Episode 122: “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke

Episode 122 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is a double-length (over an hour) look at “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke, at Cooke's political and artistic growth, and at the circumstances around his death. This one has a long list of content warnings at the beginning of the episode, for good reason... Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "My Guy" by Mary Wells.   Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. For this episode, he also did the re-edit of the closing theme. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by one artist. My main source for this episode is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick. Like all Guralnick’s work, it’s an essential book if you’re even slightly interested in the subject. Information on Allen Klein comes from Fred Goodman's book on Klein. The Netflix documentary I mention can be found here. This is the best compilation of Sam Cooke’s music for the beginner, and the only one to contain recordings from all four labels (Specialty, Keen, RCA, and Tracey) he recorded for. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode, a brief acknowledgement --  Lloyd Price plays a minor role in this story, and I heard as I was in the middle of writing it that he had died on May the third, aged eighty-eight. Price was one of the great pioneers of rock and roll -- I first looked at him more than a hundred episodes ago, back in episode twelve -- and he continued performing live right up until the start of the coronavirus outbreak in March last year. He'll be missed. Today we're going to look at one of the great soul protest records of all time, a record that was the high point in the career of its singer and songwriter, and which became a great anthem of the Civil Rights movement. But we're also going to look at the dark side of its creator, and the events that led to his untimely death. More than most episodes of the podcast, this requires a content warning. Indeed, it requires more than just content warnings. Those warnings are necessary -- this episode will deal with not only a murder, but also sexual violence, racialised violence, spousal abuse, child sexual abuse, drug use and the death of a child, as well as being about a song which is in itself about the racism that pervaded American society in the 1960s as it does today. This is a story from which absolutely nobody comes out well, which features very few decent human beings, and which I find truly unpleasant to write about. But there is something else that I want to say, before getting into the episode -- more than any other episode I have done, and I think more than any other episode that I am *going* to do, this is an episode where my position as a white British man born fourteen years after Sam Cooke's death might mean that my perspective is flawed in ways that might actually make it impossible for me to tell the story properly, and in ways that might mean that my telling of the story is doing a grave, racialised, injustice. Were this song and this story not so important to the ongoing narrative, I would simply avoid telling it altogether, but there is simply no way for me to avoid it and tell the rest of the story without doing equally grave injustices. So I will say this upfront. There are two narratives about Sam Cooke's death -- the official one, and a more conspiratorial one. Everything I know about the case tells me that the official account is the one that is actually correct, and *as far as I can tell*, I have good reason for thinking that way. But here's the thing. The other narrative is one that is he