“It’s been a long time coming. But I know a change is gonna come.” These are words from Sam Cooke’s final song, “A Change is Gonna Come,” a powerful protest song that was released during the height of the civil rights movement. However, Cooke’s music wasn’t always like this, and it took him a while to get to this monumental point in his career.

Growing up in a very religious Christian household, Cooke started out in various different gospel groups such as The Singing Children, The Highway Q.C.’s and The Soul Stirrers. He did very well in all of these groups, but Cooke didn’t want to do exclusively gospel music for the rest of his life.

He began to dabble in secular, non-religious music with the song “Loveable,” which he released under the pseudonym ‘Dale Cook’. However, his fans saw through this ruse and refused to accept his crossover to secular pop. Cooke even began to get booed at his gospel concerts.

Even after the backlash, he kept releasing secular music; he put out “You Send Me,” which was a massive hit. It broke through to the secular market selling over two million records. Cooke kept going with popular cliche love songs, and as an artist he was getting stale. That was until “A Change is Gonna Come,” which was deep and a far cry from what Cooke normally did. It not only was an incredible civil rights song, but a far bolder idea from a creative standpoint. His lyrics were no longer about love or loving someone, it was about himself and his own experiences.

It was the first time in his career he said something real. Here you have Cooke who was an incredibly successful African-American artist at the time, making hit after hit, with the same formulaic love songs. So why would he make this change?

After hearing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Cooke was incredibly moved by this song, so moved in fact that he was actually ashamed of himself for not writing a song about the civil rights movement yet. This was for a variety of reasons, but mostly because Cooke thought he could have had everything taken away from him just because he was Black and trying to speak out.

He didn’t want to lose his audience after how hard he worked to get to that point, but finally in 1964, he released “A Change is Gonna Come.”  It is a case of one idea sparking another, and this cycle of inspired song-writing has continued to this day with artists like Kendrick Lamar with Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst, Jorja Smith with Blue Lights, Donald Glover (Childish Gambino) with This is America, Anderson Paak with Lockdown and even Lil Baby.

Lil Baby sticks out on this list because similar to how people thought of Cooke at the time, he is the last person people would have thought to write a protest song, but when he did, it was something special.

“The Bigger Picture” by Lil Baby was released during a time when people really needed it, the big artists were silent; someone needed to say something. And now looking back at it, these songs aren’t just songs.

These are historical moments embodied in the artists of the time. Like Cooke with soul music and Lil Baby with rap, both of these artists for at least one song put their own musical spin on what was really happening, not just in their own world, but in everyone’s.

Whether you’re a fan of these artists or not, they are a part of our culture and have powerful effects on how we feel and can even have some influence on what’s to come.

Even though Cooke died shortly after “A Change is Gonna Come,” his legacy will be preserved through his music forever, and future artists continuing to share their own experiences through music.

Writing personal music can be tough, especially when your audience begins to expect a certain type of music from you. Cooke set a precedent that even when he thought his fans might reject a new direction in his music, he did it anyway because he didn’t succumb to social pressure. It inspired a new generation of self-expression in music and has had rippling effects to this day.