LITTLE ROCK — During Paul McCartney’s sellout show in Nashville on Monday, the former Beatle specifically mentioned Little Rock.
Upon introducing the Beatles’ acoustic hit “Blackbird” from the band’s famous “White Album,” released in 1968, he told how he came to write it:
“In the 1960s, there was a lot of conflict going on in this country, especially in places like Little Rock, Arkansas, and we heard about all of this back in England.
“I wrote this in the hope that if someone was going through these trials and tribulations, it might give them a little help and hope.”
Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise.
During at least one other tour date - in Miami back in April - McCartney specifically mentioned the Central High crisis in Little Rock.
In the October 2008 issue of Mojo magazine, McCartney said he wrote the song about the civil rights struggle for blacks after reading about race riots in the United States. He added that he wrote it in his kitchen in Scotland not long after Little Rock, when federal courts forced the racial desegregation of the city’s school system.
“We were totally immersed in the whole saga which was unfolding,” he told the magazine. “So I got the idea of using a blackbird as a symbol for a black person. It wasn’t necessarily a black ‘bird,’but it works that way, as much as then you called girls ‘birds’ ... ‘Take these broken wings’ was very much in my mind, but it wasn’t exactly an ornithological ditty; it was purposely symbolic.”
“I liked to think of a blackbird as being a kind of symbol for a black woman,” he told Diane Sawyer on ABC’s Good Morning America recently.
LOCAL CHARM:
Prolific cocktail book author and cocktail-inspired jewelry designer Cheryl Charming, who currently lives in Indian Rocks Beach, Fla., spent much of her youth living in central Arkansas.
After moving to the Little Rock area from Los Angeles in 1966 when she was 5, she attended Lawson Elementary and Bryant junior high and high schools. As a teen, she worked at Ken’s Pizza in Benton and John Barleycorn’s Vision in Breckenridge Village where she later became a cocktail server, and worked at Cabaret (now Ferneau) in Little Rock’s Heights neighborhood.
Charming left Little Rock when she was 25 to tend bar on a cruise ship and later worked for Walt Disney World.
To date, she has written 14 cocktail books.
She tells Paper Trails she’ll be moving to New Orleans this September to host a drinking-culture local TV show.
For more information, visit her website at misscharming.com.
Paper Trails appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Contact Linda Caillouet at (501) 399-3636 or at lcaillouet@arkansasonline.com.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 07/30/2010