Craig Werner's Come: A Summary

Craig Werner’s A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America, serves as an overview of the post-war history of recorded music by and influenced by African Americans. In addition to a historical analysis of post-war African American music, Werner focuses on how music both effects and is effected by society and provides a running dialogue between artists and eras. Music’s significance transcends its commercial and aesthetic value and does not simply serve as a soundtrack to a generation or a point in time. Additionally, music weaves itself into the fabric of history and when viewed in isolation loses its context and importance in understanding how it and the surrounding world changed over time. With that in mind, Werner sets out to place popular and vernacular artists in the “African American idiom” as a vital mirror to the human and American experience and in possession of the capacity to effect change. …show more content…
The first, the “gospel impulse,” is based on the artist “acknowledging the burden, bearing witness, and finding redemption.” The second, “the blues impulse,” consists of the artist “fingering the jagged grain of your brutal experience, finding a near-tragic, near-comic voice to express that experience, and reaffirming your existence.” The third and final strain is the “jazz impulse." In it, “the jazz artist constantly reworks her identity on three levels: (1) as an individual; (2) as a member of a community; and (3) as a ‘link in the chain of tradition.’” These impulses provide a chain of commentary through time between artists and audience that aids in the understanding of why music evolves despite that evolution, grounds itself in the universal truths proclaimed by their forefathers and