A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America [Paperback]

Craig Werner (Author)

Book Description

Age Level: 1 and up

Mahalia Jackson, James Brown, Diana Ross, the Righteous Brothers, the Jackson Five, Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, and Aretha Franklin--since the early 60s, Black popular music has become increasingly intertwined with American culture, both drawing from it and shaping it. From Ray Charles to Ice Cube, Craig Werner draws lively character sketches of major musicians, intricately filling in the background historical events. From the inspirational soul music of the Civil Rights Movement and the Motown moment which aided and sped integration in its own way, to the angry "gangsta" rappers of today who dare to speak the uncensored truth, the songs are telling us the state of the world, and Werner helps train our ears to distinguish it. Emphasizing how musicians of all races have drawn on gospel, jazz, and the blues, A Change Is Gonna Come is a celebration of cultural tradition and an illustration of the way it can embrace us all.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An ambitious and comprehensive look at the deep connection between race and music in America, Werner's book is filled with provocative insights. Why, for instance, did "funkateers and feminists, progressives and puritans, rockers and reactionaries" band together in an "unholy alliance" against disco, destroying "the last remaining musical scene that was in any sense racially mixed"Aa scene that made crossover stars of women, African-Americans and gay men? Werner (Up Around the Bend), a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is enlightening without being overwhelming. Tracing the gospel, blues and jazz "impulses" through American, English and Jamaican music, he shows how the threads of music spun under the oppression of slavery and inequality have been woven into all types of popular and innovative music. One of the high notes of the book is his vivid description of how, as disco petered out, hip-hop and rap emerged in the burnt-out, battle-scarred terrain of the South Bronx. Cut off from the increasingly "upwardly mobile" Studio 54 scene, the locals developed their own dance music, drawing on snippets from the history of popular music and particularly on the techniques of Jamaican street-party DJs. Werner's breadth of knowledge is impressive. He writes with equal clarity aboutAand respect forAgospel icon Mahalia Jackson (who "placed black women and their voices at the center of the freedom struggle") and Public Enemy (who expressed a "combination of political intelligence and street realism"). In America, where most people live in spaces rigidly defined by race and ethnicity, Werner shows how music still has the power to bring people together.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Werner (Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse, Univ. of Illinois, 1994) charts the integrative influence of African American-based music on race relations in the United States from the 1950s to the present. Generally following a chronological approach, he divides the book into 65 brief chapters that loosely relate to three major musical themes: a redemptive gospel strain, jazz innovation, and blues realism. Werner most clearly explores the link between music and race in chapters on soul, disco, funk, house, and rap, explaining the connections between Motown and the dream of Martin Luther King Jr., Public Enemy's rap against a Reaganized America, and Aretha Franklin's place in the late 1960s black power movement. At his worst, Werner drifts into academic overintellectualizations of straightforward artists and their songs and overambitiously tries to deal with the scope of African American music while ignoring most of postwar jazz. Although it sometimes resembles an uneven, disjointed series of lectures revolving around opinion rather than research, this book still offers academics and lay readers a provocative, passionate glimpse at the core meaning and effects of postwar American popular music.?David P. Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 1 and up
  
• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Plume (April 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452280656
• ISBN-13: 978-0452280656
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #882,249 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rare popular music book of intelligent and engaging writing, January 30, 2000

By 

Jeff Delfield - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (Paperback)

Talk about a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, the popular music literature out there seems to fall into two camps. The first populates journalism school dropouts who, because of their love for the music, feel the need to share their passion with the whole wide world. Their writings are usually superficial and they're the crowd Dylan complained about when he said (paraphrase), "they're a bunch of 40 year olds writing for a bunch of 10 year olds." The other group is made up of academics who, though often having brilliant insights, are more often impenetrable to the masses of popular music listeners. Indeed, this ilk is just as likely to write *about* listeners rather than for them.

Craig Werner skillfully accomplishes what only a handful have done before him: marrying the insights of a well read, thoughtful academic with a down-to-earth (way far away from any ivory tower), yet passionate style of writing. Using the "calls" and "responses" found in black music (and communities) and the "impulses" of gospel, blues and jazz, Werner seamlessly connects such varied artists as Mahalia Jackson, Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, Public Enemy, Madonna, Prince, Duke Ellington, Ani Difranco, and seemingly hundreds more. Though the "huh?" factor may be high at times (the jazz impulse includes Neil Young's "Arc"), through fresh, direct insights an "oh yeah" factor always neutralizes it (usually within a page or two).

The subtitle of the book suggests this is an explanation of "music, race and the soul of America." Well, it's not. This is merely Werner's "response," based on the many "calls" he writes of in his book. This is now my "response" to Werner's "call" - Wow, you gotta read this book.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is the most important book about American pop music., March 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (Paperback)

Craig Werner takes us on a lively guided tour of American popular music over the past several decades, focusing on how this music reflects--and promises, in a certain sense, to heal--the enduring racial chasm in American life. It is funny, tragic, and always engaging. The writing is often brilliant and always to the point. This is probably the best book about American music that I have ever read. Werner does such an excellent job, not only writing about the music itself, which he does with remarkable clarity and intelligence, but in placing the music in the historical context from which it emerged. This would be a great book for 20th century American history courses, courses about the 1960s, courses about African American history and culture. This is a book about the soundtrack of our lives, and how it speaks to the lasting dilemmas of race.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WELL WRITTEN, December 5, 2001

By 

Bakari Chavanu - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (Paperback)

I read "A Change is Gonna Come" last year and found it be a very informative, well written, history of the relationship between soul/Black music and the Civil Rights/Black Power movement. Werner treats the music like a literary tradition--showing how artists from Sam Cooke, to Aretha Franklin, to rapper KRS-One both were influenced by and helped shape the struggles of social justice. Aretha's fameous signature song "Respect," for example, was about the Black female call for respect from men, but also the Black movement's call for respect by a White racist power structure. Likewise, by the Reagan era, Public Enemy got it just right when they produced "Welcome to the Terrodome," and "Don't Believe the Hype," while N.W.A produced "Fuck the Police"--fameous *speeches* for a repressive era. Werner shows how the music never stops. That while there's always music that makes artists a quick rich buck, there's also serious music that seeks to document and comment on what's happening in the world. I look forward to rereading it again and listening to many of the popular songs he writes about.