Despite my growing wariness about Beyonce as a brand that feeds off feminist and Black liberation discourses, I was intrigued to listen to her new country album. I haven’t made my way through the whole album. Instead, I skipped ahead to Jolene because it is a song I have known from childhood. I was curious about what Beyoncé’s take on it would be. I found her collaborative cover of ‘Blackbird’ (titled ‘Blackbiird’) very tender in how it reorients you to the civil rights movement in America that was the inspiration for the song. Her version features Black American country stars like Brittney Spencer, Tanner Adell, Tiera Kennedy and Reyna Roberts, who, I read in an article in The Guardian, are ‘musicians who have struggled to gain a foothold in the notoriously gate-kept Nashville establishment in which women and Black artists are often marginalised’.

The song’s writer, Paul McCartney, has talked about how the lyrics reference the group of students called Little Rock Nine, who faced intense ostracism and ridicule for being the first to ‘colour’ schools that were historically meant only for white children. McCartney’s Blackbird is a kind of homonym for Black girl. Apparently, the actual black bird appeared to him when he was in Rishikesh and its chirp remained with him and became the pretext for the song which he evolved in his garden in Scotland. I didn’t know this history until recently, but the song had been dear to my heart since it was covered by Sarah McLachlan. My sister and I loved it so much we passed it down to our niblings when they were tiny. It was among the first songs they ever sang.