Charlottesville by Bryan Toney is a song about watching the media coverage of an appalling tragedy in your own backyard and realising you can no longer pretend that race hatred is something that happens far away to other people.
The gentle humility of A Change is Gonna Come, Sam Cooke’s 1964 plea for emancipation, belies the simmering fury that inspired it, a fury that reached boiling point in America where this song became an anthem for millions of disenfranchised black people who took to the streets to make that change a reality…