An earlier version of the following review ran in the July-August, 1999 issue of No Depression. A new, expanded edition of the book is now out (that’s the original cover up there on the left), and as there has yet to be a music book written I’d recommend more highly, I wanted to post the piece here at Living in Stereo.

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

Nowadays, a “music critic” is what we call anyone who writes about music.  Even as “critic” became the generic term, though, actual music criticism all but disappeared.  As Greil Marcus wrote in his rock crit’ classic, Mystery Train, “a critic’s job is not only to define the context of an artist’s work but to expand that context,” to argue for ways of hearing that make connections and that articulate what music means, and could mean, in people’s lives.  In other words, music criticism must move beyond private aesthetics to wrestle with why public music matters so much in the first place. 
 
In a music press dominated by personality profiles, album reviews, and industry journalism, Craig Werner’s A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America arrives as a revelation.  Believing that no art has expressed our struggles with race as well as our traditions of black and black-informed popular music, Werner uses soul, rock and reggae, funk, disco, rap, jazz and more, to illustrate how we’ve struggled—sometimes successfully, often unsuccessfully—with America’s savage and still persistent issues of race.  Underscoring these ongoing conversations is Werner’s conviction that with the insight and inspiration of the music, plus the hard work of a whole lot of Americans, positive change really can come. In our visionless, largely apolitical times, it’s discovering someone who writes about music with such conviction is inspiring.

Werner tells his story by pointing to the dialogues, the calls and responses, between three musical “impulses” (a term borrowed from Ralph Ellison). “The blues impulse,” according to Werner, “fingers the jagged grain of…brutal experience” and bears witness to it, in order to celebrate our continued survival in the face of great burdens.  “The gospel impulse” acknowledges and testifies too, but offers the additional possibility of redemption through community, making “the feeling of human separateness, which is what the blues are all about, bearable.”  Finally, “the jazz impulse” establishes links between the community and the individual, yesterday and today, a beloved tradition and the need for new sounds for new times. For these insights alone, A Change Is Gonna Come is essential.

But Werner’s application of these complimentary impulses to America’s recent history—from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Bill Clinton, from Mahalia and Motown to Bruce Springsteen and Wu Tang Clan—is even more revealing.  Particularly impressive is the way he melds cultural theory and social science (Werner is an Afro-American studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) with the clear, passionate prose that persuasive criticism demands.

Werner easily links poverty stats, for example, to Run D.M.C.’s “It’s Like That,” then ties that band’s story to the folk parable of the tar baby.  He draws intellectual connections, and emotional ones too, between Duke Ellington and Prince, James Baldwin and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life and Jimmy Carter’s affirmative action policies—these are intellectual and emotional connections so powerful, in fact, that distinctions between the pairs virtually disappear.  Especially strong, his chapter “Springsteen and the Reagan Rules” (”Rule #2: ‘First pig to the trough wins’ or, the purpose of life is to make a lot of money”) is a definitive statement of America in the eighties, “a world where the values of black music could not even be voiced, let alone put into action.”

Predictably, given his focus, Werner doesn’t have much to say about country music.  What he does say is critical, and all too accurate.  “The real problem with country’s racial politics during the sixties,” he writes, “was that they pretended not to exist.”  This is overstatement, but just barely.  Besides the obvious exception of Charley Pride (which Werner acknowledges), the late sixties did find country music confronting race in isolated cases: Merle Haggard, for example, recorded his inter-racial romance “Irma Jackson” during these years and Waylon Jennings covered Tony Joe White’s “Willie And Laura Mae Jones.”  In each case, however, the songs remained unreleased for years due to record label fears of controversy.  Probably not unreasonable fears either, since the country musics acknowledgements with race that did get released typically sank like heavy rocks.  Dolly Parton’s version of “In The Ghetto” climbed to just #50 on the C&W charts, and Tony Booth’s try at “Irma Jackson” didn’t even do that well.

For most of the book, Werner devotes entire chapters to explications of the racial messages found in specific artists, sounds or songs: Sam Cooke and John Fogerty, Curtis Mayfield and Philly soul, “The Message” and The Clash, and so on.  Near the end, though, the book devolves, somewhat, into marathon lists of recent relevant recordings–Werner gives brief shout outs to everyone from Iris DeMent and Alejandro Escovedo to Tupac Shakur and Kirk Franklin–that may overwhelm even as they impress.   This isn’t entirely Werner’s fault.  If you want to write about race, America and the key musical figures of, say, the sixties, it’s a no brainer; you go with Motown, Stax and Jimi Hendrix. But in today’s niche-marketed world, and minus the genre-crossing Top Forty formats that once galvanized national discussions around a shared language of pop singles, how do you even begin a conversation?

Jump starting that public conversation is what Werner hopes to accomplish.  To that end, the second edition includes a couple of new sections, including “Ozomatli and the Myth of Purity: Notes on the Browning of America,” required reading for all of us who care about pop music and America as we drag the same old problems into a new century with that will inevitably bring with it problems all its own.

Embracing the very blues impulse he writes about, Werner looks race hatred and free market fundamentalism square in the face, and doesn’t blink. And, like the gospel and jazz impulses he articulates here, Werner also knows that “We can never separate who we are from the people around us,” that we must value the wisdom of our ancestors even as we discover new ways to talk to each other.  In A Change Is Gonna Come, Werner illuminates connections, broadens the context, models ways to listen.  Exactly what great music criticism is supposed to do.

Buy A Change Is Gonna Come.

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