Sam Cooke (January 22, 1931 – December 11, 1964)

It’s been forty-five years this month since Sam Cooke was shot dead in a Los Angeles motel.

Sadly, the circumstances surrounding his death are still mystifying and murky.  Police found him in the manager’s office of the Hacienda Motel, dead from a gunshot wound to the torso, wearing a sports jacket and shoes, but no shirt, pants or underwear.

Still, as tragic as his death was, it would be just as tragic to remember him for the way he died rather than the way he lived.  And, perhaps it is best to remember the way he lived by reexamining his greatest work – the devastating ballad, “A Change is Gonna Come.”

On “Change,” Cooke delivered a hair-raising, life-changing vocal performance and cut what might just be the greatest song of all time.  Forty-five years on, it still tears out of the speakers.

Recorded December 21, 1963 – almost a year to the day before he died – the song was greatly influenced by Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”  Cooke was reportedly in awe that such a powerful song about racism was written by a white man.  He was also influenced by the changing country he saw on tour and two very personal incidents.  The first was the death of his eighteen-month-old son, Vincent, who drowned in June of 1963.  The second came on October 8, 1963 when Cooke and his band were arrested after trying to register at a “whites only” motel in Shreveport, Louisiana.  Cooke began writing about these experiences in a notebook while on tour, describing the emotions that were tearing him apart and mixing them with the emotions that had been tearing black people apart for too long.

The resulting work is so powerful because it strikes a perfect balance between the two opposing impulses that are at the heart of the human experience.  You can put it a million ways:  good and evil, happiness and sadness, life and death, negative and positive – whatever you call it, it is the dichotomy that drives the universe.

The song is brilliant because it contains such a powerful and complete rendering of each half of that dichotomy – the dark reality of racism in America and the unquenchable determination to see a better day.  Those emotions battle each other throughout the song, ripping into each word and phrase.  Deeper still, they battle each other in Cooke’s voice, which contains at once the smoothness of songs like “You Send Me,” the sweaty raw soul of songs like “Bring It On Home To Me,” and the transcendent gospel testifying of his work with the Soul Stirrers.

Lyrically, it is poetic beauty in simple, direct verse.  A scene is set up in each verse, beginning with “I was born by the river,” and each verse is ended with the dichotomy in a small capsule:  “It’s been a long time coming / But I know a change is gonna come.”

By the last verse, punctuated with martial, staccato French horns and kettle-drums, you can hear the conflicted emotions swell until they almost burst – there’s something optimistic yet cynical, something motivated yet resigned, something angry yet tired of anger.

It is the sound of desperation.  It is the sound of hope.

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