Legendary Beatles co-founder and bassist Paul McCartney is showing love to Beyoncé for her rendition of his song “Blackbird” on her Cowboy Carter album.

Taking to social media, McCartney expressed his appreciation for Queen Bey’s cover of his original composition.

“I am so happy with @beyonce’s version of my song ‘Blackbird’. I think she does a magnificent version of it and it reinforces the civil rights message that inspired me to write the song in the first place,” McCartney wrote. “I think Beyoncé has done a fab version and would urge anyone who has not heard it yet to check it out. You are going to love it!”

“I spoke to her on FaceTime and she thanked me for writing it and letting her do it. I told her the pleasure was all mine and I thought she had done a killer version of the song,” he continued. 

“When I saw the footage on the television in the early 60s of the black girls being turned away from school, I found it shocking and I can’t believe that still in these days there are places where this kind of thing is happening right now. Anything my song and Beyoncé’s fabulous version can do to ease racial tension would be a great thing and makes me very proud.”

First heard on The White Album, the song was written by McCartney but credited as Lennon-McCartney like many of the Beatles songs. 

McCartney said he was inspired to write the songs because of the sounds of blackbirds in Rishikesh, India when the Beatles were studying Transcendental Meditation with its founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It was also a response to the Civil Rights Movement in America in the ’60s.

“I was sitting around with my acoustic guitar, and I’d heard about the Civil Rights troubles that were happening in the 60s in Alabama, Mississippi, Little Rock in particular,” McCartney recalled in a recent interview with GQ.

“So that was in my mind, and I just thought, ’It would be really good if I could write something that if it ever reached any of the people going through those problems, it might give them a little bit of hope,” he continued. “ So I wrote ‘Blackbird.’ In England, a bird is a girl, so I was thinking of a Black girl going through this; now is your time to arise; set yourself free; take these broken wings.”

On Beyoncé‘s version of the song, four noted Black country singers, Reyna Roberts, Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, and Tiera Kennedy, sing beautifully over McCartney’s original solo acoustic track. 

McCartney is also listed as a co-producer on the track.