There are two types of obsessive music fans: those who can list personnel, labels, catalog numbers, and recording dates for thousands of songs across several decades, and those who latch onto the power of music to reveal and change the course of history. Craig Werner seems to be both, and he uses his skills as the former to fuel his work as the latter in his new book A Change Is Gonna Come. Sweeping in its scope and meticulous in its detail, Change offers a survey of more than a half-century of music, especially black music, and its connections to American social history. Singling out the driving impulses of three musical genres—blues, gospel, and jazz—Werner repeatedly illustrates the sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting, and often unexpected ways these impulses play themselves out in recorded music. The lucidity of his discussions would in themselves be an accomplishment of musical scholarship. That they occur as only part of a musical history that moves from Mahalia Jackson to the Wu-Tang Clan, and a social history that moves from King to Farrakhan—with everything from John Coltrane to Gloria Gaynor to George Wallace to Rakim thrown in—makes Werner's book that much more of an accomplishment. He writes with the passion of a fan, the theoretical intensity of a scholar (which he is), and the clearheadedness of a great journalist. A discussion of Motown, for example, captures what makes the music work so well, illustrates its place in the history of soul music, and cites its failings as a progressive force in racial politics. Ultimately, it's this subject that drives Werner's book. Page after page addresses the winding paths of black music, but Werner always brings the discussion back home to the music's role in reflecting and affecting the state of American racial relations. An abbreviated closing section on the '90s lacks some of the precision and depth of those that precede it, but that doesn't make Change anything less than essential reading for anyone who shares its author's passions, musical and otherwise.