Blackbird

There's a performance of his I keep coming back to again and again from back in 2016, February the 9th.

Blackbird the famous Blackbird written by McCartney and the late show with Stephen Colbert broadcast of course as you may know from the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York so it was a fitting tribute and here Baptiste sat down at the piano and began with a wandering improvised introduction that slowly found its way into the iconic Beatles melody instead of on the guitar on the piano and Paul McCartney wrote Blackbird on guitar, drawing on Bach's Bourree in E minor as a response, some would say, to the civil rights struggles of the American South.

And Batiste turned it into something that feels, of course, personal to him and still somehow true to the original.

It's kind of performance that makes you understand something about a musician that really just retelling of a biography is not going to do it justice.

I'll be honest, listening to his music, I loved his piano playing before I loved his singing voice, but I think it is an acquired taste and it'll grow on you.

You check out this Blackbird, but also a similar riff, What a Wonderful World, that we all know and love.

Another recommendation that you've got to check out, I'll put in the show notes, hopefully.

His cover of St. James Infirmary is well worth your time.

Like I know we did Seven Nation Army.

We did some Beatles, like Blackbird obviously was like our kind of slowish song.

We did, what else did we do? A little bit of Zeppelin.

It was honestly a mixed bag.

We're going to end the first hour in a real swinging style.

This is a mix of Lawrence Sartar's 1968 version of the Beatles' Blue Jay Way with easy-listening duo Sona Young and their cover of the Fab Four's Blackbird.

Come back after this and also after a short radio stinger because you're going to be listening to the second hour of Digging the Crates here on cgsw.com. Oh.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night Take these broken wings and learn to fly

All your life You were only waiting for this moment to arise Blackbird singing in the dead

of night Take these sunken eyes and learn to see

But the number one thing I've learned from DJing, I've learned this lesson through other interests of mine that I really wanted to learn or other skills I really wanted to develop, which is the key to learning is immersion.

me repeat that again the key to learning is immersion okay so as far as me pursuing djing this is something i've been thinking about for quite literally years i've been in music my entire life i grew up playing guitar i grew up playing piano i played guitar from ages 8 to 18. i played piano from 16 to 18. i took ap music theory which was a redemption story okay did i flunk out of music theory my freshman year of high school after one month and dropped the class and then senior year had a redemption arc of taking AP music theory and getting a fucking A in the class yeah I did have that redemption arc okay but after I graduated high school I took a break from playing music and honestly I loved playing so much and I do love playing now and every time I pick up a guitar I'm like wow I feel like I'm 13 again and I feel like I'm just playing the guitar but literally the only muscle memory I retained was a handful of chords and Blackbird by the motherfucking Beatles.

Okay.

Which great song, but after 10 years, you'd expect that I would remember more.

This is the way they were always designed, but wait till you hear it.

And I'll let it warm up for 15 minutes, came back and I put my favorite Beatles record on and, uh, My favorite Beatles song is Blackbird.

I love Blackbird.

It'll always be my favorite Beatles song.

And put on Blackbird.

She's like, this sounds better than streaming quality on Spotify.

I was like, I know.

I had the honor of talking to Cassandra a number of times over the course of her career, but in 2010, she came on my show to talk about her new project called Silver Pony.

The conversation starts with her talking about her cover of the Beatles song Blackbird, and then it just flies literally from there.

Take a listen.

It's my understanding that Paul wrote this during the Civil Rights era.

Yeah, they don't know.

Yeah, it's a very powerful piece, and I think it says a lot about how I feel about what we should be doing as a people right now.

And it's a brilliant song.

Lots of people have covered it, you know.

And what would be the record that you'd pass on to the next generation and why?

Blackbird by the Beatles, which was actually written about the four little girls who were killed in the bombing in the South back in the I think it was 50s still.

To me, it's the poignancy of humanity, that song, the beautiful poignancy of humanity.

There's the atrocity in that song, and then there's the holding of the victims and the people and the times in that song.

It was a good song to connect with the black community and say that we absolutely understand.

It's like the moment where something is going to happen or has happened that we haven't really taken a breath about yet.

That's Blackbird for me.

And how do you feel about the notion of your legacy?

So we were talking to him and I said, you know, tell us some stories.

He said, well, we were doing Blackbird.

White album, great, great, great.

Paul had a book of Hiawatha, the song of Hiawatha, classic paperback he was reading.

He took a pencil and started tapping along to it.

And it sounded great.

So I had to bring a mic in and we mic'd up his book and he played along to Blackbird.

And that story is perfect.

Like, I'm not going to lie.

Like I love YouTube, but like to have that level of, you know, not, not that fame is what I'm looking for or anything, but like he, he, he sat in front of Paul McCartney while Paul McCartney taught him Blackbird.

You think, you think anything I do on YouTube is going to be better than that? No way.

Like that's, that's killer.