In Dreamgirls, that bloated parody of the Supremes story, one scene finds Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech playing on LP, while another runs newsreel of the 12th Street riot in Detroit in 1967. Beyoncé and Jennifer Hudson get plenty of opportunities to flounce in period costumes, yet never discuss what King’s dream involves. And the Detroit riot? Pure decoration. Dreamgirls pays typical Hollywood lip service to a previous generation’s struggle, yet fails to communicate how black American music became part of the very fabric of the civil-rights battle and its aftermath. Why, even the Supremes sang Love Child, a ditty warning off prospective teenage mothers, which came with a chirpy “tenement block” chorus.

Still, Dreamgirls holds up a mirror of sorts to contemporary black American music: alongside the omnipresent Beyoncé, Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, Mary J Blige, Usher, Alicia Keysand co produce multi-multimillion-selling albums whose collective message rarely reaches beyond “Buy my latest product” endorsements. The angry conscience that once gave black American music such potency — Billie Holiday wailing Strange Fruit, Marvin Gaye crooning What’s Going On — appears neutered today. No popular black American artist has released material challenging the invasion of Iraq. Even when Hurricane Katrina revealed New Orleans as home to a huge black underclass, protesting voices from the hip-hop and R&B scene were few.

Just in case people were beginning to think ’twas ever thus, two albums arrive to tell it like it is. Change Is Gonna Come, subtitled The Voice of Black America 1963-1973, is a 23-track compilation that charts how Sam Cooke fired up soul music with the album’s title track, then continues through to Gil Scott-Heron’s incendiary cut The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. In between, there are classics from the likes of James Brown, Nina Simone and Donny Hathaway. While Change Is Gonna Come doesn’t claim to be a complete retrospective of the era’s socially conscious black music — that would necessitate a box set and involve a minefield of licensing — it is a fascinating document and, considering it is largely agitpop, for the most part highly enjoyable. High praise, considering that nothing stales quite like a previous generation’s rhetoric.

Among the civil-rights movement’s foremost voices were the Staple Singers, who are represented on the album with When Will We Be Paid, a chugging slice of angry soul. The Mississippi gospel troupe’s willingness to sing for the cause saw them threatened and jailed before they turned secular and scored huge hits with Respect Yourself and I’ll Take You There. Appropriately, Mavis Staples’s forthcoming album, We’ll Never Turn Back, finds the lead vocalist once again embracing both Southern gospel and social protest.

Staples hasn’t troubled the charts since 1991, yet her magnificent voice continues to draw prominent admirers — Prince produced her, Bob Dylan is a duet buddy — and, on We’ll Never Turn Back, Ry Cooder is at the controls. Cooder and Staples work well together, his epic sound-scapes pushing her to sing in a fiery way. The opening track, Down in Mississippi, finds her recalling growing up in a society where everything was segregated, and the disc includes both interpretations of civil-rights-era hymns and wry blues standards. Staples called on the Freedom Singers (of We Shall Overcome fame) to provide a backing chorus, while Cooder brought in the Zulu choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The results are stunning. “You like it? Good,” Staples says, from her Chicago home. “I like it too.” She chuckles loudly, obviously satisfied, then admits that when first approached by the boss of the Anti label, Andy Kaulkin, about the project, she had reservations. “I said to Andy, ‘You really think the world wants to hear freedom songs?’ Then I got to thinking that it’s really not in the past. What happened in New Orleans with Katrina, cops in New York shooting a young black man 50 damn times — this is painful stuff. So I got to thinking on how people today need to hear these songs. I’m trying to send a message that we got to keep on.”

Staples pauses to clear her throat, then continues, with no prompting: “This isn’t just some nostalgia album. It ain’t no feel-good history lesson. These songs tell real stories about real events that were deadly serious and seriously deadly. When the Staple Singers started out, we were mostly singing in churches in the South. Pops [her father, a band leader] saw Martin Luther King speak in 1963, and was impressed. I remember him saying, ‘If he can preach it, we can sing it.’ We drew on the spirituality and strength of the church to help gain social justice and try to achieve equal rights, and, I hope, helped make a difference in this country. It wasn’t easy, wasn’t comfortable, got scary sometimes — when they slung us in a cell in West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1965, I wondered if we’d ever make it out alive. But we never quit, and we spread our word and helped make positive changes. And that seems missing today.”

How does Staples view today’s generation of black singers and rappers? “They get offered a fortune on a golden plate, so they ignore what’s goin’ on. Black people today lack leaders. So,” she says, her rich voice rising, “I’m gonna go out there and put it to them.” And she knows how.

Change Is Gonna Come (Kent) is released tomorrow; We’ll Never Turn Back (Anti) is released on April 17

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