soul: on hope and death

Music: Sam Cooke: Keep Movin' On The story often told of the writing of "A Change is Gonna Come" is that it was inspired by Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In The Wind" and composed in 1964 after a gig in Durham, North Carolina, when Cooke spoke with a number of student sit-in demonstrators. In his forthcoming book, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, Peter Guralnick makes a strong case that the song is Cooke's most poignant commentary on race relations in the segregated south—if not the most memorable of 1964. I remember being at Aric Putnam's house many, many years ago and his playing the song, and singing along, and my sneezing because of the dog hair; I remember thinking about how well Aric—-a white guy raised in a racially diverse part of California-—understood the experience of the black folks he grew up with, and that his connection, his way of "staying in touch" in the Scandinavian whiteness of Minnesota (the snow and the skin) was by playing old soul records. I've been a huge fan of Cooke since that time, since Aric explained to me just why Cooke was the best soul singer of all time (and according to Mohammed Ali, the best "rock singer" too). Otis Redding, another of Aric's favorites, said that his vocal role model was Cooke. Guralnick explains that this is not a counter-intuitive statement when you hear Cooke in the raw (just hear the live in Harlem album! No sweetness and light there!). Anyway, Aric taught me how to hear the hope of pain.

Now that the national imaginary is saturated with a discussion of race and poverty (which means that the repression machines are also in full force), "A Change is Gonna Come" keeps playing in my mind:

I was born by the river In a little tent, and ooooh, just like that river I've been running ever since

It's been a long time coming, but I know A change is gonna come, oh yes it will

It's been too hard living but I'm afraid to die 'cause I don't know what's up there beyond the sky,

It's been a long time coming, but I know A change is gonna come, oh yes it will

I go to the movie and I go downtown Somebody keep tellin me don't hang around

It's been a long time coming, but I know A change is gonna come, oh yes it will

Then I go to my brother and I say brother help me please But he wind up (knocking) me back down on my knees

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

It's been a long time, but I know A change is gonna come, oh yes it will

Cooke said the lyrics came to him all at once, "as if it were dictated to him in a dream." Cooke's friend and occasional collaborator Bobby Womack describes the song as bone chilling: "Sam asked me to come in his house. He wanted me to hear something. When I heard it, I said, 'Man, this is spooky. The song is so spooky.' He said, 'It feels like death, don't it?'" Although Cooke rarely performed the song after he sang it on The Tonight Show for a national audience in February of 1964, it was almost immediately embraced as civil rights anthem and has been subsequently covered by scores of artists, from the Band and Solomon Burke to Tina Turner and Karen Young. In many ways "A Change is Gonna Come" captures the soul of soul music because of its message of hope in the face of certain death.

The song "feels like death," but ambivalently. This is not necessarily a dreaded kind of death, since there is, by the mere fact of utterance, some portent of joy. The change that is gonna come to us all is dreadfully certain, but there may be a better change before that final one that may or may not take us "beyond the sky." Cooke and Womack's attempts to name the musical feeling and timbre of "A Change is Gonna Come"—it's spookiness, its deathliness—is the task of poets or philosophers attempting to pen-down the ineffable truth of feeling. The philosopher Jacques Derrida spent the last decade of his career writing about this feeling, the woeful joy of this "gift of death," eventually articulating a notion of ambivalent waiting and openness to change that he termed "hauntology." In Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, Derrida critiques an obsession with the present and with presence---"presentism"—by celebrating the figure of the ghost as feeling of death that lives, of learning to feel at home with ghosts. Because the specter is neither absent nor present, but somewhere curiously in-between, it causes in us a kind of anxious waiting. In addition to reminders of soul-deep and historical pain, ghosts are harbingers of hope. “The anticipation [for the ghost] is at once impatient, anxious, and fascinated," says Derrida. "this, the thing (‘this thing’) will end up coming. The revenant is going to come. It won’t be long. But how long it is taking.” Hearing "A Change is Gonna Come," in a way, enacts a politics of “temporal disjuncture” that resists the finality of mourning and emplacement in the present. Instead of placing our bets on a certain metaphysic or an absolute understanding of the Real, in his own way, like Derrida, Cooke's singing recommends a posture of listening and an openness to hope. He tells us how to live with ghosts.

So let us keep the discussion open, then, and not stop talking about it. I'm sure my friends in Louisiana are getting tired of talking about it; I'm confident they're exhausted—to the point that they cannot talk about it any more. But the ghosts of slavery and genocide continue to haunt us, and we've got to learn to live with it without packaging it up or reducing it to a t-shirt slogan (you know, "it's a black thing; you wouldn't understand . . . .").