McCartney and Wonder recorded the song together on the West Indies island of Montserrat - with backing vocals by “Theme From Shaft” singer-songwriter Isaac Hayes - but couldn’t make their schedules work to shoot a video for it. I won’t say it demanded of people to reflect upon it, but it politely asks the people to reflect upon life in using the terms of music … this melting pot of many different people.” In The Billboard Book of Number One Hits, Fred Bronson quotes the singer as telling Dick Clark on The National Music Survey: “I listened to the song, and I liked it very much. And my first thought was Stevie.” He’d been a longtime fan of Wonder: McCartney put a message to the singer in Braille on the back cover of his 1973 album Red Rose Speedway: “We love ya, baby.” In an April 1982 interview with Bryant Gumbel on NBC’s Today, Sir Paul said: “I had a song called ‘Ebony and Ivory’ that I’d written, and I wanted to sing it with a black guy. When McCartney penned the song for his Tug of War album, he knew right away he wanted to record it as a duet.
The song’s theme of racial harmony - if a mite precious and overbroad - is beautiful in its simplicity: “Ebony and ivory/Live together in perfect harmony/Side by side on my piano keyboard/Oh Lord, why don’t we.” And its metaphor isn’t the only minimalist aspect of “Ebony and Ivory”: While the title words and chorus are repeated frequently, there’s only a single verse, which is sung twice.
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