A Change is Gonna Come

Among the things that 1964 brought to the world was the song, “A Change is Gonna Come”, inspired by events of the Civil Rights Movement.

 

I’ve read that working out to the wrong music can cut down on the effectiveness of your workout. Maybe there’s some science to this. Recently, however, I was surprised to hear a ballad that is one of the last songs I’d imagine working out to, one of my all-time favorites, “A Change is Gonna Come.”

Singer, songwriter Sam Cooke drew inspiration for “A Change is Gonna Come” from many sources in 1963: Martin Luther King led the “March on Washington” in August; it was the one-hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and Cooke’s own personal experiences, including the death of his son in June, and an arrest at a “whites only” hotel in Louisiana in October had a profound effect on him.

Cooke was also inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind.” He and other black artists, including Pops and Mavis Staples, were impressed and moved that a white man could so poignantly express the feelings of what it was like to be black in America.

Cooke combined his gospel background with the intellectualism of the Civil Rights movement to create this poignant tune. Calling on his gospel roots and the great metaphor of the river, the song opens with a beautiful line, “I was born by the river in a little tent.”

I imagine Cooke was familiar with a poem written by African-American poet and novelist Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which begins,

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow
of human blood in human veins.

Cooke’s soulful voice, laid over a gorgeous orchestral arrangement, and highlighted by the mournful weavings of a French horn, coalesces into a lyrical outpouring of great poetic feeling. This is, in my opinion, one of the finest songs of the Civil Rights’ era and perhaps of the twentieth century.

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Sam Cooke wrote and recorded “A Change is Gonna Come” in 1963, however, the song wasn’t released until shortly after his death in December 1964.  Cooke was shot to death at the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles.  He was thirty-three years old. While people still dispute the details of his death, it was ruled a justifiable homicide.  “A Change is Gonna Come,” has become Cooke’s enduring legacy. To quote Ryan Dombal of Pitchfork, “Yet, as long as change aches for resolution, the song will stand.“

Listen to A Change is Gonna Come – Sam Cooke

 

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

 

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