Greil Marcus on 'A Change Is Gonna Come'

On January 30, a week after [Petula Clark’s] “Downtown” hit the top – and three weeks before gunmen from the Nation of Islam assassinated the apostate Malcolm X, once the scary, unsatisfiable public face of the Black Muslims, then the traitor who had discovered that founder Elijah Muhammed, like so many American cult leaders before him, had gathered his flock less as a community of believers than as a harem – Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” went into the charts. Like “Downtown,” it was a song about freedom. It was also about racism, and like a call from the grave to the marchers in Selma, who were, some of them, digging their own: a star in white America but a hero in black America, Cooke had been shot to death by a hotel manager in Watts one month before.

Inspired by Bob Dylan’s 1963 “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which was itself inspired by the Civil Rights Movement (“Geez,” Cooke said, “a white boy writing a song like that?”)[1], but an infinitely better song, “A Change Is Gonna Come” was recorded on New Year’s Day, 1964, in Los Angeles, with the great New Orleans drummer Earl Palmer, at the end of the sessions for Cooke’s Ain’t That Good News. Early the next month Cooke performed it on the Tonight Show. The orchestration was pure Hollywood, a movie theme, maybe Cabin in the Sky or Porgy and Bess, maybe the movie Randy Newman always said his song “Sail Away” was meant to be: stirring, with strings enactinv an inevitable triumph, horns enacting conflict, a kettle drum enacting doom, or a martyr’s curse on his native land. Singing in a voice as clear as water, rich and expansive – “It was the tone of his voice,” Rod Stewart once said. “Not the phrasing or whatever: just the tone”- bending syllables like staircases in a dream, disappearing under your feet as you try to climb them, stretching out the word “long” until it became what before it only sygnified, Cooke looked the country in the face.

Ohhhhhhhh-

Never rising higher than number 31, the B side of the number 7 “Shake,” it was the greatest soul record ever made, and everybody who heard it knew it. It wasn’t a sentimental judgment, because Cooke was dead; it wasn’t a judgment at all. It was a recognition. The music didn’t make you sorry Cooke was dead; it made you glad that he had lived, made you feel priviliged to have shared the earth with him. This record wasn’t the real world invading the phony little construct of pop world to remind it of the travails outside; it was the pop world seizing something from the real world and sending it back, transformed, the absolute art of negating the hesitations and demurrers or ordinary speech, or, for as long as the record played, the limits of the real world itself.[2]

[1] “A folk trio out of Greenwich Village was riding the charts with a song called ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ that caught and held Sam’s attention,” Daniel Wolff wrote in 1995 in You Send Me: The Life & Times of Sam Cooke, speaking of 1963. “Peter, Paul & Mary were a long way fro, rock & roll (which they disliked and mocked) but it wasn’t the group or the folk poetry of Bob Dylan’s lyrics that struck Cooke. It was the fact that a tune could address civil rights and go to #2 on the pop charts.”

[2] On 28 March, 2004, at Apollo at 70: A Hot Night In Harlem, an all-star benefit for the Apollo Theater Foundation, Natalie Cole sang a song into the ground, there was a tribute to Ray Charles, and then the actor and civil rights activist Ossie Davis, in his eighties and speaking as if he had all the time in the world, took the stage. “At the end of the fifties,” he said, “the Civil Rights Movement was growing very insistent – hot and heavy. My generation was involved, challenging American’s deep racial devide. We marched, we prayed, we preached – and fought – for freedom. Music became a significant force in bringing these issues to light, and bringing the people together.” So far, Davis was simply mouthing awards-show blather, then he took a turn. “A young snger by the name of Sam Cooke was dominating the charts,” he said as footage of Cooke performing with more than a dozen singers and dancers appeared on the theater screen. “One day, Sam heard a song that asked, a might important question.” As the sound came up on the screen, you could hear that Cooke was singing “Blowin’ in the Wind”: “Yes, and how many deaths will it take till he knows/That too many people have died?/The Answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind”- and to hear Cooke’s seamless voice inside Dylan’s “blowin’” was to hear the song as something new. “It prompted him,” Davis said, “to write what is perhaps his most heartfelt and moving work:’A Change…Is Gonna Come.” A Song which became an anthem for the Civil Rights Movement. To perform it for us tonight is someone I’ve had the pleasure of introducing before” – and Davis filled up the word with weight, finally hitting his rhetorical stride –“when we were together once, on that historic day in Washington, D.C., in nineteen, sixty, three, when Dr. Martin Luther King told us about the dream he wanted to share with all America. I’m pleased –nay, happy—to reintroduce this artist again tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Dylan.”

With his band in darkness – hatted guitarist and stand-up bassist, hatless guitarist and drummer – Dylan stood behind an electric piano and went right into the song. The sound of his voice was the sound of shoe leather scraping a sidewalk; the song was out of Dylan’s vocal range, so he brought it into his range as a comrade. At first, with a circular guitar pattern and taps on a woodblock, the song came out soupy. Slowing the pace as radically as he could, Dylan gave himself space to drag out certain words, to flatten the melody, and by the second verse – the singer in front of a movie theater, being told he couldn’t come in – you saw someone on a WPA stage from the thirties, bare except perhaps for a backdrop of a setting sun. The performance was made of dignity and authority – qualities that, as Dylan sang, were passed from him to the song to Cooke and back again to him. The gorgeous, sophisticated record Cooke had made four decades before was now rough, primitive, where Cooke was a nightclub prophet, Dylan was a tramp on the street, a prophet content to say his piece and dissappear. That’s how he sounded; in a rakish, cutaway beige jacket, pink satin shirt, black string tie, and pencil moustache, he looked like a card shark.