But Now I Think I'm Able to Carry On

"'It was less work than any song he'd ever written,' Guralnick says. 'It almost scared him that the song — it was almost as if the song were intended for somebody else. He grabbed it out of the air and it came to him whole, despite the fact that in many ways it's probably the most complex song that he wrote. 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.'"


Arun Rath at NPR marks the fiftieth anniversary of Sam Cooke's greatest song.