is a song about racial harmony, using piano keys as a metaphor. The black keys on a piano are ebony, and the white ones are ivory – the song asks why we all can’t lie together in perfect harmony like the keys. Paul McCartney wrote this song, saying that the message was “that people of all types could live together.”
Paul started recording this as a solo effort, but then got the idea to do it as a duet with Stevie Wonder. A demo made its way to Wonder, and he agreed to record it, standing wholeheartedly behind the message in the song. It was issued as a single and appeared on McCartney’s 1982 album Tug Of War.
