Sam Cooke had been killed the previous month with a current single, "Shake," ready for release.

A brilliant up-tempo song with dazzling vocal acrobatics and a great beat, it was issued less than two weeks after Cooke's death and soared into the Top Ten, but there was no accompanying LP, and Cooke had not left behind enough unissued studio material to create one.

Instead, starting within days of Cooke's death in order to get this album out for January of 1965, RCA reached back as far as six years, to Cooke's sides for Specialty records and the Keen label ("Win Your Love for Me," "Comes Love"), up through songs from early 1964's A Change Is Gonna Come album and the handful of numbers he'd finished late in the year.

They threw on the shortened single version of "A Change Is Gonna Come," as edited for the B-side of "Shake," to create the first in an ever-weaker series of pastiche albums in Cooke's catalog.

This actually isn't a bad selection of material, and some of what's here was among his latest sides, thus representing some facet of where his music was heading during his last year alive, in what amounted to an unfinished career in an unfinished life, in an unsettled time.

It's just not a terribly relevant album in terms of anything it says about Cooke's music, apart from its diversity over time.

Most of the material on this album has reappeared in more recent years on either The Man Who Invented Soul box or the Keep Movin' On CD.