"A Change Is Gonna Come" : Sam Cook's masterpiece

Sam Cooke first found success in the early Fifties, both with gospel group The Soul Stirrers and as a solo singer; “You Send Me” was a U.S. No. 1 in 1957, selling two million copies. He sang, wrote, and co-produced a series of hits including “Wonderful World” (1959), “Chain Gang” (1960), and “Cupid” (1961), and founded his own label, SAR Records.

But arguably Cooke’s greatest accomplishment was “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a song he claimed came to him in a dream. Cooke’s biographer Peter Guralnick traces the inspirations for the song to three events: Cooke talking with student sit-in demonstrators in Durham, North Carolina, after playing a show in May 1963; his hearing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and feeling that, if a white man was writing something with such a significant message, he should be, too; and the singer’s arrest after he attempted to register at a segregated (whites only) Shreveport, Louisiana, Holiday Inn in October 1963. Furthermore, in the same year, Martin Luther King Jr. led the civil rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

On December 21, 1963, at RCA Studios, Los Angeles, Cooke recorded this melancholy civil rights sermon. Singing with a depth of emotion rarely heard outside of the church, he cries: “It’s been a long, a long time coming But 1 know a change gonna come Oh yes it will.”