“Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke

Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" first surfaced on Ain't That Good News, his RCA Victor album of February 1964, and a slightly trimmed version went out that December on the flip side of "Shake". Hugo & Luigi produced it, with René Hall arranging and conducting.

Cooke drew it from his own life, above all from the time he and his entourage were turned away at a whites-only motel in Louisiana, and he wrote it to speak for his own struggle, for the people around him and for the civil rights movement.

Next to his earlier singles it was only a modest hit, but its standing has only grown: it entered the National Recording Registry in 2007, Rolling Stone ranked it number 3 on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2021, and in 2025 the magazine put it first among protest songs.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.