A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America. - Review - book review

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Robert Cochran

Craig Werner. A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America. New York: Plume, 1999. 430 pp. $19.95.

Craig Werner sets himself a compelling and daunting task in A Change Is Gonna Come: What's attempted is nothing less than a history of the complex interactions between popular music and racial politics in the United States in the final four decades of the twentieth century. It's a huge enterprise, loaded with pitfalls, and no ground for the timid.

Werner opens with Mahalia Jackson in 1963 and closes with Wu-Tang Clan in the 1990s, with literally hundreds of stops on the way. It's a great ride for the most part, despite occasional stumbles. The cover blurbs record high praise from high places, and few readers, one guesses, will grudge the accolades.

Mahalia Jackson's singing of "I've Been 'Buked and I've Been Scorned" and "How I Made It Over" at the epochal 1963 March on Washington offers in fact a perfect introduction to A Change Is Gonna Come. The first number, with its stress upon lived experience, upon unflinching confrontation of reality, complements the second's insistence upon the eventual victory of dogged spirit over mean circumstance. Werner calls the first perspective "the blues impulse" and the second "the gospel impulse." For a fuller definition of the former he cites Ralph Ellison: Blues opts first to "finger the jagged grain" of "brutal experience," and second to "transcend" such experience by "a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism." It is "personal catastrophe expressed lyrically." For the latter he turns to James Baldwin and Mavis Staples, among others. Gospel songs insist upon hope; they affirm "a vision of spiritual community."

The larger narrative curve, divided into five sections and built in turn of sixty-five short segments--too short to be called chapters--describes songs and singers and political events and politicians that mix these fundamental "impulses" in dramatically different proportions. The story begins in exuberant hope, in the musical accompaniment to Dr. Martin Luther King's magnificent "Dream" of a beloved national community in which individuals are judged, if at all, not by their ethnicity, their gender, their region, or their religion but by "the content of their character." The first eighteen segments describe various musical affirmers of this dream--Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke, Woody Guthrie, Motown, Bob Dylan, Otis Redding at Monterey, Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, Muscle Shoals, Memphis Soul. The stress throughout is on the often explicit interaction between musical and political currents; there are whole segments where music is much subordinated to political developments.

This upward curve is soon interrupted. The second, third, and fourth sections chronicle a sharp downturn from sixties hope to seventies troubles and eighties despair, addressing Vietnam, disco, "Jimmy Carter and the Great Quota Disaster of 1978," and (rock bottom, darkest hour) "the Reagan Rules." The second section opens ominously, with "Black Power, Vietnam, and the Death of the Dream," and ends plaintively, with Donny Hathaway's "Where Is the Love?" When the fourth section opens it's time for Chuck D's "Welcome to the Terrordome." The "Reagan Rules" are for Werner the worst enemy of both the reality of the blues impulse and the community of the gospel impulse. There are four of them, in Werner's summary: "reality is determined by image and anecdote"; "the purpose of life is to make a lot of money"; "violence is the core of American, that is to say male, identity"; and "the world is divided into 'us' and 'them.' "It is at least an interesting argument that finds in the triumph of these "rules" a fertile so urce ground for the most anti-social excesses of the 'eighties gangstas.

Only with the fifth section does dawn break again, in "the Nineties Remix." Werner closes his work with segments titled "Flashes of the Spirit" and "Redemption Songs," where the claim for a resurgent beloved community is put forward: "The best music of the eighties grew out of the blues impulse, insisting on the reality of brutal experience over and against nostalgic fantasies and self-righteous lies. In the nineties, the gospel impulse moved back to the center." Kirk Franklin and the Family, Wu-Tang Clan--even the names assert community. Werner is tough on mostly obvious targets--Ronald Reagan above all, of course, but also Tipper Gore, Diana Ross, Wynton Marsalis, and Newt Gingrich. There are far more heroines and heroes. Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke, Bob Marley, Dorothy Love Coates, Sly Stone, John Fogerty, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, Al Green, Ann Peebles, George Clinton, Gil Scott-Heron, Tupac Shakur, Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Kirk Franklin--all these and scores m ore get good ink. But A Change Is Gonna Come is for all its data a very readable book. Werner writes with verve, with a fine sense of telling anecdote, and with occasional unintrusive first-person observations. Sometimes the rhetoric seems forced and artificial--a segment ends with, "I second that emotion"; a citation of Lauryn Hill is capped with, "The ball's in your court, gangstas." There is also a regrettable tendency to first-name certain esteemed figures--Mahalia, Brother Ray, Miles, Donny [Hathaway], Ronnie [Spector], Dot [Dorothy Love Coates]--suggesting an intimacy that doesn't ring true.