Back in 2014, when Katie Kapurch was first ensconcing herself in the Beatles academic community, she went to a conference at Penn State commemorating the 50th anniversary of the band’s invasion of the U.S., the birthplace of the music they helped make so famous.
When she returned to San Marcos, she showed Jon Marc Smith – her partner, in writing and otherwise – the program for the event. The first words out of his mouth were, “Where are all the presentations about all the Black people?” The resulting conversations led them to contribute to the 2016 collection New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles, where they explored Paul McCartney’s “Romantic vision of racial harmony” in flashy Eighties collaborations with Stevie Wonder (“Ebony and Ivory”) and Michael Jackson (“Say, Say, Say”).
The San Marcos-based couple dives further into the Beatles’ lesser-acknowledged historic influences in their new book, Blackbird: How Black Musicians Sang the Beatles Into Being—and Sang Back to Them Ever After, released last month with Penn State University Press. Kapurch, an associate professor of English at Texas State focused on pop culture, has taught classes on the Beatles since 2015 and published various articles on the Fab Four. She ran up against some resistance when trying to convince Smith – a novelist and senior lecturer in English at Texas State – to make McCartney’s song “Blackbird” the touchstone and title of their book.
“I didn’t wanna write that much about Paul McCartney, and it really isn’t that much about him,” says Smith, whose interest in music stems from his Texas troubadour father. “So it became a book about how important birds and flight imagery are to Black music, and therefore, practically to all American-influenced pop music.”
As part of the academic community centered on that history, Kapurch says she’s witnessed a contemporary spin on the 1968 White Album track, which McCartney has said was inspired by the famous plight of the Little Rock Nine to integrate an all-white Arkansas school.
“McCartney’s stories about ‘Blackbird’ as a civil rights story have completely overtaken the song. You can barely bring it up without someone saying, ‘Oh, and he wrote it for civil rights!'” she says. “[We] had to really go back to the beginning of American popular song, and the tradition of minstrelsy, and really dig into bird imagery.”
She adds: “What we tried to do with the book was get around the subjectivity of McCartney and tell the story of Black music’s influence, and the response to the Beatles through those other texts and artists, not allowing him to take over the book.”
To anyone who considers this a takedown of the Beatles’ legacy, Smith says: “We are not trying to deflate the Beatles, well maybe I am more than Katie […] What we’re trying to do is to put the Beatles’ story in context. To look at it in all of its historical truth actually strengthens the story – the myth takes away from the power. Lying about the truth makes everything much weaker.
“If you show all the different connections and how incredibly important many different kinds of people are to just the song ‘Blackbird,’ that truth makes the song much more complex than any mythmaking.”
This article appears in Gift Guide 2023.