Cowboy Carter Tracklist 🤠
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Article text: BEYONCÉ HAS SO many audacious culture-clash triumphs all over Cowboy Carter. But one of the most stunning moments is also one of the simplest: her version of the Beatles classic “Blackbird.” Paul McCartney wrote the song in the summer of 1968, inspired by the American civil rights movement. All that history is right there in Beyoncé’s version. She keeps the folkie Paul guitar, complete with the squeaks, but adds her heavenly gospel-soul harmonies. What she does with the word “arise” is incredible in itself.
It’s a stroke of Beyoncé’s revisionary genius that brings the story of “Blackbird” full circle. She claims the song as if Paul McCartney wrote it for her. Because, in so many ways, he did.
Paul tells the story of writing it in his 2021 book The Lyrics. “At the time in 1968 when I was writing ‘Blackbird,’” he recalls, “I was very conscious of the terrible racial tensions in the U.S. The year before, 1967, had been a particularly bad year, but 1968 was even worse. The song was written only a few weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. That imagery of the broken wings and the sunken eyes and the general longing for freedom is very much of its moment.”
Paul wrote this song as a dialogue with Black America; Bey’s “Blackbird” is part of that call-and-response, proof that the song always meant exactly what McCartney hoped it would mean. It’s one of the most profound and powerful Beatles covers ever, right up there with Aretha Franklin’s “The Long and Winding Road.”
“I had in mind a Black woman, rather than a bird,” Paul says of the song in the 1997 book Many Years From Now, by Barry Miles. “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.’”
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Beyoncé for W Magazine. This is promo to celebrate her new album “Cowboy Carter” for being released.
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Beyoncé - ACT II - Vinyl Cover + context from Tina on the name "Beyincé" from 2020:
"It's interesting, because a lot of people don't know that Beyoncé is my last name. It's my maiden name. my name was Celestine Beyoncé, which at the time was not a cool thing, to have that weird name. I wanted my name to be 'Linda Smith,' because those were the cool names. I think me and my brother Skip were the only two out of seven siblings that had the spelling B-E-Y-O-N-C-E.
It shows you the times - because we asked my mother when I was grown. I was like, 'Why is my brother's name spelled 'B-E-Y-I-N-C-E?' And my mom's reply to me was like, 'That's what they put on your birth certificate." So I said, 'Well, why didn't you argue and make them correct it?' and she said, 'I did one time, the first time, and I was told, 'Be happy that you're getting a birth certificate,' because at one time Black people didn't get birth certificates. They didn't even have a birth certificate, because it meant you really didn't exist. You weren't important. It was that subliminal message.
And so I understand that that must have been horrible for her, not to even be able to have her children's names spelled correctly.
They were like, 'How dare you have a French name.' Like, 'We're gonna screw this up real good for you.' And that's what they did. So we all have different spellings.
People don't even put the two together and know that that's the same name now, but it is.
-Tina Knowles
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