In its best form, pop music makes people see things differently

By Caitlin Ward

A Change is Gonna Come
By Sam Cooke

I was born by the river
In a little tent
Oh, and just like the river
I’ve been running ever since

CHORUS

It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come
Oh, yes it is
It’s been too hard living
But I’m afraid to die
I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky

CHORUS

I got to the movies
And I go downtown
Somebody keep telling me, “don’t hang around.”

CHORUS

Then I go to my brother
I say brother help me please
But he winds up knocking me
Back down on my knees

There’ve been times that I thought
I couldn’t last for long
But now I think I’m able to carry on

CHORUS

I have a theory. It is unsubstantiated and I have no way of proving it. It’s probably not original with me, either, but I’m owning it proudly.

My theory goes like this: the American Civil Rights Movement would not have been successful without soul music.

Now, hear me out. There were many diverse factors that made up what we now call the Civil Rights Movement, and soul music is only one part of that. Acts of non-violent protest and civil disobedience throughout the southern United States in the late 1950s and 1960s were instrumental in African American emancipation, as was the work of intellectuals and organizers like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. And perhaps it wouldn’t have happened at all if Rosa Parks hadn’t been tired of giving in to segregation laws when she refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama Dec. 1, 1955. Soul music didn’t make Congress pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, nor did it push the 1965 Voting Rights Act through the Senate. It didn’t go down to volunteer in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, or march on Washington in 1963.

What soul music did do, however, was make America aware of the African American community and their plight on a much wider scale than individual protests and boycotts did. I don’t just mean songs like Nina Simone’s I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free, Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come, or James Brown’s Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud). These songs were conscious efforts to describe an untenable situation. I have no doubt they deeply affected the people who listened to them, regardless of skin colour. They deeply affect people now. My sister can’t listen to Simone’s song without crying.

I can’t help but wonder, though, how much of an impact those songs would have had outside the African American community if they had not been preceded by the likes of Jackie Wilson’s 1958 Lonely Teardrops, Sam Cooke’s 1957 You Send Me, or The Supremes’ 1963 Where Did Our Love Go? None of these artists talked much about the Civil Rights Movement. Cooke only mentioned the discrimination he faced in one posthumously released single, the aforementioned A Change is Gonna Come. Wilson didn’t sing about the 1943 Detroit Race Riot he must have witnessed at the age of nine. The Supremes never sang about anything but falling in and out of love.

These artists have the distinction, however, of being among the first to achieve true crossover success. Rock and roll’s burgeoning fame ran parallel to soul’s, it’s true. But unlike rock and roll, which was hailed as the devil’s music by just about anyone over the age of 25, soul music was for everyone. Grandmas from Vermont liked Sam Cooke just as much as their 17-year-old granddaughters did.

And so African American artists came into the homes of white America via music programs like American Bandstand: not as caricatures in blackface or blindingly awful racial stereotypes; not as background players or comic relief; not as some menacing but unknowable threat that might rape your daughter; but as articulate, well-dressed, charismatic and talented artists. They showed many in the United States that African Americans were people not so different from themselves.

But they were people who were playing at a disadvantage. People who weren’t allowed into certain hotels, had to stand on the bus, couldn’t get certain jobs by virtue of the colour of their skin. Cooke and Wilson and The Supremes and artists like them didn’t spend a lot of time talking about any of those things. However, when other people did — people like Dr. King — America had faces they already recognized to put alongside the injustices they heard about. Sam Cooke was born and raised in Mississippi, the site of Freedom Summer. Motown was based in Detroit, the site of the 1967 riots. These artists made the headlines personal. Their very existence meant that people couldn’t plead ignorance; they could only plead discrimination. And thus, soul music helped to make the world a little bit better.

When I told my father that I thought Sam Cooke changed the world, he responded “well, he didn’t stop a war.” And it’s true, pop music has never won or lost that kind of battle. It doesn’t run for office. It didn’t teach in a Freedom School down in Mississippi. But in its best form, it makes people see things a little bit differently. By virtue of its gentleness, it opens perspectives, and its influence echoes through history. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Barack Obama’s victory speech paraphrased not Dr. King or Malcolm X, but Sam Cooke: “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.”

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that something so minor, so basic, so insubstantial as pop music can’t change the world. Because it did. And it will, again.

Ward is a freelance writer and aspiring documentary filmmaker based in Saskatoon. You can find her short bursts of insight and frustration at http://www.twitter.com/newsetofstrings.