Reagon was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and was named for Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State under President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1944.

[1] Reagon's powerful tenor voice spread the message of the civil rights movement throughout the United States and Canada in the 1960s.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Reagon became active in the movements against the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, and environmental destruction.

Cordell Reagon remained an activist until his 1996 death at the age of 53 in his Berkeley apartment, the victim of a still-unsolved homicide.

Reagon's two marriages: to Bernice Johnson of Albany, Georgia, and to Merble Harrington of Suffield, Connecticut, ended in divorce.