Songs of the Day for MLK

From Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Nina Simone, Phil Ochs, Allen Toussaint and Rhiannon Giddens.

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books and now writer/director of award-winning films. He was also a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy.

A holiday special: a few songs from the civil rights battle in memory of Martin Luther King Jr., who was certainly a formative figure for me growing up in the late-1950s and 1960s. And an apt cartoon down below.

Sam Cooke wrote the greatest song of our era, “A Change Gonna Come,” partly inspired by Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He felt a black man should have written that so he penned an even better one. Here he does the Dylan.

Otis’s version of “Change” just before he passed.

Another of the all-time greats, Nina Simone, with a stupendous song, “Mississippi Goddam.”

My old pal Phil Ochs with his “Here’s to the State of Mississippi.” Near end of his life he re-cut it as “Here’s to the State of Richard Nixon.”

A modern giant talent, Rhiannon Giddens, with her take on the classic song about the four girls killed in church bombing, “Birmingham Sunday.”

Finally, another of “greatest songs of the century,” Allen Toussaint’s wider lens with his “Freedom for the Stallion.” The line that always slays me: “Heading for a brand new land / that some cat said he up and found.”

Cartoon of the Day

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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s atomic bomb movie twisted by the White House and Pentagon), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His 2021 film, Atomic Cover-up, drew extraordinary acclaim, and his current one, The First Attack Ads, aired over hundreds of PBS stations this past fall. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.