A Change Is Gonna Come

Cooke wrote it and recorded it on January 30, 1964 at RCA Studios in Hollywood, engineered by Wally Heider, with Hugo and Luigi producing and Rene Hall arranging and conducting; Cooke gave Hall full creative control. Earl Palmer played drums, John Boudreaux stayed in the control room, intimidated by the arrangement, and Luigi Creatore asked for one more take, the eighth being described as nearly perfect. Each verse is a different movement, strings first, horns second, timpani on the bridge, and the French horn conveys melancholy. The song article gives 3:11 and the album tracklist 3:13.

Bill Flanagan's CBS Sunday Morning essay says Cooke felt ashamed that a Black writer had not written Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind", and he is also said to have written it after being turned away from a Holiday Inn in Shreveport and arrested at the Castle Hotel on October 8, 1963, and said it came to him in a dream. After Christmas 1963 he played it for J. W. Alexander, who warned it might not sell as well as lighter songs. Flanagan says he promised it to Martin Luther King Jr. for an SCLC fundraising album. His only documented performance in his lifetime was on The Tonight Show on February 7, 1964; NBC logged it as "It's a Long Time Coming" and did not keep the tape, and he chose not to perform it again.

The single, on December 22, 1964 as the B-side of "Shake", is edited to 2:36, cutting a verse, chorus and bridge; American Songwriter says the cut verse was politically pointed. It reached 31 on the Hot 100 and 9 on R&B in 1965, and is Platinum in New Zealand and Gold in the UK. Rolling Stone ranked it 12th in 2004 and 3rd in 2021 on its 500 greatest songs, and first on its 2025 list of 100 best protest songs; Pitchfork placed it third among the 1960s' 200 greatest songs, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2007. Manjula Martin wrote in Aeon that it is so politically potent because it sounds so personal. Obama alluded to it in his November 2008 victory speech.

Covers include Otis Redding (Otis Blue, 1965), Aretha Franklin (1967), the 5th Dimension (1970 medley), Baby Huey (1971), Bettye LaVette with Jon Bon Jovi at the 2009 Obama inaugural celebration, Seal, Greta Van Fleet (2017) and Beyonce (2013). It appears in Malcolm X (1992) and One Night in Miami... (2020). Our upload appears to be the album version.