It's Okay... I Guess...

Earlier in the week I stumbled across a stack of old CDs that I had put away and forgotten about some time ago. Most of them were crap which is why they had been forgotten about in the first place, but one CD stood out.

It's a CD Moe Greene made for me back when we still worked together and it says a lot about Moe... I'm actually not really sure what it says about him, but it says something.

The CD is "The Best of Sam Cooke... According to Moe Greene."

When he made it I had just purchased my first Mp3 player from a crackhead in a parking lot and I was itching to put some songs on it. Moe, always helpful, started to burn songs from his work computer onto CDs so that I could then rip them to my computer and transfer them to my new mP3 player... At some point he decided to make the Sam Cooke CD, and he was really excited about it.

"I love Sam Cooke," he enthusiastically said as he handed the CD over.

I slid it into the computer and pressed play... "Cupid"... "Summertime"... "Wonderful World"... "Shake"... "Twistin' the Night Away"... and of course, Moe's favorite, "Chain Gang"... There were a couple of other throw away songs mixed in... It was a decent CD.

But of course, as I skipped from track to track I kept waiting to hear the Sam Cooke song... the heartbreaking orchestra intro, the soulful voice overflowing with pain and struggle. And that magical first line, "I was boooooooooooorn by the river..."

Of course I'm talking about "A Change is Gonna Come"... Cooke recorded the song a few months before his tragic death in 1964. Up until that point Cooke had made strictly pop songs. Safe and uncontroversial... But a few things happened to inspire him to write the song that would be come to be known as "the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement."

First, he was inspired by Bob Dylan's own segregation protest song, "Blowin' in the Wind"... Second, his son died in a drowning accident... and finally, Third, he was arrested while on tour with his band in Louisiana for trying to register at a "White's Only" hotel.

So there he was, inspired, heart broken, and pissed off... The result was, for my money, one of the best 3 or 4 songs ever recorded. No one, and I mean NO ONE, has ever sang their hearts out on a song the way Sam did on "A Change is Gonna Come".

You feel the depth of his pain: "It's been too hard livin', but I'm afraid to die, cause I don't know what's up there, beyond the sky" and yet a glimmer of hope and optimism: "Oh there been times I thought I couldn't last for long, but now I think I'm able to carry on."

This is a black man, born in Mississippi, during the depression, raised on the streets of Chicago... He's been singing happy pop songs for white kids to dance to for a decade, but now the 60's are here and damn it, "It's been a long, long time coming, but I know, a change is gonna come!"

And yet somehow Moe Greene doesn't even think to put the song on his "Best of Sam Cooke" CD!!!!

"How could you NOT have this CD finish up with 'A Change is Gonna Come'"?! I questioned him.

"I don't know..." he replied.

"Don't you like the song?"

"It's okay... I guess..."

I don't care if he wasn't born until 1981, as far as I'm concerned, Moe Greene killed Sam Cooke.