Blackbird Singing
Poems and Lyrics, 1965-1999
In working on this book with Paul, I have chosen the best of Paul's poems and song lyrics. It's been a delight.
I met Paul, John, George, Ringo, and Brian way back in January 1963 when the Beatles hit London. I was writing a pop column for the Daily Mail, and on February 1, 1963, published the first interview with the group in a national newspaper. I enjoyed meeting them and hearing them play live, and went back to write about them whenever my paper would give me the space. They were a friendly bunch. Paul was interested that I was a published poet and novelist, so I came to know him best.
We maintained a friendship that became closer over the years, especially when our families met. One of the highlights of my life was performing four of my poems backed by Paul, Linda, and their band on the Southend leg of his world tour in 1991.
Around that time Linda phoned me to suggest that I edit a collection of Paul's poems. The idea was to keep the project a secret from Paul—it would be a surprise for his birthday. That didn't last long. Paul always knows what's going on around him.
In 1995, when I was poetry editor of the New Statesman, I published a page of five of his colourful, impressionist poems—"Chasing the Cherry," "Miss the Mind," "The Blue Shines Through," "Trouble Is," and "Velvet Wave." The sales of that issue of the magazine shot up by several thousand.
We've taken our time in making our selection, party because Paul had to excavate several crammed tea-chests to find old manuscripts, partly because he's writing some of his best poems now. Sometimes I've made suggestions for small cuts or changes and sometimes Paul accepted them.
Linda herself had a way with words. She wrote, briefly but poignantly:
This book was Linda's idea and she is our inspiration.Oppression won't win.
The light comes from within.
Who listens to the words of songs, anyway? I do. And so do millions of people. Plenty of fans painstakingly write down the lyrics of their favourite songs in exercise books.
Of course, most songwriters aren't artists of any sort. Mostly they're trying to make money by writing the same words that have made money over and over again. The hits songs of my adolescence in the late 1940s—perfomed by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Dinah Shore, etc.—were full of mushy words like "devotion:" and "emotion," plus a few tinselly stars above—empty, awful lyrics, like tons of white mud. But a few funny songs of the time were verbally alive—"Talahassee," "Accentuate the Positive," and the weird "Cement Mixer." It was in the blues that I found the best words, in gritty numbers like "Make Me a Pallet on the Floor," "If You See Me Comin'," "Saint James Infirmary," and "Low Down Dirty Shame Blues":
I looked out the window, saw a poor boy walkin' in the rain,That was real true solid gold poetry and I knew it.
Yeah, looked out the window, saw a poor boy walkin' in the rain,
Heard him mutter. "It's a low down dirty shame.
"I walked the streets all night long, got my feet all soakin' wet,
Walked the streets all night long, feel all soakin' wet,
Ain't seen nobody look like my baby yet—
It's a low down dirty shame"
It was with rock 'n' roll that the dirty truthful words of rhythm and blues broke into radio. Song writers like Chuck Berry and Jerry Leiber wrote story lyrics about city life using images of cars, burgers, love potions, booze, prison riots, strippers, school, and trouble of all kinds—fast-moving three-minute poetic dramas. Songs like "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Riot in Cell Block Number Nine" were not only delivered like death threats, they were written in the language of reality.
The Beatles loved and sang these songs before they began to grow their own. As their confidence grew, the Lennon/McCartney team shoved back the frontiers of lyric writing to achieve wonders like "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," "Come Together," "Eleanor Rigby," and "A Day in the Life." When the parted, John and Paul both kept writing strong and clever lyrics.
Of course, the Beatles did far, far more. They changed the world, they opened doors and minds. The Sixties saw a resurgence of the bohemian revolts of Oscar Wilde, Erik Satie, Van Gogh, and jazz. But this time more people joined in. Everybody, it seemed, wanted a bit of it—some freedom, some colour, some poetry, some revolution.
By the late 1950s poetry was changing radically. In the United States a revival of oral poetry was fired by the performances of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, and others. In Britain, Mike Horovitz first took his Live New Departures circus of poets, musicians, actors, and clowns out on the road and continued the good work. Since those ancient days, when almost all published poets seemed to be white male graduates from private schools, more and more barriers have been torn down. Women were the first to demand equal opportunities for their words. Black and Asian poets followed. Gays and even children demanded their rights, claiming that poems can come from anyone. Of course.
The old snobberies still persist—just study the more respectable anthologies and you might still think that poetry is for intellectuals and academics only.
Clean out your head. Wash out the name and the fame. Read these clear words and listen to them—decide for yourself.
Paul is not in the line of academic or modernist poets. He is a popular poet in the tradition of popular poetry. Homer was and is a popular poet, understood and loved by millions of people who never saw a university. William Blake, who used to sing his Songs of Innocence and of Experience to a small circle of friends, has become one of the most popular of all poets. Whenever critics say there is something inferior about poetry that is to be sung, my advice is to sing Blake's "Tyger" or Robert Burns's "My Luve is Like a Red, Red Rose" at them.
A few songwriters, although they know you can get away with banal nothingness in pop lyrics, have a vision and try to convey it to us. A few manage to write truthfully about the world—as Paul does in "Penny Lane," "She Came in through the Bathroom Window," and "Eleanor Rigby." His best lyrics can well stand alongside Christina Rossetti's "In the Bleak Midwinter" or Blake's "A Poison Tree" or Burns's "This is No My Ain Lassie."
There's often a difference between a poem and a song lyric. Lyrics tend to be less concentrated, partly because a song has to work instantly, and partly because the words must allow room for the music to breathe, to allow time for the work of the music. In a good song the words and the music dance together, so they need dancing room.
Paul takes risks, again and again, in all of his work. He's not afraid to take on the art of poetry—which is the art of dancing naked. There is a real kinship between Paul's work and poets of today, like Brian Patten and Carol Ann Duffy and also lyric writers like Elvis Costello, Randy Newman, and Laurie Anderson.
Paul's not the primitive. He's been writing poems since he was a schoolboy, since the days when his great teacher Alan Durband introduced him to Chaucer and Shakespeare, since his first discovery of Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Bernard Shaw, Sheridan, and Hardy. And he has sought advice from living poets as well, friends like Allen Ginsberg and Tom Pickard. Of course, Paul is blessed with one of the subtlest, warmest singing voices of our time. Of course, his gift for writing tunes that go straight into the heart and stick there is unsurpassed. But he's a jeweler and a juggler when it comes to words. Both his poems and lyrics are full of surprises.
Sometimes his poems are light as feathers. They can tickle or fly or delight the eye. Sometimes he writes four lines as heavy as a double-decker bus, or the heart itself.
To demonstrate the seriousness and sense of Paul's writing, here is his description of how he wrote "Blackbird," quoted from Many Years from Now by Barry Miles:
I developed the melody on guitar based on the Bach piece and took it somewhere else, took it to another level, then I just fitted the words to it. I had in mind a black woman, rather than a bird. 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.'Not many poets could bear to write as openly and transparently as that about their working methods and their reasons for writing. Paul knows the value of words, how they can help us to enjoy living and loving. He also knows how words can work during the deepest grief—not just as therapy, but as a way of speaking to and for others who have lost their loved ones.
As is often the case with my things, a veiling took place, so rather than say 'Black woman living in Little Rock' and be very specific, she became a bird, became symbolic, so you could apply it to your particular problem.
This is one of my themes: take a sad song and make it better, let this song help you. 'Empowerment' is a good word for it. Through the years I have had lots of wonderful letters from people saying, 'That song really helped me through a terrible period.' I think that the single greatest joy of having been a musician, and been in the Beatles, is when those letters come back to you and you find that you've really helped people. That's the magic of it all, that's the wonder, because I wrote them with half an idea that they might help, but it really makes me feel very proud when I realise that they have been of actual help to people.
This collection needed no introduction. I wrote one because I wanted to indicate Paul's place in poetry. But these poems and song lyrics stand on their own two feet. Their own two dancing feet. Thank you Paul, Thank you Linda.
—ADRIAN MITCHELL
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