Birdsong(s): Adam Bradley serves up an avian-themed playlist

Adam Bradley | September 6, 2024

Adam Bradley is a professor of English and founding director of the Laboratory for Race and Popular Culture at UCLA. The bestselling author and literary scholar, whose works include “The Poetry of Pop,” explores song lyrics in popular music as an innovative and influential literary form. Bradley contributed this article to a UCLA College digital mini-magazine on the theme of birds.

In 1963, on a song called “Surfin’ Bird,” a one-hit-wonder surf rock band called the Trashmen claimed that the “bird, bird, bird, b-bird’s the word.” They might be right. Look and listen closely, and you’ll find that birds are everywhere in literature and song.

Birds give humans things that we might aim to achieve (the beauty of their song, for instance) and things about which we can only dream (the exhilaration off unaided flight). They live deep in our language, too — in stock phrases (“birds of a feather flock together”) and in our most exalted similes (“Higher still and higher / From the earth thou springest / Like a cloud of fire,” wrote the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley over 200 years ago).

The best birdwatching — at least of the literary variety — is found in song lyrics. Birds, after all, are often creatures of melody. They are also symbolically rich: inviting metaphor, simile and other rhetorical figures and forms.

I’m not a poet, but I once wrote a cento, a collage poem, built entirely upon quotations from song lyrics featuring our feathered friends. Here’s an excerpt: “Like a bird on the wire / like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried in my way to be free” / “Free as a bird / Home, home and dry / Like a homing bird I’ll fly / As a bird on wings.” / “And, baby, all I need for you to know is / I’m like a bird, I’ll only fly away.” / “Fly like an eagle to the sea.”

(That’s Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire,” The Beatles’ “Free as a Bird,” Nelly Furtado’s “I’m Like a Bird” and the Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle” for those keeping score.)

Below you’ll find a baker’s dozen “bird songs,” both old and new. Some simply play upon a phrase or strike upon a simile, while others more closely explore the conditions and connections of birds themselves. Together, they comprise an avian songbook that crosses genre and time.

“Who Killed Cock Robin?” (1744) This English nursery rhyme, first found in print in “Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book” from 1744, would cross the ocean to become a staple of the American folk songbook. Smithsonian Folkways offers multiple recordings (like Mickey Miller’s from 1959,) but the most surprising version might be the one from the 1934 Disney Silly Symphony animated short.

“Skylark” (1941) Skylarks are among nature’s greatest songbirds, noted for the duration of their song, often delivered during flight. “Skylark,” with lyrics by Johnny Mercer and music by Hoagy Carmichael, is a standard of the American songbook, recorded over the decades by everyone from Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan to Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan.

“Sparrow” (1964) “Who will love a little sparrow? / Who’s traveled far and cries for rest?” opens Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sparrow,” from their 1964 debut album. The sparrow of the song is an outcast and the song carries the weight of metaphor for a generation of young Americans breaking from traditions and social conventions that could not contain them.

“Blackbird” (1968) Paul McCartney, who wrote the song, has variously charged the title bird with symbolic significance: as a reference to young Black students who so bravely faced down racist aggression while integrating schools in 1957 as part of the Little Rock Nine or as an homage to his practice of transcendental meditation. Regardless, the song’s simple beauty works on the literal level as homage to the “blackbird singing in the dead of night.”

“Rockin’ Robin” (1958/1972) Bobby Day took the song all the way to No. 2 on the Billboard chart back in 1958. A 13-year-old Michael Jackson covered the song on his solo debut in 1972, taking it No. 2 as well. Both begin with an infectiously whistled birdsong and a playful “twiddly-diddly-dee.”

“Three Little Birds” (1977) Bob Marley and the Wailers’ “Three Little Birds” is a beautiful, simple song. Though some have attributed profound symbolic meaning to it, those who knew Marley best suggest that it is about exactly what it says it is. A longtime friend, Tony Gilbert, explained that “Bob got inspired by a lot of things around him, he observed life. I remember the three little birds. They were pretty birds, canaries, who would come by the windowsill at Hope Road.” Sometimes simplicity is more than enough.

“When Doves Cry” (1984) Doves were part of the mythos even before the release of “When Doves Cry,” one of Prince’s best-known songs. He owned two doves, Majesty and Divinity. His doves even received album credits on his instrumental song “Arboretum,” recorded in Paisley Park’s atrium.

“Birdhouse in Your Soul” (1990) Despite what the title says, this is not a song about birds but about memories of a childhood nightlight. But in the minds of They Might Be Giants, that nightlight becomes a “blue canary in the outlet by the light switch / Who watches over you.”

“I Like Birds” (2000) Eels, the L.A.-based rock band, set the simple pleasure of birdwatching up against the many agitations of daily life. Mark Oliver Everett, who goes by E, explained why he likes birds: “a tribute to my mother. she was really into birds. after she died, i brought back her feeder and some books about birds. i put the feeder in my yard, and i got them a birdbath too.”

“Bird Flu” (2006) The bird in M.I.A.’s “Bird Flu” is more sonic than linguistic, in the samples and sounds that create a soundscape of squawks and bocks.

“Bird Song” (2009) Florence and the Machine make a songbird a central character in the story they relate in this song. “Well, I didn’t tell anyone, but a bird flew by / Saw what I’d done, he set up a nest outside / And he sang about what I’d become / He sang so loud, sang so clear / I was afraid all the neighbors would hear.” Like all good extended metaphors, it works first on the literal level.

“Two Birds” (2009) Regina Spektor’s two birds embody the conflicting impulses of boldness and caution, adventure and safety. The short song (just over three minutes long) ends on irresolution, a powerful state that insists on contemplation. “Birds of a Feather” (2024) Billie Eilish must have had birds on the brain when she recorded her most recent album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft.” You’ll find a song titled “Birds of a Feather” that goes no deeper in its avian exploration than repeating that well-trodden phrase. With some close listening, though, you’ll find other references, like on the opening track, “Skinny,” where she laments her fame as making her “a bird in a cage.”

Read more of the UCLA College mini-magazine, “We Are UCLAvian,” on UCLA Newsroom.