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  • Charles Manson and other members of the Manson Family were obsessed with The Beatles’ “Blackbird.”
  • Lyrics of the song may have inspired the Manson Family’s actions.
  • Paul McCartney said The Beatles’ “Blackbird” was supposed to be uplifting.
Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, and George Harrison in black-and-white during The Beatles' "Blackbird" era
The Beatles | John Pratt / Stringer

Charles Manson felt The Beatles‘ “Blackbird” was supposed to encourage violence. It was one of several songs from the same Beatles album that intrigued the cult leader. Subsequently, Paul McCartney revealed that Manson partly understood one aspect of “Blackbird.”

Charles Manson thought The Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’ was about a coming race war

Members of the Manson Family infamously obsessed with The White Album. According to the book Helter Skelter, they were particularly fixated on five tunes from the record: “Piggies,” “Helter Skelter,” “Revolution 1,” “Revolution 9,” and “Blackbird.”

Manson felt a race war between Black and white Americans was on the horizon. He thought The Beatles were using the song “Blackbird” to encourage the war. Supposedly, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” was a call to gun violence. In Manson’s mind, he could start the conflict himself.

How The Beatles’ lyrics might have inspired some of the Manson Family’s actions

More disturbingly, the lyrics of “Blackbird” may have been connected to the Manson murders. The tune repeatedly uses the word “arise.” This may explain why members of the Manson Family wrote the word “rise” in blood at the home of Rosemary LaBianca, one of their victims.

Notably, the Manson murders all happened in “the dead of night,” similar to a lyric of the song. Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor who put Manson in jail, drew that connection. However, it’s not clear if the line inspired the cult’s crimes.

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Paul McCartney said ‘Blackbird’ had a completely different message about race

In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul revealed “Blackbird” was about race, but not in the way Manson believed. “I developed the melody on guitar based on [a] Bach piece and took it somewhere else, took it to another level; then I just fitted the words to it,” he recalled. “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.'”

In addition, Paul wanted Fab Four fans to apply the song to many different situations. “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,” he said. “This is one of my themes: take a sad song and make it better, let this song help you.” Over the years, Paul received numerous letters from fans saying “Blackbird” helped them through hard times.

Paul wanted the lyrics of “Blackbird” to be elastic. Sadly, the Manson Family interpreted them in the worst possible way.

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