#Michal chlewicki song black beatles series
Rivers and Camele even used the image in a series of red, black and green pectoral crosses for the country’s black Catholic bishops. The image became a hallmark of not only Rivers’s work but also the ongoing inculturation of African-American culture into Catholic worship and theology. Instead of a white dove, the Spirit of God is depicted as a blackbird. In the early 1970s, Father Clarence Joseph Rivers, the pioneering African-American liturgist, commissioned his designer and collaborator David Camele to create an image of the Holy Spirit. McCartney’s song is not the only art to use a blackbird to evoke freedom. Arise and be free: there is light in the dark, black night.
Her eyes may be sunken and tired, but the poet bids her, learn to see. Her wings may be broken, but the poet bids her, learn to fly. The subject is a blackbird singing, flying and seeing light in the dark, black night. The Catholic theologian David Tracy defines “the classic” as a text or other human creation with an “excess of meaning” that “demands constant interpretation and bears a certain kind of timelessness-namely the timelessness of a classic expression radically rooted in its own historical time, yet calling own historicity.” Today, it would be nearly impossible for African-Americans not to interpret the “excess of meaning” in this Beatles classic through our contemporary experience of struggle and liberation. Whether McCartney was actually invoking an image of black struggle when he wrote “Blackbird” in 1968 is less important to us interpreters and listeners who are dark. You were only waiting for this moment to be free. But what was it actually saying to me today? Certainly the idea of “Blackbird” being about being black had crossed my mind.
So when I finally heard his performance of “Blackbird,” I posted the video on my Facebook page with the caption, “Finally the talent is revealed.” A friend commented that it was the first time he had “felt like ‘Blackbird’ was the gentlest, most spiritually-based black power song in the world.” Of course, that got me thinking. Still, my first impressions were lukewarm the show seems to highlight his frenetic and jovial personality more than his actual musicianship. I found myself reconsidering the song earlier this year when Jon Batiste performed his own moving rendition of “Blackbird,” just voice and piano, on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” I was not familiar with Batiste before he was brought on as the new “Late Show” band leader, but I quickly learned that this Juilliard-trained jazz pianist from a musical New Orleans family is a burgeoning force on the New York music scene. Paul McCartney claims to have written it in honor of the 1960s movement for black equality other members of the band have their own recollection of the song’s origins. The Beatles’ song “Blackbird” is either a civil rights anthem or a response to transcendental meditation in India, depending on whose story you believe.
0 kommentar(er)
