The story of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come”
In this excerpt from Which Side Are You On?, James Sullivan describes Sam Cooke’s inspiration for “A Change is Gonna Come.”
Many of the black performers who came of age during the civil rights era were products of churchgoing homes. A good number of them were in fact the sons and daughters of men of the cloth. Nina Simone, a preacher’s daughter from North Carolina, once explained that she and her peers saw no real distinction between gospel music and the blues, unlike their parents, who felt the two styles should not intersect. “Negro music has always crossed all those lines,” she said, “and I’m kind of glad of it. Now they’re just calling it soul music.”
In other cases, though, the transition was not made lightly. Sam Cooke, himself the son of a Holiness minister, was wary enough of losing his gospel audience that he released his first single, “Loveable” (1957), under a pseudonym. By the time of the March on Washington six years later, Cooke was firmly established as a pop star, with an impressive run of crossover hits — “You Send Me,” “Wonderful World,” “Cupid.” But he was chagrined when he first heard Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which borrowed its melody in part from the old spiritual “No More Auction Block.” The song asked a barbed question: “How many roads must a man walk down/Before you call him a man?” Cooke, marveling that it took a white boy to write it, vowed to write his own song for the progressive movement.
It was an incident in which the singer, his wife, and his band mates were denied accommodations at a Holiday Inn in Shreveport, Louisiana — Cooke, incensed, was arrested for disturbing the peace — that compelled him to compose his song.
Shortly after Christmas 1963, he summoned his friend and fellow musician J. W. Alexander to his home, where he ran through the somber ballad he called “A Change Is Gonna Come.” He recorded the song in late January 1964, at RCA Studios in Hollywood, with a full orchestral arrangement, and performed it a week later on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
That would turn out to be the one and only time Cooke sang the song in public.
Cooke was unsettled by the song’s grave tone, and his friend Bobby Womack agreed, admitting that he thought the song sounded “like death.” In the brief time he had left, Cooke declined to sing it again. He was killed on December 11, 1964, in a bizarre shooting incident at a Los Angeles motel.
“A Change Is Gonna Come,” which had first been issued on an album called Ain’t That Good News back in March, was released as a single less than two weeks after Cooke’s murder, as the B-side of the posthumous hit “Shake.” The version of the song released to radio stations omitted the verse that most clearly referred to racism: “I go to the movie and I go downtown/Somebody keep telling me, don’t hang around.” Despite its muted release, “A Change Is Gonna Come” has been handed down as Cooke’s best and most significant song. It was added to the National Recording Registry in 2007.
Regrettably, the tape of Cooke’s Tonight Show performance does not survive. But if the singer was reluctant to revisit the song onstage, he was emboldened in his last months to speak his mind in other ways. In July 1964, he returned to headline the Copacabana, the swank New York City nightclub where he’d bombed shortly after launching his pop career several years earlier. This time he commanded the stage, adding to the set list a version of one of the songs most associated with the civil rights movement, “This Little Light of Mine,” which Cooke interpolated with the traditional gospel “Amen.” He also reportedly pledged to contribute “A Change Is Gonna Come” to an album called The Stars Salute Dr. Martin Luther King, compiled as a fund- raiser for the SCLC. The completed album featured tracks by Belafonte, Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis, Jr., and others, but it didn’t include Cooke’s.
James Sullivan is the author of five books, with subjects ranging from the comedian George Carlin and the performer James Brown to high school football and a cultural history of blue jeans. He is a longtime contributor to the Boston Globe and a former staff critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, and he has written for Rolling Stone, the Atlantic and many other publications.
