In October 1963, Sam Cooke and his party were turned away from a whites-only Holiday Inn in Shreveport, Louisiana. He was one of the most famous singers in America. It made no difference.
A few months later, he wrote "A Change Is Gonna Come."
He had been thinking about it for a while. Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" had been released the previous year, and Cooke had heard it and felt, by his own account, embarrassed. A white folk singer from Minnesota was writing the songs about Black American life that Cooke, living inside that life, had not yet written. He decided to change that.
"A Change Is Gonna Come" was released in December 1964. Cooke died eleven days later.
He never saw what the song became. He never knew that it would be sung at civil rights marches, that Barack Obama would quote it on election night in 2008, that it would still be played at protests more than sixty years after it was recorded. He made the record and then he was gone.
The song is almost unbearably sad and almost unbearably hopeful at the same time. That tension is exactly right, because that's what the moment required. Not a rallying cry. Not a slogan. Something more complicated. Something that admitted how hard it was while still insisting that it would get better.
Cooke was not a protest singer. He was a pop star, a soul singer, a gospel-trained entertainer who knew how to work a room. And that made the song more powerful, not less. It wasn't coming from the expected place. It was coming from someone who had everything the mainstream wanted to give him, and who still knew it wasn't enough.
The distance between what he was allowed to have and what he deserved to have was the song.
That's where the best writing comes from. Not from comfort, and not from pure anger either. From the gap between what is and what should be. From the specific, personal experience of that gap.
Cooke put the whole thing into four minutes and fifteen seconds. He didn't over-explain it. He didn't have to.
Listen this week: "A Change Is Gonna Come" from Ain't That Good News (1964). The full album version, not the single edit. It's worth every second.
THE MUSIC
If the history is what brings you here, the music is what keeps you here.
Until next time.
Sid