Under The Covers- Other Artists Covering Beatles Songs: ‘Blackbird’- Billy Preston. One of Paul McCartney’s finest contributions to The White Album. I was overwhelmed when I saw the number of covers ‘Blackbird’ has had. Like with ‘Yesterday” i am going to commit to 5-7 days of just ‘Blackbird’ covers. The other night listening to The Beatles Channel they had a program on which played a number of covers from African-American artists-and talked about what the song has come to mean to that community. Back when I first heard the song in the mid-1970’s I didn’t make that connection and Paul McCartney during the 70’s 80’s and 90’s had never made any comments that directed the song to have any deeper kind of meaning. Paul now says that the song was inspired by the call of a blackbird he heard while The Beatles were in India- and the state of race relations in the United States. What better artist to start my week of “Blackbird’ than one of the 5th Beatles Billy Preston.