is a particular harmonic thing between the melody and the bass line which intrigued me. Bach was always one of our favourite composers; we felt we had a lot in common with him… I developed the melody on guitar based on the Bach piece and took it somewhere else, took it to another level, then I just fitted the words to it.” But it’s the civil rights movement which was on McCartney’s mind when he wrote Blackbird, a song which he still performs to this day. Blackbird featured on the UK and US leg of the Got Back tour, which concluded in November 2025.

McCartney went on to tell Miles he had a person in mind, not a bird, when he wrote the song. He said: ” had in mind a black woman, rather than a bird. Those were the days of the civil rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about, so this was really a song from me to a black woman, experiencing these problems in the States: ‘Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope.’

“As is often the case with my things, a veiling took place so, rather than say ‘Black woman living in Little Rock’ and be very specific, she became a bird, became symbolic, so you could apply it to your particular problem.”

McCartney, according to Far Out Magazine, wrote the song after returning from India. When writing the song in Scotland, the Let it Be hitmaker decided to give fans camped outside his home an impromptu performance of Blackbird. Margo Stevens, speaking to Philip Norman in the book, Shout!, recalled the “Mad Room” performance.

She said: “A few of us were there. We had the feeling something was going to happen. Paul didn’t take the Mini inside the way he usually did – he parked it on the road and he and Linda walked right past us. They went inside and we stood there, watching different lights in the house go on and off.

“In the end, the light went on in the Mad Room, at the top of the house, where he kept all his music stuff and his toys. Paul opened the window and called out to us, ‘Are you still down there?’ ‘Yes,’ we said. He must have been really happy that night. He sat on the window sill with his acoustic guitar and sang ‘Blackbird’ to us as we stood down there in the dark.”