After 50 years, ‘A Change is Gonna Come,’ they still sing

Almost 50 years ago, Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” was released. A year before, Cooke had reportedly been turned away from a whites-only hotel, an event that urged him to go from timid support to an out-and-out endorsement of the Civil Rights Movement.

It took him a year of work to release this masterpiece in late 1964. When he embarked on the project, he did not regard it as a political, social, or any kind of collective revenge. He wanted it to be a song that laments personal injustice. That was more of a man speaking or rather to himself.

However, he seems to have put too much in it that it went beyond what was originally intended for a song. “A Change Is Gonna Come” quickly turned into a Civil Rights Anthem,” but Cooke did not live to see it becoming so.

Sam was shot dead few weeks before the release of that song.

But they are still talking about it, singing it, referring to it, quoting it, and in that they are immortalizing Sam. Al-Green endorsed the song and sang it in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks.

After winning the 2008, Barack Obama referred to the song saying, “"It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America," said Obama during his victory speech.”

Smokey Robinson said it is the song every songwriter wants to write because it will be there forever.