A Change Is Gonna Come: One of soul’s greatest songs

A Change Is Gonna Come: One of soul’s greatest songs Getty Images A Change Is Gonna Come was a smooth soul tune that became the unofficial anthem of the US civil rights movement. By 1963, Cooke was no stranger to the daily toxic humiliations doled out by Jim Crow America or the ways in which young black men and women were confronting the nation’s white skin-privileging status quo. Dylan’s song had become a wistful wake-up call from a bygone phase of anti-racist struggle – but Cooke’s Change still resonated, beyond the 1965 Watts riots against racial injustices, those in 1967 in Detroit and Newark, and with Martin Luther King’s 1968 assassination in Memphis, with the Black Power movement’s unfinished business with white America. By contrast, his 1964 Live at the Copa found him saddled with a house big band covering two Broadway show tunes, The Best Things In Life Are Free, country music staple Tennessee Waltz, Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home, the campfire warhorse Frankie and Johnny, Pete Seeger’s If I had A Hammer, Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind – that latter triumvirate of ditties reflecting how humongously popular folk music had become in whitebread America.