Blackbird

Katie Kapurch is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University. She is the author of Victorian Melodrama in the Twenty-First Century and the coeditor of New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles and The Beatles and Humour.Jon Marc Smith is Senior Lecturer of English at Texas State University. His publications include scholarship on race and gender in popular music, literature, and film, and a novel, Make Them Cry, coauthored with Smith Henderson.

“[T]here’s much to be savored.”—starred review Library Journal

• Foreword—Cyrus CassellsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Change the History; The Blackbird in Song,Story, and Transatlantic Flight1. Flee (Free) as a Bird: The Legacy of the Ring Shout, Flying Africans, and Gospel in Black Music and the Beatles2. Sing a Song of Blackbird: Pre-Twentieth-Century Transatlantic Flights in Black Music, the Beatles, and Liverpool3. I’m a Little Blackbird: Florence Mills, Blackbirds of the Harlem Renaissance, and the Beatles’ Jazz Age Predecessors4. Flying Across the Ocean: Lead Belly, “Grey Goose,” and the Beatles’ Liverpool Skiffle Scene5. You Can Fly Away: Lord Woodbine and Lord Kitchener, “Yellow Bird,” and Calypso in the Beatles’ Liverpool Club Scene6. You Ain’t Ever Gonna Fly: Nina Simone’s “Blackbird” and Revolutionary Responses to the Beatles7. A Blackbird on a White Album: Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Diana Ross, and Other Winged Inspirations in and around 19688. Like a Bird Up in the Sky: Billy Preston Flies to the Beatles in London and Circles Back to Los Angeles with “Blackbird”9. Y’all Ready, Girls? “Blackbird” Soars in San Francisco with Sylvester, Two Tons O’ Fun, and the Band10. I Was Just Seeing Myself Singing: Bettye LaVette on Interpreting the Beatles and Singing a Bridge of BlackbirdsConclusion: Twenty-First-Century “Blackbird” in Paul McCartney’s Legend, for #BlackLivesMatter, and into Transoceanic FlightpathsNotesBibliographyIndex