CHRISTOPHER TRIGG A Change Ain’t Gonna Come: Sam Cooke and the Protest Song ABSTRACT Although Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ is inextricably linked to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, it has an uneasy relationship with the genre of the protest song. Where protest songs enact the social change they seek to accomplish, Cooke’s composition places its singer at a distance from an imminent, unspecified change. While protest songs are confident that the development they desire will materialize, the musical and lyrical structure of ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ implies that the change in question may never arrive. Insofar as it depends upon contained progression – thematic and harmonic movement that is both linear and cyclical – the song could be described as a blues. Like many blues, moreover, it engages with the theme of human mortality: death, which every individual expects but never experiences, could be the ‘change’ to which the title and refrain refer. At the same time, change is the very word through which the lyric participates in the protest genre. If it were to be stricken from the text, the song would have no political referent, nothing to take its meaning beyond the confessional and personal. Of all the songs of the civil rights movement, which is the most definitive, the most powerful? If there was ever any doubt, Barack Obama settled it on 5 November 2008. In his victory speech that evening, he told the crowds gathered in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, ‘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.’ The allusion to Sam Cooke’s classic ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ was unmistakable and entirely fitting. Although Cooke, like the president-elect, was born else- where, both were truly sons of Chicago. Obama, as is well known, began his public career as a community organizer on the South Side; Cooke started singing at his father’s Christ Temple Church in Chicago Heights (Guralnick 13 – 15). Change had been the watchword of the Obama-Biden campaign – ‘Change We Can Believe In’ its slogan, change.gov the website set up to provide voters with information on the presidential transition. Above all, the election of a Black American president seemed to have achieved the change that Cooke had hoped for, just as it had made Martin Luther King Jr’s dream more tangible. universityof toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 3, summer 2010 doi: 10.3138/utq.79.3.991