Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Don’t Know Much About History, Part 2
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2021
⏱️ 50 minutes
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Summary
In Part 2 of this episode of Hit Parade, Chris Molanphy continues his analysis of the music of Sam Cooke. The Oscar-nominated film One Night in Miami… imagines the conversation between Cooke, Malcolm X, Cassius Clay and Jim Brown the night in 1964 they gathered to celebrate the soon-to-be Muhammad Ali’s heavyweight victory. Malcolm X challenges Sam Cooke to use his amazing voice to help “the struggle.” Little did he know Cooke had already recorded his civil‑rights masterpiece, “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
In his too-brief career—seven years as a gospel star, then seven more as a chart-conquering superstar—Sam Cooke took a remarkable journey: from the pathbreaking pop of “You Send Me,” to the wistful R&B of “(What a) Wonderful World,” to the yearning romance of “Bring It on Home to Me,” to—of course—the now-legendary “Change Is Gonna Come.” Meet the man who defined what soul music was and could be.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening Ad Free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:13.0 | Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate Magazine, about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris |
| 0:22.1 | Melanthe, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number |
| 0:26.9 | One series on our last episode. I talked about how sole legend Sam Cook began his career as |
| 0:35.1 | gospel legend Sam Cook and how he pivoted to secular music. |
| 0:41.1 | And in the wake of multiple Oscar nominations for the 2020 film One Night in Miami, |
| 0:47.4 | which reimagines numerous aspects of Cook's career, |
| 0:51.4 | I began a fact check of the film, which compresses multiple years' worth |
| 0:56.5 | of his accomplishments into early 1964. As Sam Cook entered the 1960s, he was about to enter |
| 1:05.2 | a new phase of his artistry. After Wonderful World brought Sam Cook closer to the top 10 on the pop charts |
| 1:14.4 | than he had been in years, his new label, RCA, knew they had to step up. And they finally did. |
| 1:23.2 | Three months later, when Cook's next single got all the way to number two on both the R&B and the pop charts. |
| 1:32.2 | But really, it was Cook who stepped up. |
| 1:35.6 | He had written an ingenious, deceptively deep pop song. |
| 1:39.7 | That's the sound of the men working on the chain gang. That's the sound of the men working on the chain gang. |
| 1:47.0 | Chain gang was a jaunty, joyous tune, disguising a truly despairing topic, prison labor. |
| 1:56.0 | And, by implication, the mass incarceration of African Americans. |
| 2:01.8 | Cook's friend and fellow touring singer Lou Rawls later said that Cook wrote the song |
| 2:08.5 | after seeing an actual chain gang, toiling in the hot sun by the road as they drove past. |
| 2:16.3 | Cook built the beat of the song |
| 2:18.4 | out of the metallic clank of prisoners' shackles |
| 2:21.9 | and from the who, |
... |
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