Despite the song’s present-day status—and now, its multiple uses at the highest levels of national politics—Cooke only performed “A Change” himself once. One of Cooke’s biographers, Peter Guralnick, told NPR in 2014 that when Cooke “first played it for Bobby Womack, who was his protégé, he said, ‘What’s it sound like?’ And Bobby said, ‘It sounds like death.’ Sam said, ‘Man, that’s kind of how it sounds like to me. That’s why I’m never going to play it in public.’”
“It was a complex arrangement with something like 17 strings,” Guralnick added. “I think part of him felt, ‘I’m not gonna do it if I can’t do justice to it.’ But the other part was that it had this kind of ominousness about it.”
Cooke was shot and killed in 1964, at the age of 33, by a motel clerk who claimed self-defense—she was cleared, but the circumstances of the encounter remain the subject of some dispute. Between the song’s release on Cooke’s 1964 album Ain’t That Good News and its release as a posthumous B-side single days after his funeral later that year, some of the original lyrics about segregation on “A Change” were cut. In 1963, Cooke and his band were turned away from a Holiday Inn in Louisiana, an incident that was embodied by those omitted lyrics.
“He just went off,” Guralnick told NPR. “And when he refused to leave, he became obstreperous to the point where his wife, Barbara, said, ‘Sam, we’d better get out of here. They’re going to kill you.’ And he says, ‘They’re not gonna kill me; I’m Sam Cooke.’ To which his wife said, ‘No, to them you’re just another…’ you know.”
Cooke and some of his bandmates were arrested for disturbing the peace, according to NPR. On the album version, Cooke sang, “I go to the movie and I go downtown / Somebody keep tellin’ me don’t hang around.”
“It was less work than any song he’d ever written,” Guralnick said. “It almost scared him that the song—it was almost as if the song were intended for somebody else. He grabbed it out of the air and it came to him whole, despite the fact that in many ways it’s probably the most complex song that he wrote. It was both singular—in the sense that you started out, ‘I was born by the river’—but it also told the story both of a generation and of a people.”
Twelve years from Obama’s victory speech, and 56 years from the song’s writing, “A Change” was sung on the national stage again. “It shows you the longevity of Sam,” Cooke’s brother L.C. told the Chicago Tribune after the 2008 election. “One thing about Sam’s music, Sam’s music don’t get old.”
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