Blackbird

Katie Kapurch is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University. She is the author of Victorian Melodrama in the Twenty-First Century and the coeditor of New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles and The Beatles and Humour. Jon Marc Smith is Senior Lecturer of English at Texas State University. His publications include scholarship on race and gender in popular music, literature, and film, and a novel, Make Them Cry, coauthored with Smith Henderson.

"Blackbird frequently makes productive connections between otherwise disparate cultural strands, thereby establishing a dialogic mosaic highlighting the ubiquity of bird imagery and its associated competing meanings. Interlinking religion, mythology, folklore, history, and art with chronologies of cross-cultural interpretations encompassing many geographical domains from an underexplored perspective, this book opens new critical space for consideration of race in African American and international Black creative contexts. Blackbird revises and reexamines relationships between the Beatles and Black cultures." -Mike Alleyne, Professor Emeritus, Department of Recording Industry, Middle Tennessee State University "I do not believe this combination of artists and music has been treated anywhere else and applaud the authors for conceptualizing the subject in such an original way. Kapurch and Smith have combined the work of many artists to demonstrate the prevalence of songs based on birds and flight in the African-American musical tradition, while also demonstrating the extent to which these same themes have appeared in the Beatles' oeuvre and Paul McCartney's solo career." -Kenneth L. Campbell, author of The Beatles and the 1960s: Reception, Revolution, and Social Change