Parks, who ignited the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott that brought Martin Luther King Jr. to prominence, found solace after King's murder 13 years later by repeatedly playing Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come."

The song, which Spike Lee also used brilliantly in "Malcolm X," is as bittersweet as the days after King's death, when crushing loss was tempered by reflection on all that he had done.

"Change" finds hope while warning much work remains:

Then I go to my brother

I say brother help me please

But he winds up knocking me

Back down on my knees ...

It's been a long, long time coming

But I know a change is gonna come.

"Change" was not, by the way, some abstract "protest song" written by an idealist in an ivory tower. While Cooke was only 33 when he wrote it - and he would be shot to death before he reached 34 - he'd been out there all his life. He'd been on the streets, walking the gospel and pop-music roads. He was a businessman. He'd sung on "The Tonight Show." He knew the rich and famous.

He had seen white artists get better deals and better money. He'd seen his people shuttled to the balcony in theaters and blasted off sidewalks with fire hoses.

He knew a change had to come. He just didn't know when it would, which sounds a lot like how Rosa Parks must have felt.

Parks lived long enough to see changes start. But we're far from the finish line, and Parks' friends and admirers fear she's now being rewritten into a harmless feel-good symbol rather than a woman who had to put her life on the line to get equal seating on a public bus. They resent seeing her used as a photo op by those who fought against her just demands in 1955 and still resist them today under code phrases like "reversing judicial activism."

Likewise, as "Dream Boogie" illustrates, Sam Cooke was more than the smiling guy who cut catchy radio hits like "Havin' a Party" or "You Send Me."

He sang a breathtaking range of music, from hard-edged gospel to the soaring "Bring It on Home to Me." He was a remarkably successful pioneer whose private life wasn't always happy.

He'd been around, and he put what he'd found into his songs. That's why we find as much in them today as Rosa Parks did in 1968. That's why he, like she, will always matter.

Peter Guralnick and Sam Cooke's brother L.C. will sign copies of "Dream Boogie" today at 12:30 p.m. at J&R Music. They will also lead a Cooke program tonight at 7 at the Schomburg Center, 103 W. 135th St.

Originally published on November 2, 2005