“Ain’t That Good News” by Sam Cooke

I revisit the tragic swan song from one of soul's greatest talents.

This album review revisits Sam Cooke’s 1964 masterpiece, the album that would tragically be his last.

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Genre: R&B, Soul, Pop

Label: RCA

Release Date: February 1, 1964

Vibe: 🕊️

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Sam Cooke died on December 11, 1964, shot at a Los Angeles motel under circumstances that have never fully added up. He was 33 years old. The tragedy immortalized him as one of music’s biggest “what if” figures, and made Ain’t That Good News, released less than a year before he was killed, as an unintentional, heartwrenching swan song. It was supposed to be another logical step forward for an artist who was hitting his stride as a businessman, activist, and creative force. Throughout his career, he refused to be boxed in by other people’s expectations. Listening to this record, you hear someone in complete control of their considerable powers and primed to take over the R&B and pop charts in much the same way that Marvin Gaye would with What’s Going On less than a decade later. Sadly, we’re only left with could’ves instead of dids.

Ain’t That Good News follows a classic Saturday night/Sunday morning structure, where the first side is more energetic soul cuts, while the flip side hits you with Cooke’s signature brand of subdued balladry. If you examine the LP’s bookends, there’s a considerable difference in approach, and yet every note you hear is undeniably his. The opening title track, a gospel-tinged celebration, sounds like pure joy wrapped in acoustic guitar and a gentle drum groove. Cooke’s voice glides over the arrangement with his signature, effortless restraint, stretching syllables until they shimmer but never breaking them. 30 minutes later, he comes through with the true closer, “There’ll Be No Second Time,” an effective entry in Cooke’s then-growing library of “you’ve done be wrong” swayers. The lyrics, however, belie his mean streak. “Go on laugh and have your fun/Let the good times keep rollin’ on,” he says. “There’ll come a day when you’ll have to pay/For everything that you have done.”

By 1964, Cooke had already proven himself as one of the most versatile voices in America. Born in Mississippi in 1931, he grew up in Chicago, the son of a Baptist minister, and was singing in church at age six. That upbringing gave him a foundation in gospel but also a different kind of edge, turning an aesthetic normally associated with sacred music into something almost dangerously sensual. In 1957, he crossed over to pop with “You Send Me,” a song he had written and recorded himself as a demo nearly two years earlier. It went to No. 1 on both the pop and R&B charts, selling over 1.7 million copies and establishing him as an overnight sensation. It made him the first Black artist to build a career on his own terms, more or less from the beginning.

Until his death, he would craft 30 Top 40 hits, including “What a Wonderful World,” “Chain Gang,” and “Bring It On Home.” He did so while destabilizing the music industry, primarily because he refused to stay in the same reliable lane that other Black artists operated in. He could croon like Nat King Cole, swing like Frank Sinatra, and, when he wanted to, screech like Little Richard. Occasionally, he did all of that in the same track, in the span of just a couple of minutes. In 1961, he founded SAR Records to give other Black artists a means of owning their music and legacies. He fought for higher royalties and creative control when most R&B singers were treated like replaceable parts on an assembly line. And he was starting to write songs that moved beyond romance into something sharper, more pointed. When recording for Ain’t That Good News got underway at RCA Victor’s Studio A in Hollywood, Cookie and his producers had designs on a more sophisticated production. Lush strings and horns float above rhythm sections that feel loose and uninhibited. It sounds like Cooke really was turning a corner as a cultural icon.

What struck me is how diverse the influences Cooke draws on are. “Tennessee Waltz” is essentially a country standard that he transforms into a tender, mournful moment. His vocal sits low in the mix, striking this almost conversational tone, all while the instrumental stirs around him like a slow-motion sigh. It’s not flashy, but it’s devastating in its restraint and is in the running for the best song on this tracklist. “Another Saturday Night,” a Top 10 single initially released in 1963, takes a completely different approach. It’s a lighthearted complaint about being broke and lonely, but Cooke sells it with so much charm that you can’t help but smile along with him. There’s also a small calypso inflection sitting under the groove that gives it more bounce than some of his other material. The backing vocals answer him like old friends. It’s miles away from the gravity of a later cut like “Home (When Shadows Fall),” but Cooke clearly didn’t want to be just one thing. He wanted to be all of them.

The track that hits hardest, then and now, is of course “A Change is Gonna Come.” This gorgeous, ultimately hopeful civil rights anthem was inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and written after Cooke was turned away from a whites-only motel in Louisiana. Cooke supposedly was so impressed that Dylan had written an anti-racism song and disappointed in himself that he hadn’t yet tried his hand at equaling or surpassing it. The resulting ballad personifies persistence in the face of crushing systemic oppression. Cooke sings it with a weariness that has become an intrinsic part of America’s overall story, contrasted beautifully with the strings that build to a swell before he utters. The timpani rolls like distant thunder, and his voice cracks just enough to let you hear the growing exhaustion underneath the hope. It is, without a shred of doubt, one of the greatest performances in music history and the defining cry for unity across a country that’s still more mired in discriminatory practices than it wants to admit.

Another one of my creative heroes, Spike Lee, understood all of that when he used the song to build up to the bloody climax of his 1992 biopic, Malcolm X. As the song starts playing, you get snapshots of the activist driving to make a public appearance, but there’s this look of knowing dread on Denzel Washington’s face as he glances at his mirrors, looking at who might be following him, seemingly resigned to the inevitable. The close-up on his face as Cooke sings, “It’s been too hard livin’/But I’m afraid to die” gets me right in my gut every single time I watch the movie. You know what’s coming, especially after the man who’d later kill Malcolm X gives the doll back to his daughter. But then, the brief interaction he has with the woman on the sidewalk, who repeats the song's theme back to him, is the little glimmer of light at the end of racism’s dark tunnel that Cooke alludes to. He never got to see the Civil Rights Act pass. He never got to see what his music would mean to future generations and how it would change the world. He was gone before he could finish the singular cultural transformation he’d started.

The mystery of his death only deepens the loss. The official story is that he was shot by Bertha Franklin, the manager of the Hacienda Motel, after a confrontation involving a sex worker named Elisa Boyer. But the official details have never made sense. Witnesses contradicted each other, evidence mysteriously disappeared, and the coroner still ruled it a justifiable homicide. Per Peter Guralnick, the author of the excellent Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke:

“I could have filled 100 pages of the book with an appendix on all the theories about his death. The central tenet of every one of those theories is that this was a case of another proud Black man brought down by the white establishment who simply didn’t want to see him grow any bigger. I looked into this very carefully. I had access to the private investigator’s report, which nobody has seen and which filled in a good many more details. And no evidence has ever been adduced to [prove] any of these theories. But, you know, it’s the love that people felt for Sam Cooke, I think, is far more significant than the circumstances of his death. But in the research that I did and also all the people who were closest to him, I don’t know anyone who doubts the official story, as much as they might wish that it were otherwise.”

Ain’t That Good News feels unfinished. Not because the songs are incomplete, but because the arc was. Cooke was just starting to understand how much power he could wield. He was learning to write songs that challenged as much as they entertained. He was, knowingly or not, building infrastructure that eventually gave voice to artists who might otherwise not have had access to that kind of exposure. Every artist who has fought for ownership since him is walking a path he had started to clear. Every musician who demands control over their output and refuses to acquiesce to systematic oversight is finishing a fight he started. That’s the “what if” that looms largest since his passing. Not what we lost, but what we were robbed of.