In the last few years, you hear it everywhere. After Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray; after Terence Crutcher and Keith L. Scott; after the mass shooting at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston and the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando. After those deaths, and so many others, marchers and mourners have sung it—out in the streets, at candlelight vigils, and at protests—distinctly echoing the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s. It is replayed on the radio, filtering out of open windows and passing cars. Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” has been covered, over the years, in melting, slow-burning, and rousing versions by Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, Luther Vandross, R. Kelly, the Supremes, Solomon Burke.
I have a personal weakness for Baby Huey’s aching rendition, with its scorching shriek and ad-libbed, psychedelic refrain. Here’s Stax Records soulman William Bell in his new song “This Is Where I Live”: “I was just a boy when I heard Sam Cooke sing ‘A Change Is Gonna Come.’” Three years ago, Beyoncé covered “Change” at a benefit for bankrupt Detroit; in Camden, New Jersey, a high school kid named Dwayne Cooke (ostensibly no relation) belted out his own rendition of the song in a YouTube video that went viral. In a laundry room he drops to his knees; by the time he stops singing, the sound of a baby crying, maybe a little sister, is audible from the next room.
Lately, we’ve come to know “A Change Is Gonna Come” in the context of sorrow and solidarity, but two elections ago, when soul singer Bettye LaVette sang Cooke’s song on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, her performance transmitted a sense of joy and hope. In two days, America would inaugurate the first black president. You could even excuse the oddness of the choice to make Jon Bon Jovi her duet partner because of the sheer sense of joy and hope that he, too, radiated in that moment.
Forty-four years earlier, Cooke sang “A Change Is Gonna Come” on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” It would be the first and only time he’d perform it and the tape of that night has been lost. The arrangement was too complex, he said—they’d had to scramble to get musicians together for the Carson spot. The song, which had come to him practically whole and vision-like, spooked him. “It's been too hard living, but I'm afraid to die/‘Cause I don't know what's up there, beyond the sky.” He worried that other lyrics (“I go to the movies/And I go downtown/Somebody keep tellin’ me/Don’t hang around”), with their stinging references to Jim Crow laws, would be too controversial. Those lines were cut for radio play when the single, the B-side to his hit song “Shake,” came out in December 1964, ten days after Cooke died of a gunshot wound in a Los Angeles motel.
You can hear, from those very first notes, an echo of all that has come before. The opening movement is a swoon of strings, stirring with thunderous, deep-breathed suspense. In the exhalation that follows, the singer’s entire life pours out. “I was born by a river in a little tent,” Cooke sings, and in that declaration of the singular I, he steps away from the ancient chorus. “Change” has the tenor of a familiar hymn, but without the “we” (shall overcome), or the “ev’ry voice” (lift and sing). It is the sound of a solitary wanderer. “Oh and just like the river I've been running ev'r since.” He is mythic, he is epic, he is Everyman, he is Moses, he is the Invisible Man, but he is alone. There is a golden weariness in that voice, heavy, pleading, resilient, still believing. Call it protest soul.
“It would just go all through your bones,” Mavis Staples said. A couple years later her father Pops wrote a kindred song, “Why (Am I Treated So Bad),” about the Little Rock Nine, a sorrowful gospel number that became part of the Staples Family Singers repertoire.
The events that inspired the writing of “Change” occurred one night in October 1963 when Cooke, his wife, and his band arrived at a Holiday Inn in Shreveport, Louisiana, where they’d called ahead to reserve some rooms. The date was Oct. 8, 1963, nearly 100 years after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery; 10 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregated public schools; nine years after Emmett Till’s murder in Mississippi; seven years and 10 months after Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery; and four years after the Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins in North Carolina. But it was also only four months after activist Medgar Evers’ assassination, two months after the March on Washington, and three weeks after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 wouldn’t be passed for another six months.
Cook, then 32, drove up to the motel in a Maserati that cost $60,000; his band caravanned in a Cadillac limousine. He was a recognizable musician with performances on “Ed Sullivan” and “Dick Clark”, and more than a dozen Top 40 hits to his name. And yet when this group of sharply dressed black men and women arrived, suddenly, inexplicably, there were no vacancies. The cops were called, the incident of the “negro band leader” trying to register at a “white motel” made the New York Times. Cooke, charged with disturbing the peace when he argued with the night manager as his band’s limo honked its horn repeatedly in protest, spent the night in jail.
All year long, Cooke had been aiming distinctly toward “Change.” Months before, he’d heard a song he wished he’d written—or at any rate, one he believed a black man should sing. He nearly immediately incorporated Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” into his live repertoire, in a kind of act of reclamation. Dylan had borrowed the melody from “No More Auction Block For Me,” a spiritual that first gained renown as a marching song for black Civil War soldiers and was later recorded by Paul Robeson and Odetta Washington, as well as by Dylan himself. “No More Auction Block” had inspired what is arguably the greatest marching hymn of all, “We Shall Overcome.” Taking back its melodic roots, Dylan made a deliberate reference, offered a clear signal of the song’s self-awareness, paid homage to its wellspring. “‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’” Dylan told a journalist in 1978, “sorta follows the same feeling.”
In Cooke’s hands, Dylan’s plaintive folk became uptempo—downright peppy, even. He picked up the pace. He stirred the crowd. Singing it propelled him further. When he finally wrote “Change,” driven by the deep injustice of that night in Shreveport, he found his answer in the apex of the song. It explodes with power before it deals a devastating, crushing blow: “Then I go to my brother/And I say brother help me please/But he winds up knockin’ me/Back down on my knees.”
It’s impossible to hear “Change” now without feeling the omens Cooke likely felt—change tinged with quite a bit of foreboding. I listened to it again one Sunday evening late this summer. The streets had baked all day in a humid, oppressive heat, and my Brooklyn neighborhood felt oddly soundless and empty. The wall outside Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule film company headquarters, which has become a de facto neighborhood memorial, had just added two new posters by the designer Adrian Franks, commemorating the abruptly ended lives of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La. and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn. Days before, the activist Reverend William Barber II, organizer of civic protests in my own embattled home state of North Carolina, had taken the stage at the Democratic National Convention. “We must listen to the ancient chorus,” he exhorted the country in florid, an almost musical phrasing. “It is possible to shock a bad heart. We are called upon to be the moral defibrillators of our times.” When I came home and put on Cooke’s record as I’d done so many other times recently, I let the sweeping lonely dream of it fill the room.
Two months later in North Dakota, as I stood in solidarity with Native American and allied water protectors opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline, I would hear the song’s call again. “Ask me how many times I've listened to ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ today as I watch my brothers and sisters getting arrested,” one young organizer I met had written on Twitter. Half a century later, for those born by the Missouri River, and those fighting to save it, Cooke’s anthem was a warrior cry, a torch, a source of both solace and strength.
The spirit of familiarity that haunts protest soul, from “Auction Block” down to “Change,” is intentional, the handed-down quality of traditional music, an extended conversation with the ancient chorus. The power of “Change” thrives on these deep roots, its lonesome singer sustained by that river. They share the same water, they are awash in the same blood. If Dylan issued a call, posed the question—“Yes, and how many years must some people exist/Before they’re allowed to be free?”—“Change” was Cooke’s response. The song represents his greatest achievement, his last words, and truly, the purest expression of all that is soul music. “It's been a long, a long time coming/But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will.” He was that wind, restless, still delivering—a call we must now seize.
This essay appears in a different form in the current issue of The Pitchfork Review.