A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America

extraordinarily far reaching highly accessible Notes No one has written this way about music in a long long time Lucid insightful with real spiritual political intellectual and emotional grasp of the whole picture A book about why music matters and how and to whom Dave Marsh author of Louie Louie and Born to Run The Bruce Springsteen Story This book is urgently needed a comprehensive look at the various forms of black popular music both as music and as seen in a larger social context No one can do this better than Craig Werner Henry Louis Gates Jr W E B Du Bois Professor of the Humanities Harvard University Werner has mastered the extremely difficult art of writing about music as both an aesthetic and social force that conveys implies symbolizes and represents ideas as well as emotion but without reducing its complexities and ambiguities to merely didactic categories African American Review A Change Is Gonna Come is the story of more than four decades of enormously influential black music from the hopeful angry refrains of the Freedom movement to the slick pop of Motown from the disco inferno to the Million Man March from Woodstock s Summer of Love to the war in Vietnam and the race riots that inspired Marvin Gaye to write What s Going On Originally published in 1998 A Change Is Gonna Come drew the attention of scholars and general readers alike This new edition featuring four new and updated chapters will reintroduce Werner s seminal study of black music to a new generation of readers Craig Werner is Professor of Afro American Studies at the University of Wisconsin and author of many books including Playing the Changes From Afro Modernism to the Jazz Impulse and Up Around the Bend An Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival His most recent book is Higher Ground Stevie Wonder Aretha Franklin Curtis Mayfield and the Rise and Fall of American Sou l extraordinarily far reaching h