Spoiler alert! Contains details about the final scene for “One Night in Miami”, now broadcast on Amazon Prime.
“One Night in Miami” leaves you on a high note.
The civil rights era drama (now broadcast on Amazon Prime) depicts a fictional encounter between four black legends – Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) – while they debate issues of activism and art in a motel room in Miami.
The film culminates with a tearful performance of Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” in February 1964, interspersed with scenes of Malcolm and his family escaping his burning house after a bomb attack incendiary, and Cassius changing his name from Muhammad Ali upon joining the Nation of Islam. It is an electrifying moment, made even more powerful by knowing the true story behind the music itself.
‘I know the cost of my words’: Leslie Odom Jr. finds her voice as Sam Cooke in ‘One Night in Miami’
Sam Cooke was partially inspired by Bob Dylan
In the summer of 1963, Cooke received a copy of Bob Dylan’s new album, “The Freewheelin ‘Bob Dylan”, from his friend and business partner JW Alexander. As screenwriter Kemp Powers portrays in the film, Cooke was deeply affected by one track in particular: “Blowin ‘in the Wind”, the meditative protest song by the folk singer that became an anthem for civil rights and anti-war movements from Vietnam.
“(Cooke) hears a song, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind ‘, written by a young white man and it shakes him,” says Odom. “He covers the song and records his own version (in 1964), but he can’t get rid of the shame of not having written a song like that.”
Cooke was also moved by the march in Washington in August 1963, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his now iconic speech “I have a dream”. But it was an experience that October – when Cooke and his entourage were expelled from a white-only Holiday Inn in Shreveport, Louisiana, despite having reservations – that would have “fired him directly” to write “A change is coming,” says Peter Guralnick, author of “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke.”
“Sam refused to back down,” says Guralnick. “His protests were so long and loud that his wife, Barbara, was sure they were going to kill him. Eventually, he was arrested and thrown in prison for disturbing the peace. He did the show that night, but he never forgot the experience. “
Your collaborator said ‘it looks like death’
Cooke said the lyrics for “A Change is Gonna Come” came to him in a dream shortly after Christmas 1963, and he recorded the song in January. Singing lush strings and funeral horns, Cooke beckons with his religious upbringing – born in Mississippi and raised in Chicago by a pastor father – and looks forward to the day when blacks and whites are alike. With the lyrics, “It has been very difficult to live / but I am afraid to die”, he painfully conveys the physical and emotional price of discrimination.
“It was obvious to everyone how excited he was about the music, how proud he was – but it looked like he was upset too,” says Guralnick. “When he asked his guitarist Bobby Womack about this, Bobby said, ‘It looks like death.’ And for Sam, that may have echoed some of the awkwardness about how it all happened. “
“Change” appeared on Cooke’s 11th and final studio album, “Ain’t That Good News”, released in February 1964, but it did not attract immediate attention. In fact, he is known to have played only once publicly during his life and that was on “The Tonight Show”. Having achieved cross-pop success with the 10 biggest hits, including “Chain Gang” and “Twistin ‘the Night Away”, he probably felt that the sad lyrics and complex arrangements of the song were not suitable for his lively club shows.
“I wasn’t a big hit and he was a big hit artist. He was one of the most popular pop singers of his day, another reason why I think it’s such a remarkable song,” said Dr. Charles L. Hughes, author from “Country Soul: making music and running in the South American.”
“Change” was released as a single two weeks after Cooke’s murder at the age of 33 on December 11, 1964, and was quickly adopted by civil rights activists. It was later recorded by Otis Redding in 1965 and Aretha Franklin in 1967.
“In the late 1960s, it was a standard for R&B musicians,” says Hughes. “It was recorded by several artists who knew Cooke or were tremendously influenced by him and recognized his power. After that, it became part of the way we think about Sam Cooke in a really wonderful way, because that was where he was going, but neither did it’s necessarily how it fell when it was first released. “
Music resonates now more than ever
“Change” has been memorably played by artists like Beyoncé, Jennifer Hudson, Celine Dion and Patti LaBelle in recent years. In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it 12th in the magazine’s list of the 500 best songs of all time, and in 2007, the song was selected for preservation by the National Record Registry of the Library of Congress for its historical and cultural importance.
Nearly 60 years after Cooke recorded the song, “Change” is as relevant and powerful as it was then, particularly in light of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and the attack on the US Capitol last week by pro-Trump protesters waving flags confederate.
“Its central message is really at the heart of the black cultural experience in the United States,” says Hughes. “On the one hand, Cooke is describing the depth of the horror, the depth of the violence, the depth of the challenge. He is trying to be honest and get us to be honest about what it meant in a country of white supremacy with a history of supremacy white.
“On the other hand, he is trying to persevere. He is hopeful, but he is just trying to survive. He is saying ‘a change will come’, although his voice and the way he trembles suggest that perhaps he is not as sure as he is on paper. Which is part of what makes it so brilliant: it requires us to insist on survival and trying to find a way to a better place, but we also have to be honest about what it means and how problematic it is. “
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ‘A Change is Gonna Come’: How Bob Dylan inspired Sam Cooke’s anthem