The B-Side That Outlived Him

On a fall night in October 1963, Sam Cooke pulled into the parking lot of a Holiday Inn in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he and his wife Barbara had reservations. He was thirty-two. He was one of the biggest pop stars in America. Seven years earlier he had left the gospel circuit — where he had sung lead for the Soul Stirrers, to congregations that reached for him as if the man himself were a healing — and crossed into the pop chart with "You Send Me," a song so light and easy it seemed to have been written by the summer air. Since then he had accumulated the hits that get called classics: "Wonderful World," "Cupid," "Twistin' the Night Away," "Chain Gang," "Bring It On Home to Me." He had his own label. He had control of his masters, which almost no Black artist had in 1963. He had every reason to believe the country had, in some way that mattered, accepted him. Then a clerk told him the motel had no rooms.

There were rooms. He knew there were rooms. He argued. His party moved on to another motel. Somewhere in that night — or in the moving of the argument, or in the arrest that followed for disturbing the peace — a thing came loose in Sam Cooke that could not be put back where it had been. In the weeks after, he wrote a song that sounded nothing like the songs that had made him. He said later that it came to him almost fully formed, and that it scared him.

"A Change Is Gonna Come" is a hymn. Not a pop song dressed as a hymn, but a hymn — with the harmonic vocabulary of gospel, with a melody that sits in the difficult upper part of a baritone's range, with chords that ask the singer to give something up in every bar. René Hall wrote the arrangement around him — strings that swell like weather, timpani, a French horn placed where a church choir would stand behind him. Cooke cut the vocal in a single session at the end of January 1964, at a studio in Hollywood he had used a hundred times for songs that were nothing like this one. He performed it in public only a handful of times.

He put it on an album released in February and did not build a tour around it. Ten months later he was killed at a motel in Los Angeles — the second motel to write his life in ink. His label reissued "Shake" as a single with "A Change Is Gonna Come" tucked on the back. That B-side is the one that outlived him.

The songs he wrote to sell — the ones that were exactly what the market at that moment wanted from a Black pop crossover in the early sixties — are largely a memory now, played on oldies stations to a listener who is not really listening. The song he wrote because a room would not take him in is the one that plays in every documentary, every anniversary, every hour when the country needs to hear itself. He did not write it for that. He wrote it because he could not not write it. Sometimes the record that lasts is the one the writer knew, while he was writing it, was not for now. It was for a room he might not live long enough to sit inside.