A Change is Gonna Come

February 6, 2014

Earlier this week, NPR featured a beautifully written short piece on Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come”. Catch the full article and podcast here.

"It was less work than any song he'd ever written," [Cooke biographer Peter] Guralnick says. "It almost scared him that the song — it was almost as if the song were intended for somebody else. He grabbed it out of the air and it came to him whole, despite the fact that in many ways it's probably the most complex song that he wrote. It was both singular — in the sense that you started out, 'I was born by the river' — but it also told the story both of a generation and of a people."

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"A Change Is Gonna Come" was released on the album Ain't That Good News in March of 1964. The civil rights movement picked up on it immediately, but most of Cooke's audience did not — mostly because it wasn't selected as one of the first singles and because Cooke only played the song before a live audience once. 

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Guralnick says "A Change Is Gonna Come" is now much more than a civil rights anthem. It's become a universal message of hope, one that does not age. 

"Generation after generation has heard the promise of it. It continues to be a song of enormous impact," he says. "We all feel in some way or another that a change is gonna come, and he found that lyric. It was the kind of hook that he always looked for: The phrase that was both familiar but was striking enough that it would have its own originality. And that makes it almost endlessly adaptable to whatever goal, whatever movement is of the moment.

Sam Cooke and the Song that 'Almost Scared Him', NPR Staff, NPR, Feb. 1, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/02/01/268995033/sam-cooke-and-the-song-that-almost-scared-him.