“Since there’s no video footage of it, that gave us the confidence to take a little bit of a leap of the imagination and do something that not only honored Sam and the piece that he wrote, but also the story being told in the film,” says Odom, whose performance was fueled by the rigorous conversations he had just filmed. 7, the same date of the actual “Tonight Show” appearance 56 years earlier.
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It was the last scene of the movie that Odom shot, and happened to fall on Feb.
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The film adaptation became “a wonderful dual opportunity to present the entire song with its full arrangement, and to re-create a moment that really happened but none of us have ever seen,” says Powers. In the play, Cooke revisits the topic of Dylan’s hit, telling Brown, “Just because I haven’t put out any records about the movement doesn’t mean I haven’t written any songs about it.” He then shares a portion of the song a cappella for his close friends - and the live audience, which is of course acutely aware of the song’s rich history. But the song has always closed out “One Night in Miami,” from its 2013 debut at Los Angeles’ Rogue Machine Theatre to subsequent stagings in Denver, Baltimore and London.
In real life, that “Tonight Show” gig occurred weeks before the foursome’s historic gathering. It came to him almost whole, despite the fact that in many ways, it’s probably the most complex song that he wrote because it was both singular - in the sense that you started out, ‘I was born by the river’ - but it also told the story both of a generation and of a people.” “It was less work than any song he’d ever written. “Since you say being vocally in the struggle is bad for business, why has this old song gone higher on the pop charts than anything you got out?”įor Cooke, “A Change” was “a real departure,” “undoubtedly the first time that he addressed social problems in a direct and explicit way,” Cooke’s biographer, Peter Guralnick, told NPR in 2014. “This is a white boy from Minnesota who has nothing to gain from writing a song that speaks to the struggles of our people, more to the movement, than anything you have ever penned in your life,” Malcolm X ( Kingsley Ben-Adir) tells Cooke in the movie. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan’s protest song “Blowin’ in the Wind” became an undeniable hit.
“It means something very special to us, so it’s performed with care.”īefore debuting “A Change,” Cooke had built an impressive career as a crossover artist with easygoing compositions like “You Send Me,” “Wonderful World” and “Cupid.” But something shifted in 1963, when he and his band were turned away from a Louisiana hotel when he refused to leave, he was then arrested and jailed for disturbing the peace.
“That piece of writing is so powerful,” says Odom. Covered by artists of every stripe, it has also emerged as a mainstay of momentous occasions: President Barack Obama’s first inaugural in 2009, by Bettye LaVette and Jon Bon Jovi Whitney Houston’s funeral in 2012, by Kim Burrell last year’s Democratic National Convention, by Jennifer Hudson. That song, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” would go on to become an anthem of the civil rights movement and, for many, one of the greatest songs of all time. The final moments of Amazon’s “One Night in Miami” drop in on Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) as he makes an appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” Unflappable and debonair as always, he’s just finished performing one of his signature feel-good pop songs when he launches into “something that I’ve been working on, something new I haven’t really shared with anyone yet - anyone except for some friends of mine.”
The following story contains spoilers from the movie “One Night in Miami,” now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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