A Change Is Gonna Come. Baby Huey and the Babysitters. 1971. Curtom.

 Artistic improvisation is a high wire act in which the artist stakes that part of himself who’s only brought to life under pressure of the moment. The artist, in a state of absolute freedom, may only return to the safety of the ground beneath him by exposing a consciousness he is otherwise predisposed, like most of us, to keeping secured by lock and key. In 1971, roughly four months after the body of James Thomas Ramey—better known, along with his band the Babysitters, by his stage name Baby Huey—was found dead in a Chicago motel room of a heart attack likely caused by a heroin overdose, Curtom Records, co-founded by Curtis Mayfield, released the LP, The Baby Huey Story: The Living Legend. Closing side one of the posthumous record is Ramey’s cover of A Change Is Gonna Come. The cover version’s first two verses demonstrate a finely executed pathos the band and vocalist pitch solidly between the lyric’s blues resignation and hymn influenced entreaty. Then something unexpected happens. Ramey and his band leap, unbridled, into a Janis Joplin-Big Brother inspired, rock fueled declaration of events, jettisoning the lyric’s “movie/downtown” verse, and moving directly into the social betrayal of the “Brother, help me, please” couplet. Ramey then amends Cook’s original lyric with a verse that tells us, “There was a time when I tried to live alone,” but then, through divine intervention, the singer “makes it back home.” The blues rock juggernaut presses on, punctuated by a Stax style horn section made up of Byron Watkins and Rick Marcotte. Thus, the parable of the American Civil Rights Movement becomes an impassioned ballad of transcendence, renewal of self, and, as a spoken word coda struggles to make clear, cosmic justice. The finale is both bewildering and fascinating for what it does and doesn’t do. It poeticizes, without resorting to poetry, the struggle of sixties American youth in transition from a generation raised with mass awareness of the firsthand effects of drug use to a culture in which daily drug intake was normalized, with a complex of consequences whose reach we still feel today. What Ramey’s rambling outro doesn’t do is attempt to impose a facile coherence upon this spiritual project, thus rendering intelligible what is better expressed in abstruse versification, the same free associative mode of lyrical discourse that Van Morrison made perfect on Astral Weeks. Another means of achieving detachment from self was the way of altruism practiced by fellow Chicagoan Fred Hampton, before his assassination in 1969 by members of the Chicago Police Department, acting illegally with the FBI. Hampton’s legendary community activism and urban charity work was something of a revolutionary dialectic practiced by a committed Marxist-Leninist, whose praxis tethered him to the reality of this world while his revolutionary sense of action paradoxically transcended the existential banalities to which so many of us belong. Both Ramey and Hampton were young men who were killed by an intrusive violence systemized into a culture that has yet to define the limits of its democratic freedoms. A change is gonna come; likely, many changes happening simultaneously, and far too rapidly to reasonably process and absorb; most of them introduced by governing forces into the status quo, for better or for worse, along racial and economic lines. Popular music once dramatized in mythic or poetic terms the details of our struggle to match wits with life’s bilious offensives, the devil in our revolt against the vast madness of civic corruptibility. The rigors imposed upon marginalized groups by the toxic, radioactive star of American capitalism—inaccessibility to proper health care surely hastened Ramey’s early death—made durability within the machine of commercial marketplace a sometimes fatal game. The calculus of risk aversion, our one true source of poetry since August, 1945, keeps us nostalgic for the fictions of unstable meanings.