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A lengthy post recirculating online offered a slightly dramatized account of the origin of one of Paul McCartney's most socially conscious songs. The post, which first appeared on Facebook in June 2017 (and then again in October 2018), reported that the Beatles song Blackbird, which was released on the group's eponymous 1968 LP commonly referred to as the White Album, was inspired by a visit the singer/guitarist paid to America. According to the post: At least one detail in the post, that McCartney wrote the song in the U.S.m is not accurate: McCartney said in a 25 May 2002 interview with KCRW that he wrote Blackbird in Scotland, explaining that I remembered this whole idea of, 'You were only waiting for this moment to arise' was about, you know, the black people's struggle in the southern states, and I was using the symbolism of a blackbird. It's not really about a blackbird whose wings are broken, you know. It's a bit more symbolic. The post does, however, accurately recount McCartney's meeting and acknowledgement of Thelma Mothershed Wair and Elizabeth Eckford on 30 April 2016, when he tweeted a photograph of himself with the two women, who were among the first nine African-American students to enroll at Little Rock Central High School after the school's all-white attendance policy was deemed unconstitutional as part of the Supreme Court verdict in Brown vs. the Board of Education. The photograph was posted the same day as McCartney's concert in Little Rock, when he introduced Blackbird with an explanation of the song's origin: The title of McCartney's 2001 poetry book, Blackbird Rising, is also a reference to the song.
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