Monday Music: A Change is Gonna Come

The plaintive hope of Sam Cooke

From "Sam Cook and the Song that Almost Scared Him" on NPR:

"A Change Is Gonna Come" is now much more than a civil rights anthem. It's become a universal message of hope, one that does not age.

"Generation after generation has heard the promise of it. It continues to be a song of enormous impact," he says. "We all feel in some way or another that a change is gonna come, and he found that lyric. It was the kind of hook that he always looked for: The phrase that was both familiar but was striking enough that it would have its own originality. And that makes it almost endlessly adaptable to whatever goal, whatever movement is of the moment."