The singer was born in a little tent beside a river. He has been running ever since, like the river. Living has been too hard. Dying frightens him, because he does not know what waits past the sky. He goes downtown and someone tells him not to hang around. He goes to his brother and asks for help, and his brother knocks him back down to his knees.
Every verse returns to the same line. It has been a long time coming. A change is going to come.
He never says when. He never says how. He has not seen the change yet, and he sings about it as if it were already on the road. By the last verse something has shifted inside him. There were times he thought he could not last much longer. Now he thinks he can carry on.
A man stands at the edge of a promise he cannot yet reach, and he refuses to stop believing it is coming. The song was written from the bottom of the hill. It looks up.
The Song and the Singer
Sam Cooke came out of gospel music before he became a pop star (64 Parishes). By 1963 he was one of the most famous singers in America. Fame did not buy him a room.
On October 8, 1963, Cooke had reservations at a new Holiday Inn outside Shreveport, Louisiana. When he and his group pulled in, the clerk turned them away. Cooke refused to leave quietly. His wife tried to calm him and warned that they would kill him. He answered that they would not, because he was Sam Cooke (Wikipedia). Police arrested the group that night for creating a disturbance.
Another song was already working on him. Earlier that year he had heard Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind." Cooke loved it and added it to his act. His biographer Peter Guralnick says he also wished a Black man had written it (NPR). Within a few months he had written his own.
He recorded it in January 1964, and it appeared on the album Ain't That Good News. On December 11, 1964, Cooke was shot and killed at a Los Angeles motel. Eleven days later RCA released the song as a single. It was the B-side of a dance record called "Shake" (Popdose). The radio version cut the verse about being told not to hang around downtown, the verse that pointed most plainly at segregation (Medium).
Cooke sings it close and unhurried, so the repeated claim never becomes a slogan. The song reached most listeners after its singer was gone. Cooke never heard it become an anthem. He sang that change was coming, and he died long before he could see how far it would go. Like Moses on Pisgah, he saw the country and did not live in it.
How Long, O LORD?
"It's been a long time coming" is a lament. Scripture has a short psalm that is nothing but that line, asked four times.
How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be exalted over me? (Psalm 13:1–2)
David gets no answer to the question. Nothing in the psalm says the enemy has fallen or the sorrow has lifted. Then, three verses later, he turns. "But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with me" (13:5–6). The circumstances have not moved. The singer has. Cooke's last verse makes the same turn. Nothing outside him has changed, and yet now he thinks he can carry on.
The verse about the brother cuts deepest, because the blow comes from someone who should have helped. David knew that wound too. "Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me" (Psalm 41:9). At the last supper, Jesus took that verse and applied it to Judas (John 13:18). The one who would change everything was knocked down by a man who ate at his table.
Through Fear of Death
The most personal line in the song is about dying. Living is too hard, and death frightens him, because he does not know what waits past the sky. The other verses are about what men do to him. This one is about what waits for every man.
The letter to the Hebrews names that fear and says what it does to a life.
Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. (Hebrews 2:14–15)
All their lifetime. The fear runs under everything else, the way a river runs under a town. The writer's answer starts with flesh and blood. The Son took on the same kind of body the singer was born in. He went into death himself, and he broke the power of the one who held it.
Israel waited a long time for that. Paul says it arrived on God's schedule. "But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons" (Galatians 4:4–5). The waiting was real. So was the day it ended.
Cooke did not live to see most of the change he sang about. Some of it is still on the road. The fear in his second verse is a different matter. It has been a long time coming, and for that fear, the change has already come.