Saturday, April 30, 2016

SAM COOKE (1931-1964): Legendary, iconic, and innovative singer, songwriter, musician, composer, arranger, producer, and ensemble leader


SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR:  KOFI  NATAMBU

  SPRING, 2016

  VOLUME TWO           NUMBER THREE


WAYNE SHORTER


Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of: 
 
LEO SMITH
March 26-April 1

AHMAD JAMAL
April 2-8

 
DIONNE WARWICK
April 9-15

LEE MORGAN
April 16-22

BILL DIXON
April 23-29

SAM COOKE
April 30-May 6

 
MUHAL RICHARD ABRAMS
May 7-13

BILLY HARPER
May 14-20

SISTER ROSETTA THARPE
May 21-27

QUINCY JONES
May 28-June 3

BESSIE SMITH
June 4-10

ROBERT JOHNSON
June 11-17



http://www.allmusic.com/artist/sam-cooke-mn0000238115/biography


SAM COOKE  (1931-1964)


Artist Biography by Bruce Eder 


Sam Cooke was the most important soul singer in history -- he was also the inventor of soul music, and its most popular and beloved performer in both the black and white communities. Equally important, he was among the first modern black performers and composers to attend to the business side of the music business, and founded both a record label and a publishing company as an extension of his careers as a singer and composer. Yet, those business interests didn't prevent him from being engaged in topical issues, including the struggle over civil rights, the pitch and intensity of which followed an arc that paralleled Cooke's emergence as a star -- his own career bridged gaps between black and white audiences that few had tried to surmount, much less succeeded at doing, and also between generations; where Chuck Berry or Little Richard brought black and white teenagers together, James Brown sold records to white teenagers and black listeners of all ages, and Muddy Waters got young white folkies and older black transplants from the South onto the same page, Cooke appealed to all of the above, and the parents of those white teenagers as well -- yet he never lost his credibility with his core black audience. In a sense, his appeal anticipated that of the Beatles, in breadth and depth. 


He was born Sam Cook in Clarksdale, MS, on January 22, 1931, one of eight children of a Baptist minister and his wife. Even as a young boy, he showed an extraordinary voice and frequently sang in the choir in his father's church. During the middle of the decade, the Cook family moved to Chicago's South Side, where the Reverend Charles Cook quickly established himself as a major figure in the religious community. Sam and three of his siblings also formed a group of their own, the Singing Children, in the 1930s. Although his own singing was confined to gospel music, he was aware and appreciative of the popular music of the period, particularly the melodious, harmony-based sounds of the Ink Spots, whose influence could later be heard in songs such as "You Send Me" and "For Sentimental Reasons." As a teenager, he was a member of the Teen Highway QCs, a gospel group that performed in churches and at religious gatherings. His membership in that group led to his introduction to the Soul Stirrers, one of the top gospel groups in the country, and in 1950 he joined them. 


If Cooke had never recorded a note of music on his own, he would still be remembered today in gospel circles for his work with the Soul Stirrers. Over the next six years, his role within the group and his prominence within the black community rose to the point where he was already a star, with his own fiercely admiring and devoted audience, through his performances on songs like "Touch the Hem of His Garment," "Nearer to Thee," and "That's Heaven to Me." The group was one of the top acts on Art Rupe's Specialty Records label, and he might have gone on for years as their most popular singer, but Cooke's goal was to reach audiences beyond the religious community, and beyond the black population, with his voice. This was a tall order at the time, as the mere act of recording a popular song could alienate the gospel listenership in an instant; singing for God was regarded in those circles as a gift and a responsibility, and popular music, rock & roll, and R&B were to be abhorred, at least coming from the mouth of a gospel singer; the gap was so great that when a blues singer such as Blind Gary Davis became "sanctified" (that is, found religion) as the Rev. Gary Davis, he could still sing and play his old blues melodies, but had to devise new words, and he never sang the blues words again. 


He tested the waters of popular music in 1956 with the single "Lovable," produced by Bumps Blackwell and credited under the name Dale Cooke so as not to attract too much attention from his existing audience. It was enough, however, to get Cooke dropped by the Soul Stirrers and their record label, but that freed him to record under his real name. The result was one of the biggest selling singles of the 1950s, a Cooke original entitled "You Send Me," which sold over two million copies on the tiny Keen Records label and hit number one on both the pop and R&B charts. Although it seems like a tame record today, "You Send Me" was a pioneering soul record in its time, melding elements of R&B, gospel, and pop into a sound that was new and still coalescing at the time. 


Tribute to the Lady
 
Cooke was with Keen for the next two years, a period in which he delivered up some of the prettiest romantic ballads and teen pop singles of the era, including "For Sentimental Reasons," "Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha," "Only Sixteen," and "(What A) Wonderful World." These were extraordinarily beautiful records, and in between the singles came some early album efforts, most notably Tribute to the Lady, his album of songs associated with Billie Holiday. He was unhappy, however, with both the business arrangement that he had with Keen and the limitations inherent with recording for a small label -- equally to the point, major labels were knocking on Cooke's door, including Atlantic and RCA Records; Atlantic, which was not yet the international conglomerate that it later became, was the top R&B-oriented label in the country and Cooke almost certainly would have signed there and found a happy home with the company, except that they wanted his publishing, and Cooke had seen the sales figures on his songs, as well as their popularity in cover versions by other artists, and was well aware of the importance of owning his copyrights. Thus, he signed with RCA Records, then one of the three biggest labels in the world (the others being Columbia and Decca), even as he organized his own publishing company, Kags Music, and a record label, SAR, through which he would produce other artists' records -- among those signed to SAR were the Soul Stirrers, Bobby Womack (late of the Valentinos, who were also signed to the label), former Soul Stirrers member Johnny Taylor, Billy Preston, Johnnie Morisette, and the Simms Twins.


Hits of the Fifties
 
Cooke's RCA sides were a strangely schizophrenic body of work, at least for the first two years. He broke new ground in pop and soul with the single "Chain Gang," a strange mix of sweet melodies and gritty, sweaty sensibilities that also introduced something of a social conscience to his work -- a number two hit on both the pop and R&B charts, it was his biggest hit since "You Send Me" and heralded a bolder phase in his career. Singles like bluesy, romantic "Sad Mood," the idyllic romantic soul of "Cupid," and the straight-ahead dance tune "Twistin' the Night Away" (a pop Top Ten and a number one R&B hit), and "Bring It on Home to Me" all lived up to this promise, and also sold in huge numbers. But the first two albums that RCA had him do, Hits of the Fifties and Cooke's Tour, were among the lamest LPs ever recorded by any soul or R&B singer, comprised of washed-out pop tunes in arrangements that showed almost none of Cooke's gifts to their advantage. 
 
Night Beat

In 1962, Cooke issued Twistin' the Night Away, a somewhat belated "twist" album that became one of his biggest-selling LPs. He didn't really hit his stride as an LP artist, however, until 1963 with the release of Night Beat, a beautifully self-contained, dark, moody assembly of blues-oriented songs that were among the best and most challenging numbers that Cooke had recorded up to that time. By the time of its release, he was mostly identified through his singles, which were among the best work of their era, and had developed two separate audiences, among white teen and post-teen listeners and black audiences of all ages. It was Cooke's hope to cross over to the white audience more thoroughly, and open up doors for black performers that, up to that time, had mostly been closed -- he had tried playing the Copa in New York as early as 1957 and failed at the time, mostly owing to his inexperience, but in 1964 he returned to the club in triumph, an event that also yielded one of the most finely recorded live performances of its period. The problem with the Copa performance was that it didn't really represent what Sam Cooke was about in full -- it was Cooke at his most genial and non-confrontational, doing his safest repertory for a largely middle-aged, middle-class white audience; they responded enthusiastically, to be sure, but only to Cooke's tamest persona. 
  In mid-1963, however, Cooke had done a show at the Harlem Square Club in Miami that had been recorded. Working in front of a black audience and doing his "real" show, he delivered a sweaty, spellbinding performance built on the same elements found in his singles and his best album tracks, combining achingly beautiful melodies and gritty soul sensibilities. The two live albums sum up the split in Cooke's career and the sheer range of his talent, the rewards of which he'd finally begun to realize more fully in 1963 and 1964. 

The drowning death of his infant son in mid-1963 had made it impossible for Cooke to work in the studio until the end of that year. During that time, however, with Allen Klein now managing his business affairs, Cooke did achieve the financial and creative independence that he'd wanted, including more money than any black performer had ever been advanced before, and the eventual ownership of his recordings beginning in November of 1963 -- he had achieved creative control of his recordings as well, and seemed poised for a breakthrough. It came when he resumed making records, amid the musical ferment of the early '60s. Cooke was keenly aware of the music around him, and was particularly entranced by Bob Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind," its treatment of the plight of black Americans and other politically oppressed minorities, and its success in the hands of Peter, Paul & Mary -- all of these factors convinced him that the time was right for songs that dealt with more than twisting the night away. 

The result was "A Change Is Gonna Come," perhaps the greatest song to come out of the civil rights struggle, and one that seemed to close and seal the gap between the two directions of Cooke's career, from gospel to pop. Arguably his greatest and his most important song, it was an artistic apotheosis for Cooke. During this same period, he had also devised a newer, more advanced dance-oriented soul sound in the form of the song "Shake." These two recordings heralded a new era for Cooke and a new phase of his career, with seemingly the whole world open to him. 


Sam Cooke at the Copa

None of it was to be. Early in the day on December 11, 1964, while in Los Angeles, Cooke became involved in an altercation at a seedy motel, with a woman guest and the night manager, and was shot to death while allegedly trying to attack the manager. The case is still shrouded in doubt and mystery, and was never investigated the way the murder of a star of his stature would be today. Cooke's death shocked the black community and reverberated far beyond -- his single "Shake" was a posthumous Top Ten hit, as were "A Change Is Gonna Come" and the At the Copa album, released in 1965. Otis Redding, Al Green, and Solomon Burke, among others, picked up key parts of Cooke's repertory, as did white performers, including the Animals and the Rolling Stones. Even the Supremes recorded a memorial album of his songs, which is now one of the most sought-after of their original recordings, in either LP or CD form. 
 
The Man and His Music

His reputation survived, at least among those who were smart enough to look behind the songs -- to hear Redding's performance of "Shake" at the Monterey Pop Festival, for example, and see where it came from. Cooke's own records were a little tougher to appreciate, however. Listeners who heard those first two, rather poor RCA albums, Hits of the Fifties and Cooke's Tour, could only wonder what the big deal was about, and several of the albums that followed were uneven enough to give potential fans pause. Meanwhile, the contractual situation surrounding Cooke's recordings greatly complicated the reissue of his work -- Cooke's business manager, Allen Klein, exerted a good deal of control, especially over the songs cut during that last year of the singer's life. By the 1970s, there were some fairly poor, mostly budget-priced compilations available, consisting of the hits up through early 1963, and for a time there was even a television compilation out there, but that was it. The movie National Lampoon's Animal House made use of a pair of Cooke songs, "(What A) Wonderful World" and "Twistin' the Night Away," which greatly raised his profile among college students and younger baby-boomers, and Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes made almost a mini-career out of reviving Cooke's songs (most notably "Having a Party," and even part of "A Change Is Gonna Come") in concert. In 1986, The Man and His Music went some way to correcting the absence of all but the early hits in a career-spanning compilation, but since the mid-'90s, Cooke's final year's worth of releases have been separated from the earlier RCA and Keen material, and is in the hands of Klein's ABKCO label. Finally, in the late '90s and beyond, RCA, ABKCO, and even Specialty (which still owns Cooke's gospel sides with the Soul Stirrers) each issued comprehensive collections of their portions of Cooke's catalog. 


https://rockhall.com/inductees/sam-cooke/bio/

SAM COOKE

ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME BIOGRAPHY

Sam Cooke 

(born January 22, 1931, died December 11, 1964



SAM COOKE 

Considered by many to be the definitive soul singer, Sam Cooke blended sensuality and spirituality, sophistication and soul, movie-idol looks and gospel-singer poise. His warm, confessional voice won him a devoted gospel following as lead singer for the Soul Stirrers and sent “You Send Me,” one of his earliest secular recordings, to the top of the pop and R&B charts in 1957. It was the first of 29 Top Forty hits for the Chicago-raised singer, who was one of eight sons born to a Baptist minister.

Cooke’s career was defined by his early embrace of gospel and his subsequent move into the world of pop music and rhythm & blues. Joining the Soul Stirrers at age fifteen, he served as lead vocalist from 1950-56. He recorded his first pop song, “Lovable,” as Dale Cook, choosing the pseudonym so as not to jeopardize his standing within the gospel community. Nonetheless, he’d crossed a line that made it impossible for him to carry on with the Soul Stirrers. Cooke’s first solo successes came on the Keen label, for which he recorded “You Send Me,” “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons” and “Wonderful World,” among others. In 1960 Cooke signed with RCA, where his hits included “Chain Gang,” “Cupid,” “Another Saturday Night” and “Twistin’ the Night Away.” A versatile singer who never really settled on a style, Cooke tackled everything from sophisticated balladry and lighthearted pop to finger-popping rock and roll and raw, raspy rhythm & blues.

In addition to being a performer, Cooke established himself as a successful and even groundbreaking black entrepreneur operating within the mainstream music industry. Cooke produced records for other singers, founded his own publishing company (Kags Music) and launched a record label (Sar/Derby). He also helped such fellow artists as Bobby Womack, Johnnie Taylor, Billy Preston and Lou Rawls make the transition from gospel to pop. Tragically, Cooke was shot to death at a Los Angeles motel on December 11th, 1964, under mysterious circumstances. RCA posthumously issued “Shake” b/w “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Regarded as one of the greatest singles of the modern era, it matched a hard-hitting R&B number (later cut by Otis Redding) with a haunting song about faith and reckoning that returned Cooke’s voice to its familiar gospel home.

- See more at: https://rockhall.com/inductees/sam-cooke/bio/#sthash.5FwMakg2.dpuf
 


Sam Cooke (vocals; born January 22, 1931, died December 11, 1964)
Considered by many to be the definitive soul singer, Sam Cooke blended sensuality and spirituality, sophistication and soul, movie-idol looks and gospel-singer poise. His warm, confessional voice won him a devoted gospel following as lead singer for the Soul Stirrers and sent “You Send Me,” one of his earliest secular recordings, to the top of the pop and R&B charts in 1957. It was the first of 29 Top Forty hits for the Chicago-raised singer, who was one of eight sons born to a Baptist minister.
Cooke’s career was defined by his early embrace of gospel and his subsequent move into the world of pop music and rhythm & blues. Joining the Soul Stirrers at age fifteen, he served as lead vocalist from 1950-56. He recorded his first pop song, “Lovable,” as Dale Cook, choosing the pseudonym so as not to jeopardize his standing within the gospel community. Nonetheless, he’d crossed a line that made it impossible for him to carry on with the Soul Stirrers. Cooke’s first solo successes came on the Keen label, for which he recorded “You Send Me,” “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons” and “Wonderful World,” among others. In 1960 Cooke signed with RCA, where his hits included “Chain Gang,” “Cupid,” “Another Saturday Night” and “Twistin’ the Night Away.” A versatile singer who never really settled on a style, Cooke tackled everything from sophisticated balladry and lighthearted pop to finger-popping rock and roll and raw, raspy rhythm & blues.
In addition to being a performer, Cooke established himself as a successful and even groundbreaking black entrepreneur operating within the mainstream music industry. Cooke produced records for other singers, founded his own publishing company (Kags Music) and launched a record label (Sar/Derby). He also helped such fellow artists as Bobby Womack, Johnnie Taylor, Billy Preston and Lou Rawls make the transition from gospel to pop. Tragically, Cooke was shot to death at a Los Angeles motel on December 11th, 1964, under mysterious circumstances. RCA posthumously issued “Shake” b/w “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Regarded as one of the greatest singles of the modern era, it matched a hard-hitting R&B number (later cut by Otis Redding) with a haunting song about faith and reckoning that returned Cooke’s voice to its familiar gospel home.
- See more at: https://rockhall.com/inductees/sam-cooke/bio/#sthash.3wIFPKvp.dpuf
Tracing the Highs and Tragic End of Sam Cooke

January 19, 2006
NEAL CONAN, host:


This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal CONAN in Washington. Our focus today, our main guest is Peter Guralnick, author of the new book Dream Boogie, the Triumph of Sam Cooke. We're having some difficulty technically getting him setup in the studio in Boston. He'll be joining us shortly.

Earlier today, as you may know, the Al-Jazeera television network broadcast excerpts from an audio tape purported to be from Osama Bin Laden, and in fact, you can hear more on that story later today on NPR News. This coming Sunday, though, would have been Sam Cooke's 75th birthday.

(Soundbite Sam Cooke singing 'You Send Me’) : 

AUDIO:  <iframe src="http://www.npr.org/player/embed/5163408/5163409" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"></iframe>


CONAN: That magical voice animated a long string of hits that came to a sudden end when Sam Cooke was shot and killed in a motel manager's office in 1964 at the age of 33. In a new biography, writer Peter Guralnick traces Sam Cooke's career.

He began singing with his brothers and sisters in his father's church in Chicago, became a star on the gospel circuit and then broke through. Along with Ray Charles, Cooke was among the first to crossover from gospel to pop. Like other black stars, he struggled with white-owned record companies, but Sam Cooke went ahead and formed his own record label. Like the rest of his generation, he got caught up in the civil rights movement.

Dream Boogie, the Triumph of Sam Cooke sets the singer and songwriter in the context of his times, of his ambitions, of his enormous accomplishment and describes his darker side as well. Later in the program, the Vatican newspaper weighs in on intelligent design, but first, if you have question about the life and times of Sam Cooke, give us a call or send us an email. Our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255. That's 800-989-TALK. The email address is talk@npr.org. Peter Guralnick joins us now from the studios of WBUR, our member station in Boston, Massachusetts. Nice to have you on the program, Peter.

Mr. PETER GURALNICK (Author, Dream Boogie): Well, it's good to be here.

CONAN: This may sound like a strange question, but everybody knows You Send Me and Chain Gang and Wonderful World and A Change Is Gonna Come and more, but do people really remember Sam Cooke?

MR. GURALNICK: Well, I think that's just one of the anomalies of creativity in any field is that if the work has any worth, it will survive, but often the creator may be lost sight of for periods of time. I mean, somebody like John Donne disappeared for 300 years. Robert Johnson disappeared for 50. I think in the case of Sam Cooke, I think that his, you know, his celebrity or his fame was definitely cut down by the fact that he died so young, but his songs have never gone away.

CONAN: He died, also, at a time when it seems he was nationally known, internationally known, but on the cusp of even greater renown.

MR. GURALNICK: Well, he was really on the cusp of so many things. I mean, one thing about Sam Cooke is that he was always moving forward. There was never a period of life, there was never a period in his life from the time he was five years old where he didn't have a sense of strong forward motion. And at the end of his life, he envisioned any number of new advances.

For one thing, he was making a more and more explicit commitment to the civil rights movement, had set up a benefit performance for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had had his song A Change Is Gonna Come adopted as a kind of anthem for the movement. But in addition to that, he was planning to plan supper clubs, to open in Las Vegas, he had just signed a movie contract, and on the last night of his life, he spoke of going into the studio in the next month and recording a gut bucket blues album which would be influenced by his great love for the music of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and John Lee Hooker.

So I mean, we tend to compartmentalize things, and we often say, oh, somebody goes in this direction, they can't possibly go in that direction. I mean, they might sell out by doing this...

CONAN: Mm hmm.

MR. GURALNICK: ...if we don't like it or, but in Sam's case, he truly believed, he had been brought up by his father to believe never allow anyone else to set any limits for you, never put any limits on yourself, and he genuinely didn't. He really believed he could do it all.

CONAN: Hm. Sam Cooke's father, a minister, an itinerant minister much of his life, but for most of his childhood there in Chicago. But he started him singing with his brothers and sisters in a little group that they took around to various places, and then he joined other local groups and became an absolute star, and I don't think people understand this, on the gospel circuit when he was the lead singer with a group called the Soul Stirrers.

MR. GURALNICK: Well, that's right. I mean, he was in essence kind of matinee idol on the gospel circuit. I mean, there were other great stars there. There were, Archie Brownlee with the Five Blind Boys was a great, great singer and a star in his own right, and there was someone like June Cheeks with the Sensational Nightingales. But Sam, as Bobby Womack who was a protégée of his, who met Sam when he was only seven or eight years old, Bobby Womack always likes to say Sam brought sex into the church, and while that may not be explicitly true, or it may be, I'm not sure, but, you know, he attracted an audience, and he had a kind of seductive style that was new to quartet singing. Most of the singers that he was going up against, like Archie Brownlee, like June Cheeks, like, oh, Kylo Turner and Keith Barber with the Pilgrim Travelers who traveled all over with the Soul Stirrers...

CONAN: Mm hmm.

MR. GURALNICK: ...they were more shouters. They were, in some cases they were screamers, but they really put their music out there by the volume that they created and the passion that they communicated. And it's not that what Sam was doing was better or worse. But what he was doing, he was a crooner in that field, and he brought teenagers into the church. He brought young girls, and he brought an atmosphere, a kind of seductiveness into the music which was a natural to crossover into pop music.

CONAN: Let's hear a little clip of, this is Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers and one of their biggest hits, Jesus Gave Me Water.

(Soundbite Sam Cooke and Soul Stirrers singing Jesus Gave Me Water)

CONAN: And interestingly that we listen to that, Peter Guralnick, we can hear Sam Cooke's voice. It sounds a little light, a little young. We don't hear that characteristic sound that he had in so many of his pop and R&B records, that whoo. I'm not gonna try to do it, that whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo.

MR. GURALNICK: I think you should do it.

CONAN: Another career maybe.

MR. GURALNICK: But, no, I mean, he, that was something that he developed. I mean, he came close to it. He came up in the wake of another great lead singer R.H. Harris, who really set the tone for all of the quartets singing in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and Harris had what he called a yodel, and it was really almost a natural break into a falsetto that really was almost as natural as his regular voice.

CONAN: Hm.

MR. GURALNICK: And it was that break between the, between his, you know, what you would call his natural range into the falsetto that created the yodel. Well, Sam couldn't really do that, and eventually he created, I'm gonna leave it to you to do the whoo-whoo-whoo...

CONAN: OK.

MR. GURALNICK: But, you know, he created that almost as compensation. But I, although people say that, I'm really not convinced of it. I think that he was developing his own style, and in fact, it should be pointed out that that Jesus Gave Me Water was the very first record that came out with him as lead singer with the Soul Stirrers. He was just 20 years old when he recorded it.

CONAN: Boy, he sounds so confident there.

MR. GURALNICK: He does. And the point is this was a song, the owner of the label, Art Rupe, the Specialty Records owner, was adamantly opposed to the Soul Stirrers recording this with this kid. He didn't want the kid to record at all, but he definitely didn't want to record that song because it had just been a hit for the Pilgrim Travelers on Specialty, and every single gospel group had...

CONAN: Which was Art Rupe's label, yeah.

MR. GURALNICK: ...which was Art Rupe's label, exactly. And every gospel group, it seemed, had recorded Jesus Gave Me Water. Well, Sam had been singing it with his teenage gospel group that he had been with just before the Soul Stirrers, the Highway QC's, and it was so much a signature to him that the manager for The Soulsters, F.R. Crain(ph), and the Pilgrims travel manager, J.W. Alexander, who was a great champion of insisted, give him a chance. And you can hear the resolve out there. And although you're right, his voice is like, you can hear it break in places. But, nonetheless, there's so much confidence and again, even without that characteristic yodel, there is still such a remarkable sense of the style of his own.

CONAN: Peter GURALNICK's, new book is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. If you'd like to join the conversation, 800-989-8255 or send us e-mail: talk@npr.org.

Let's take some callers.

This is Tony(ph). Tony's calling from Portland, Indiana.

TONY (Caller): Hello, yes I love the show.

CONAN: Thank you.

TONY: And the subject's great because his music stirs my soul. What was his relationship with Lou Rawls?

MR. GURALNICK: Well, Lou Rawls was kind of the protégé of Sam's. I mean, Lou Rawls grew up in Chicago and as Lou Rawls said, you just wanted to hang around with Sam. You know because you knew that there was so much happening there was always going to be some fall out for you.

And Lou Rawls came up in gospel groups like the Holy Wonders and the Teenage Kings of Harmony and their Queen, which were secondary to the gospel group that Sam was signing in as a teenager, the Highway QCs.

And basically, Lou Rawls' whole career he, when he entered, what you want to call the Big Time in gospel it was as the lead signer of The Pilgrim Travelers after he got out of the Army. Which Sam's friend and business partner J.W. Alexander managed and brought Lou into the Pilgrim Travelers. J.W. Alexander became Lou's great guide and to some extent his manager, brought him to Capital Records. And Lou sang on many of Sam's records, sang backup. The most notable one being Bring it On Home to Me…

TONY: Oh, that's a great song.

MR. GURALNICK: …which Sam recorded in 1962 and which really marked the return, on Sam's part, to the kind of gospel sound.

TONY: And wasn't Sam Cooke one of the original members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

MR. GURALNICK: He was. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I think, in 1986, with Elvis Presley and Little Richard and Chuck Barry and James Brown. And you know, it was a great class.

TONY: Well, thank you for remembering him.

CONAN: Tony, thanks for the call. I just wanted to read and excerpt from Peter Guralnick's book. This is from L.C. Cooke, Sam's brother talking about his brother when he was very young. “‘I figured out my life then,' he said. ‘I'm never going to have a nine-to-five job.' I said, ‘what do you mean Sam?' He said, ‘Man, I figured out the whole system.' He said, ‘it's designed if you work to keep you working. All you do is live from payday to payday. At the end of the week, you're broke again.' He said, ‘the system is designed like that.' And I'm listening, I'm seven and he's nine and he's talking about the system. I said, ‘what are you going to do then if you ain't going to work, Sam?' He said, ‘I'm going to sing and I'm going to make me a lot of money.' And that's just what he did.” There's a man who knew what he was going to do with his life.

MR. GURALNICK: Well, exactly, and you know his brother L.C., while he is certainly a reflective person and somebody who has his own insights. To this day the system doesn't mean anything to L.C. I mean, when he speaks of Sam telling him that, he's referring to a child who became an adult with a deeply analytic cast of mind.

I mean, all his life Sam really sat himself to figure out how to do things work and how do I move ahead within the frame work of the way the things work.

CONAN: We're talking with Peter Guralnick whose new book is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke.

If you'd like to join the conversation, 800-989-8255 or e-mail us: talk@npr.org.

We'll be back after a short break.

I'm Neal Conan you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

(Soundbite, music)

CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION, I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

We're talking about gospel pop and R&B legend Sam Cooke today. Our guest is Peter Guralnick, whose newest book is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. If you'd like to read an excerpt of the book and listen to some of Sam Cooke's music you can visit our Web site at NPR.org. And if you want to speak with Peter Guralnick, give us a call: 800-989-8255; e-mail address is talk@npr.org.

Let's get another caller on the line. This is David. David's with us from Kansas City.

DAVID (Caller): Hi.

MR. GURALNICK: Hi, David.

DAVID: I'm a huge Sam Cooke fan, but also kind of an amateur musician. And a year or so ago I tried to look for sheet music, piano/guitar music for Sam Cooke songs. And I found that almost none of it was available. The only thing you could buy commercially was a collection of his very, very early stuff, which was primarily the gospel music.

And it got me wondering of the later songs of Sam Cooke that most of us know Wonderful World, Change is Gonna Come, Bring it Back Home to Me. How many of those were actually written or, by Sam Cooke or Sam Cooke compositions. And to what extent was his music owned by other people and controlled by other people?

MR. GURALNICK: Every one was written by Sam Cooke and every one was…

David: That's what I thought.

MR. GURALNICK: …controlled by Sam Cooke because he started in 1959 with his friend J.W. Alexander. He started his own publishing company, Keg's Music, which was actually named for Lou Rawls stepfather Keg. His nickname was Keg because he was an armature bartender. But so Sam, again, in line with that quote from his brother L.C. at the age of nine, Sam saw the system for what it was and really with J.W. Alexander's tutorial because J.W. was 15 or 20 years older than Sam. He learned early on that that the music business is a business. And at the heart of the business, the heart of the business is ownership. That's where you make your money.

DAVID: I was just wondering if, there must be some reason that his estate or the people who later took control of his music have chosen not to issue. The records are out there for us, but you can't purchase, you can't purchase sheet music to it.

MR. GURALNICK: I don't know what the politics of sheet music are. I mean, I don't know what or the business of sheet music. I know that there's a booklet which is of all the songs from Sam Cooke's Sar record story, which is the label. Neal was talking about it earlier, the label that he and J.W. owned. And on which they recorded people like Johnny Taylor, the Simpson Twins, The Valentinos, The Soulsters. Most of those songs are also songs that he wrote. And there's a booklet with sheet music for each of the songs on that two-CD set.

But I know that when Portrait of a Legend came out a couple of years ago. The intent was to have a book, this is all of his greatest hits, it's on the ABKCO Label and the intention was to put out a book with that sheet music. But I never followed up on it and I, I'm sure you're right. I'm, you seemed to have pursued it and…

DAVID: He wrote all those songs, huh?

MR. GURALNICK: Yep, he wrote all the songs for all of his artists, virtually all of the songs for all of his artists on Sar Records.

DAVID: What a genius. He was the best.

CONAN: David, thanks for the call, good luck looking for the music.

DAVID: All right, thanks.

CONAN: You mentioned Sar Records. Art Rupe mentioned earlier that the guy that ran Specialty Records, he and Sam had a lot of professional problems. Sam thought he was being ripped off and ended up leaving Art Rupe feeling like he had been ripped off.

Sam formed his own company, Sar Records. But then he went to work for a big time label. He was recording for RCA.

MR. GURALNICK: Well yeah, actually, the company that he went to after when he left Specialty. And you're right, they both Art Rupe and Sam felt seriously abused. Each felt abused by the other in a business sense. But Sam went to a label that didn't have a name initially, but was, when it was formed over the summer of 1957 and when his and his record You Send Me was the first record on that Keen label. Which was owned by an airplane parts manufacturer named John Fiamis(ph).

While he was on Keen he started his own label, which was Sar Records in 1959 basically to record The Soulsters. But he himself was never on his own label.

He and J.W. recorded as J.W. said, J.W. was just a wonderful person and a great mentor to Sam and eventually much later in his life to me too, but he, J.W. said they recorded, we recorded people we liked.

But Sam went from Keen Records to RCA with the idea of, you know, not staying on his own label because he believed that you know what he wanted was major label exposure. He believed he could compete in the same market place as Elvis Presley. Saying he was the second biggest single seller on RCA behind Elvis Presley.

CONAN: One of his big hits for RCA, Chain Gang. Let's take a listen.

(Soundbite of Chain Gang)

CONAN: Sam Cooke and Chain Gang. As a song writer, Peter Guralnick, he liked to describe things that he saw. This is one of many occasions you describe in the book where he saw something happen and said, “That's a song” and proceeded to write it down.

MR. GURALNICK: Yeah. I know that's exactly I mean he carried a notebook with him everywhere he went and it just, like that Norman Mailer story and advertisements for myself, The Notebook. He just, everywhere he went he carried a notebook to jot his. And if he didn't have a notebook, he'd write it down on a napkin.

But he saw himself as a kind of reporter so that, as you say, I mean he saw this chain gang in the Carolinas. He and his brother Charles, I don't think he'd ever seen a chain gang before. He and Charles went and got cigarettes for the prisoners but he wrote the song that he wrote rather than being a social protest song, it was almost a romantic song about the women back home and when they get back home. And actually, if you were to listen to the session tapes and you see how the song evolves, it's fascinating how he takes a real life situation and he sees it as a kind of drama but he develops it almost like a fiction writer aligns with his imagination suggests.

And similarly I mean he saw these dancers at the Peppermint Lounge you know doing the Twist at the Peppermint Lounge. High Society doing the Twist at the Peppermint Lounge on TV and then wrote the song Twisting the Night Away in which he peoples with characters. I mean these are very brief, you know character sketches. But the idea is to create a scene and to create a kind of storyline and he believed deeply in simplicity so that it was a matter of presenting characters in a storyline that the listener could immediately grasp and a melody as he said that the person on the street, the person walking down the street could pick up on and could hum to himself or herself.

CONAN: Let's get another caller on the line, Jim. Jim's calling from Tuscan, Arizona.

JIM (Caller): Hi.

CONAN: Hi, you're on the air; go ahead please.

JIM: I wanted to ask your guest if he is familiar with any alcohol problems Sam Cooke had.

MR. GURALNICK: No I wouldn't say that he had any alcohol problem. He drank, his son Vincent drowned in…

JIM: I hired him in 1964, 65 for our fraternity in a university I was going to and he got off the plane in Oklahoma. He stood on the tarmac and he goes, “Here I am in Oklahoma City. Lot's of pigs, lots' of cattle, lot's of nothing. Oh, New York, New York where's my skyscraper?” as he turned around two or three times.

And then he couldn't even, by that night, that was the afternoon, and by the evening he, went on and he couldn't even do the second part of the act. He had to have the comedian and the band do a second round and people were upset and everything. And I was just…

MR. GURALNICK: Well, I, yeah I don't know. He met a very demanding schedule. He performed probably as much as you know 200, 250 nights a year. I‘ve never heard a story like that. I've never seen a show that he missed. I've never, you know, I've spoken to hundreds of people, and so I think that was very uncharacteristic of, but that certainly doesn't, he was certainly, after the death of his son Vincent in, I think May of 1963, he was depressed and he drank more.

But as far as meeting his professional responsibilities both in terms of an extremely demanding, you know, live performance schedule in terms of maintaining a recording schedule and recording the artists on his own label and really constantly being on the go and constantly meeting his obligations and always and improving his possibility, his situation. You know there was never any evidence of that kind of behavior.

CONAN: You were mentioning, though, his son Vince who as a baby fell into a swimming pool, the cover had been left off. And that not all that far from the end of Sam's life.

Mr. GURALNICK: No, no, and I think that that marked a period of great sadness even in the midst of great achievement, so that while his career and while on the surface everything went well, it marked a, there was both self-blame and I think he and his wife Barbara blamed each other. So that it led to a great deal of friction in a marriage which already had its share of friction.

CONAN: Yeah, you could say and be truthful that he married his childhood sweetheart and that would be the most misleading thing you could probably say.

MR. GURALNICK: Well, it would and it wouldn't, because in a certain way, I think, they never fell out of love, but the love that they shared was not the love that exists in story books. It was not an easy kind of love and there was constant friction and I think the great heartbreak in his wife's life, who was perceived in many different ways by many people around her, but was perhaps one of the most honest people that I've ever met, one of the most brutally honest in terms of not just other people but herself.

Just the great heartbreak of her life was that she never could make a place for herself in Sam's. And that while she would have given anything to have become more a part of his life with his, not just his professional life, but I mean of his whole life. And she did everything she could to do that. But, I mean, it's funny. Like so many entertainers I would say that at heart Sam was an almost solitary person. And I think you find that, you know, you find that to be true of a great many entertainers who go out, charm the world, and yet in their own selves are more contemplative, more solitary and more brooding than you would every imagine from their public persona.

CONAN: He had that ability you describe of being what people wanted him to be. Being utterly sincere and convincing at the moment that they were with him, but being able to turn on that, you know, being detached from that in the same way. Almost as if he's observing himself.

MR. GURALNICK: Yeah. No, I think that that's, I mean you can call that a protean personality, you know, where you can, but I mean, but I think it suggests the same problems of intimacy again that so many entertainers have or so many people have. I mean it really it's unfair just to put it on enter, but entertainers are placed in the position, entertainers are like politicians, it's similar to, you know, you can see this let's say in someone like Bill Clinton or in Elvis, both of whom clearly want to be loved by everybody and put forth a persona that allows them to be loved and accepted by the crowd, but the question is who are they, you know, when they're by themselves at night.

CONAN: We're talking with Peter Guralnick about his new book, Dream Boogie, the Triumph of Sam Cooke. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let's talk now with Nordine(ph). Nordine calling us from Tucson, Arizona.

NORDINE (Caller): Yes, hi Pete, Neal.

MR. GURALNICK: Hi.

CONAN: Hi.

NORDINE: I just wondered if Pete had a, was aware of the impact that Sam Cooke made in my generation. (Unintelligible), song, especially the song you just played, The Chain Gang, and he really, really inspired us and helped us all in (unintelligible).

CONAN: I'm sorry, Nordine, we're having trouble hearing you. Did you say you drew up in France?

NORDINE: Yes, I'm French. and I moved about ten years ago here and I moved because I was inspired by Sam Cooke. Sam Cooke is and was an icon, an American Icon in Europe, especially in France.

CONAN: Did you know the words when you were listening?

NORDINE: I didn't know the words. We're singing after him and the words (unintelligible) inspired by his voice and the music. And until today, now that I understand everything that he says, it's really moving, you know, and I just want your listeners to know that Sam Cooke had an impact on all of us in France, especially North African children dealing with racism.

CONAN: Oh, Nordine thank you very much for the call.

NORDINE: Thanks so much.

CONAN: Appreciate that. And I guess Peter Guralnick, there's a testament.

MR. GURALNICK: Well, you know, I think that to some extent is a testament as well to the universality of music. I mean the way in which say the Blues has reached around the world to an audience that may very well not understand the words, but it's the way in which that's that direct impact communication of the songs of someone like Sam Cooke, of a whole variety of people. And the emotional core that lies at the heart of Sam Cooke songs that allows them to communicate in a way that is beyond language I think.

It's what Ray Charles said of him. I spoke to Ray Charles just a few months before he died and he said, you know, Sam Cooke was the one and only. He knew Sam from the time Sam was singing with The Soul Stirrers, they would get together. Ray would get, they would all be staying at the same little hotels because of course black entertainers whether they were Gospel singers or they were R&B singers, or Pop singers or if they were sports figures there was only one little hotel in town who would take African Americans. They couldn't stay in a white hotel.

So on Sunday morning Ray Charles would talk about how he would get together with J.W. Alexander and The Pilgrim Travelers and Sam Cooke and The Soul Stirrers and how they would just sing Gospel music. But he said of Sam, Sam was the one and only. Not only did he hit every note, he hit every note with feeling. And as Ray pointed out to me, I'm not one to hand out compliments lightly.

CONAN: The stories about those meetings, either back stage or in those hotels, there's a description of a scene with Clyde McPhatter, I think, on one of the tours, another person who came from Gospel, but of Clyde McPhatter and Sam Cooke trading lines and songs and you would have given anything to be there.

MR. GURALNICK: Yeah. No, no, I mean, it's just, the musicality of these singers, I mean, and it's something that, it hasn't been lost, but I mean when we talk about the golden age of Gospel, which was, you know, roughly say from 1950 to 1960 but continue, I mean, you have great, great Gospel singing. The Mighty Clouds of Joy came in right around '60 or '61. but the point is that you had, it was just every night you had the kind of exchanges and the kind of competition that is almost beyond imagined and then, you know, with the Soul shows and I used to usher the Soul shows. We would have Otis Redding and Solomon Burke and Jackie Wilson and again, I mean, these are the shows that Sam would go out with, Sam and Jackie Wilson, for example.

And the competition and the way in which the music alone would elevate them, you know, beyond anything that can be imagined from the records alone. And anyone who's ever been at any of those shows and, what you describe, what you describe was on a backstage thing. Which I think either Phil or Don Everly described to me. He said that they would be singing Country and Western songs with Clyde McPhatter and Sam Cooke backstage. But just the sheer musicality and the way in which music served as an instrument of communication. I know that I wish I had the eloquence but Sam Phillips just used to declaim to me about the way in which music had changed the world, could change the world, would continue to change the world, you know. He would say put some of those musicians over there in Iraq and that'll be the end of the war.

CONAN: Well, I'm not sure about that, but music…

MR. GURALNICK: We can hope.

CONAN: …music helped change the country in the early ‘60s and of course what was going on in the country changed a lot of the music as well. And we'll talk about that with Peter Guralnick when we come back from a break. Again, his new book is about the triumph of Sam Cooke. It's called Dream Boogie. 800-989-8255. TALK OF THE NATION has an email address too. That's talk@npr.org. And this is NPR News.

CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

Today we're talking about Gospel, Pop, and R&B legend Sam Cooke. With us is Peter Guralnick. His new biography is Dream Boogie, the Triumph of Sam Cooke. If you'd like to read an excerpt of that book and listen to some of Sam Cooke's classic songs you can visit our website at npr.org. If you'd like to get in on the conversation 800-989-8255 or email us: talk@npr.org. And let's get another caller on the line. This is Michael. Michael's calling us from Cleveland.

MICHAEL (Caller): Neal, how are you?

CONAN: I'm well, Michael.

MICHAEL: Great. Peter, thank you very much for the book. I really enjoyed it.

MR. GURALNICK: Oh, thank you.

MICHAEL: And I have a story that I'd like to share with you. I'm originally from Brooklyn, New York. And a local group, The Five Star Gospel singers would open for Sam Cooke and The Soul Stirrers when they would come into town. And my father was a member of that group. And it was a performance where Sam really lit the church up and he made my mother cry so much that after the performance when I was with my father and my father said, say hi to Sam. I wouldn't say hi. My father says, why won't you say hi and I said, because he made mommy cry.

MR. GURALNICK: Now, would that be at Washington Temple in Brooklyn?

MICHAEL: That was definitely, yeah, that was Brown's Memorial Baptist Church in Brooklyn. Right off of Gates and Washington.

CONAN: That's a great story, Michael.

MICHAEL: Peter, thank you very much and keep it up. I enjoyed both of the books.

MR. GURALNICK: Well thanks. And I hope you were at the shows in Cleveland. The tribute to Sam Cooke.

MICHAEL: I was out of town and I missed it, but I heard it was really great.

CONAN: Michael thanks very much for the call. Appreciate it.

MICHAEL: Thanks a lot, Neal. Appreciate the show.

CONAN: And Sam Cooke had that affect on a lot of women.

MR. GURALNICK: Yeah. No, he could make them cry and, I mean, it was a very, it was a deeply emotional kind of music and Sam's whole point was that if you couldn't bring that emotion to it, if you couldn't bring that feeling to it then don't do it. I mean that was the core of the music, despite the fact that he was a deeply reflective person, a highly analytic person, and really an intellectual. Somebody who was not just a veracious reader, but someone who pursued his reading in directions.

For example, he took up, he was inspired by the work of John Hope Franklin, by specifically From Slavery to Freedom to begin his study of black history. And he soon acquired a library of black history and, you know, that would rival anybody's. he used to go out to a bookstore in Los Angeles called The Aquarian Bookstore, one of the few in the country that had that kind of, you know, that had that, that had those kinds of books. But the point is that for all of that, for all of his intellectuality, for all of his acuity of mind, for all of his the way in which his analytic cast of mind, his whole point about music was you had to bring the feeling to it. And that what's brought the feeling out in the audiences.

CONAN: Let's talk now with John. John calling from Syracuse, New York.

JOHN (Caller): Yes, Neal, thanks for taking my call.

CONAN: Mm hmm.

JOHN: I had recently read the autobiography of Malcolm X, which I highly recommend to everyone and in researching Sam Cooke recently I understand (unintelligible) with Malcolm X at the Liston and Clay fight in the early ‘60s and my question is about Sam Cooke's politics. I know that at the time of his death he had written A Change is Gonna Come. I'm wondering what kind of political activities he was undertaking and what he might have undertaken?

CONAN: You know how long it was and it's still referred to as Cassius Clay, of course we know him as Muhammad Ali.

JOHN: I know it's Muhammad Ali. I'm just, at the time I know Clay/Liston, so.

CONAN: At the time, Cassius Clay. Peter Guralnick?

MR. GURALNICK: Well, I mean, again, as a deeply reflective person as a, you know, a person of color in a world in which the color line was clearly drawn and in which prejudice was not just prevalent, but just omnivorous. Sam was somebody who was deeply sensitive to racial issues, to racial hurt, and who in the course of his career took a number of stands that some entertainers did and some entertainers didn't. I mean, for example, he and Clyde McPhatter refused to play in Memphis at the Ellis Auditorium at a segregated show after the NAACP had pointed out, had requested them not to play. And everybody else on the bill played and Sam and Clyde McPhatter refused and made statements to the paper at risk to themselves, at personal peril that, with threats, with financial threats and the threat of their cars being confiscated.

And there were any number of incidents like that, including his refusal to be turned away from a segregated motel in Shreveport, Louisiana, which is one of the three point of impetus for his writing, A Change is Gonna Come. But, I think that he was becoming more and more explicit in his political activity, more and more of an activist towards the end of his life. And in fact, after the fight, in Miami after Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston in Miami because as you said, as you pointed out he was yet to become Mohammad Ali. Clay, rather than go to the Fontainebleau for a big victory party that had been planned, or going off with his girlfriend Dee Dee, I'm forgetting her last name right now, went back to the Hampton House where Malcolm X was staying with Sam, with Jim Brown.

And the FBI informant who was there reported back to J. Edgar Hoover with considerable alarm that these sports and entertainment figures should be getting together to express their common dissatisfaction over issues of color. So, more and more, over the course of the last few years of his life, Sam was not just aware of something which no person of color could fail to be aware of. More and more he was inclined to take action and he had just, he had donated his song, A Change is Gonna Come to an album, which was a benefit album for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the summer of '64. There were any number of things which he had planned.

CONAN: John thanks very much.

JOHN: Yes, thank you.

CONAN: And, Peter Guralnick, we just have a couple of minutes left but you said earlier Sam Cooke did not have an alcohol problem. As such, people in your book say repeatedly he never smoked dope, never took pills.

Mr. GURALNICK: Right.

CONAN: There was a dark side of his character though, he was a womanizer. And, the night he died he was certainly drunk.

Mr. GURALNICK: He was he had been drinking certainly, yeah. I mean and was, I don't think there's any way of measuring how much he had drunk. But he certainly had been, he had been drinking. I think the point is that like, if you look to anybody else in the book, he was in the life like everybody else in the book. Like Ray Charles, like Lloyd Price, like B.B. King and I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who wasn't a womanizer, which is neither to condemn or condone.

But what was so difficult about his death to accept was, that simply, people couldn't accept it because it was, it simply wasn't the way it should have been. And I think that, for someone as smooth, as urbane, as sophisticated as Sam Cooke, it just, it simply should not have come to an end in that way. Now, that's as if there were some rational impulse behind the way in which any of us die. But as J.W. Alexander said, and J.W. believed that, this was his friend this was his best friend in the world. And he felt that it was a tragic accident, it was simply a senseless waste of life.

He didn't doubt that it happened the way it was said to have happened. But, I think, to see it as a senseless waste of life would be the best way to see it. But the way in which the community reacted to it was essentially, I think there was almost universal disbelief, because Sam was such a shining light within the black community. And, the conspiracies that were constructed to explain it all make perfect sense in the sense that, they see Sam as being a, this was the case of another proud black man struck down by the white establishment that just couldn't stand to see him get any bigger. Which, in view of the prevalent, you know the prejudice that was so pervasive it was just, ran through every aspect of American life and continues to in many respects. It's a perfectly rational explanation and maybe you know, tomorrow somebody's gonna walk in the door with the evidence to prove these, any one of these theories. But so far no evidence has been, you know has been presented.

CONAN: Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, Peter Guralnick thank you very much for being with us today.

Mr. GURALNICK: Well thanks I've really enjoyed it.

CONAN: You mentioned, Change is Gonna Come an anthem of sorts, for the civil rights movement, let's go out of this segment listening to that.

(Soundbite of song 'Change is Gonna Come')

CONAN: Sam Cooke, A Change is Gonna Come. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

Copyright © 2006 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
 


Books



Tracing the Highs and Tragic End of Sam Cooke



Cover of 'The Triumph of Sam Cooke'










Sunday marks the 75th anniversary of the birth of Sam Cooke, one of the most famous gospel and pop singers in American music history. Along with Ray Charles, Cooke was one of the earliest artists to span both musical genres. By the end of his career, he heralded the advent of soul.
Cooke's magical voice animated a long string of hits that came to a sudden end, when he was shot and killed in a motel manager's office in 1964, at the age of 33.

Writer Peter Guralnick talks about his biography of Cooke, Dream Boogie, which sets the singer and songwriter in the context of his times, his ambitions, his enormous accomplishments — and his dark side.


Excerpt: 'Dream Boogie, the Triumph of Sam Cooke'





"Let me tell you a story on Sam. Sam was always ambitious. He always knew exactly what he wanted to do. When we was very little boys, we were playing, and he had these popsicle sticks — you know them little wooden sticks? He had about twenty of them, and he lined them sticks up, stuck 'em in the ground, and said, "This is my audience, see? I'm gonna sing to these sticks." He said, "This prepare me for my future." Another time he said, "Hey, C., you know what?" I said, "What?" He said, "I figured out my life, man." He said, "I'm never gonna have a nine-to-five job." I said, "What you mean, Sam?" He said, "Man, I figured out the whole system." He said, "It's designed, if you work, to keep you working, all you do is live from payday to payday — at the end of the week you broke again." He said, "The system is designed like that." And I'm listening. I'm seven and he's nine, and he's talking about "the system"! I said, "What are you gonna do, then, if you ain't gonna work, Sam?" He said, "I'm gonna sing, and I'm going to make me a lot of money." And that's just what he did."
— L.C. Cooke, on his brother's early ambitions

[Note: Cooke added the 'e' at the end of his name later in life, as did his brother.] 

Sam Cook was a golden child around whom a family mythology was constructed, long before he achieved fame or added the e to his last name.

There are all the stories about Sam as a child: how he was endowed with second sight; how he sang to the sticks; how he convinced his neighborhood "gang" to tear the slats off backyard fences, then sold them to their previous owners for firewood; how he was marked with a gift from earliest childhood on and never wavered from its fulfillment.

He was the adored middle child of a Church of Christ (Holiness) minister with untrammeled ambitions for his children.

Movies were strictly forbidden. So were sports, considered gambling because the outcome inevitably determined a winner and a loser. Church took up all day Sunday, with preparations starting on Saturday night.

They were respectable, upwardly mobile, proud members of a proudly striving community, but they didn't shrink from a fight. Their daddy told them to stand up for themselves and their principles, no matter what the situation was. Respect your elders, respect authority — but if you were in the right, don't back down for anyone, not the police, not the white man, not anyone. One time neighborhood bullies tried to block Sam's way to school, and he told them he didn't care if he had to fight them every day, he was going to school. He lived in a world in which he was told hard work would be rewarded, but he could see evidence to the contrary all around him. Their father told them that their true reward would come in heaven, but Sam was unwilling to wait. He was unwilling to live in a world of superstition and fear, and even his father's strictures and homilies were subject to the same rational skepticism, the same unwavering gaze with which he seemed to have been born. He was determined to live his life by his own lights and no one else's.

He was born January 22, 1931, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the fifth of the Reverend Charles Cook and his wife Annie Mae's eight children (the oldest, Willie, was Annie Mae's first cousin, whom they took in at three upon his mother's death). Charles and Annie Mae met at a Church of Christ (Holiness) convention at which he was preaching, and they started going to church together. He was a young widower of twenty-three with a child that was being raised by his late wife's family. Born to sharecroppers in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1897, he had been baptized into the Holiness church at the age of eight, and when the church split in two a couple of years later (its founders, Charles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason, differed over the importance of speaking in tongues as certain confirmation of "spirit baptism," with Mason declaring this surrender to a force that overcomes recognizable human speech to be a sure sign of grace), the Cooks remained with the Jackson-based Reverend Jones, while Reverend Mason's followers became the better-known, more populous (and more prosperous) Memphis-based Church of God in Christ.

Just fourteen when she met Charles, Annie Mae was fair-skinned, round-faced, with hair she could sit on. She was sixteen when they married in November of 1923. She had grown up in Mound Bayou, a self-sufficient all-black township founded in 1887 and known as "the negro capital of Mississippi." The granddaughter of a businessman reputed, according to family legend, to be "the second-wealthiest man in Mound Bayou," she was raised by an aunt after her mother died in childbirth. She was working as a cook when she met her future husband and by her husband's account won him over with her culinary skills, inviting him home from church one day and producing a four-course meal in the forty-five minutes between services.

They had three children (Mary, Charles Jr., and Hattie), spaced eighteen months to two years apart, before Sam was born in January of 1931, with his brother L.C. ("it don't stand for nothing") following twenty-three months later.

Within weeks of L.C.'s birth Charles Cook was on the road, hitchhiking to Chicago with a fellow preacher with thirty-five cents in his pocket. It was the Lord who had convinced him he couldn't fail, but it was his children's education, and the opportunity he was determined to give them to get ahead, that provided the burning motivation. He had sharecropped, worked on the railroad, and most recently been a houseboy in one of Clarksdale's wealthiest homes while continuing to do the Lord's work as a Holiness circuit preacher — but he was not prepared to consign his children to the same fate. He was thirty-five years old at the time, and as certain of his reasons sixty-three years later. "It was to educate my children. It was a better chance up here. In Mississipi they didn't even furnish you with the schoolbooks. But I didn't put nothing ahead of God."

Charles Cook preached his way to Chicago, "mostly for white folks, they give me food and money," he said, for a sermon that satisfactorily answered the "riddle" of salvation, "proving that man could pray his self out of hell." Within weeks of his arrival, he had found work and sent for his wife and children, who arrived on a Greyhound bus at the Twelfth Street station, the gateway to Chicago's teeming South Side.

It was a whole different world in Chicago, a separate self-contained world in which the middle class mingled with the lowest down, in which black doctors and lawyers and preachers and schoolteachers strove to establish standards and set realistic expectations for a community that included every type of individual engaged in every type of human endeavor, from numbers kings to domestics, from street players to steel workers, from race heroes to self-made millionaires. It was a society which, despite a form of segregation as cruel and pernicious as the Southern kind, could not be confined or defined, a society of which almost all of its variegated members, nearly every one of them an immigrant from what was commonly referred to as South America, felt an integral part. It was a society into which the Cook family immediately fit.

From the moment of his arrival, Reverend Cook found his way to Christ Temple Cathedral, an imposing edifice which the Church of Christ (Holiness) had purchased for $55,000 six years earlier, just ten years after its modest prayer-meeting beginnings in the Federal Street home of Brother Holloway. He preached an occasional sermon and served as a faithful congregant and assistant pastor while working a number of jobs, including for a brief time selling burial insurance, before he found steady employment at the Reynolds Metals plant in McCook, Illinois, some fifteen miles out of town, where he would eventually rise to a position as union shop steward.

The family lived briefly in a kitchenette apartment on Thirty-third and State but soon moved into more comfortable surroundings on the fourth floor of the four-story Lenox Building, at 3527 Cottage Grove Avenue (there were five separately numbered entrances to the Lenox Building, with the back porches all interconnected), in the midst of a busy neighborhood not far from the lake. There was a drugstore on the corner, the Blue Goose grocery store was just up the street, and directly across from the Blue Goose was a chicken market where you could select your own live chicken and have it killed and dressed on the spot. Westpoint Baptist Church was on the other side of the street, all the players hung out at the poolroom on Thirty-sixth, and Ellis Park, an elegant enclave of privately owned row houses surrounding a park with two swimming pools in the middle, ran between Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh across Cottage Grove.

The new baby, Agnes, was almost two years old when Reverend Cook, through the intervention of one of his original Jackson mentors, Bishop J. L. I. Conic, finally got his own congregation at Christ Temple Church in Chicago Heights, some thirty miles out of town. This quickly became the focus of the Cooks' family life.

We was in church every time that church door was open. That was a must, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Saturday night Mama would cook our dinner. Then we'd all get up about 6:30 Sunday morning, 'cause everyone had to take their bath — seven children, one bathroom! — so we could be dressed and be at church at nine o'clock for Sunday school. After Sunday school you had eleven o'clock service, with prayer and singing, and Papa would do the sermon for the day. Then Mama would take us to the basement and heat up our food in the church kitchen. Then we had afternoon service, and after that BYPU, which is a young people's service, then the eight o'clock service until about 10 o'clock, when we would go home. Plus Wednesday night prayer meeting! One time Mary, our oldest sister — she was used to doing what she wanted — decided she wasn't going to go to church. She said, "I know what I'm gonna do. I'm going to wash my hair, and then I'm going to tell Papa, ‘I can't go to church 'cause I just got my hair washed, and I haven't got it done.'" Well, she washed her hair, and she told Papa, but he just said, "That's all right, just come right on." So she had to go to church with her hair all a mess. Papa didn't play. You had to either go to church or get out of his house.
— Hattie, Agnes, and L.C. Cook in a spirited chorus of voices recalling their early religious training

The Chicago Heights church, which had first been organized in 1919, grew dramatically under Reverend Cook's stewardship. The "seventeen" previous ministers, he told gospel historian David Tenenbaum, had been able to do nothing to increase the size or fervor of a congregation made up for the most part of workers from the local Ford assembly plant, but, Reverend Cook said, "I worked up to one hundred and twenty-five, I filled the church up. You had to be sure to come there on time if you wanted a seat."
He was, according to his daughter Agnes, a "fire-and-brimstone country preacher" who always sang before he preached, strictly the old songs — two of his favorites were "You Can't Hurry God" and "This Little Light of Mine." He took his sermon from a Bible text and was known to preach standing on one leg for two minutes at a time when he got carried away by his message. The congregation was vocal in its response, shouting, occasionally speaking in tongues, with church mothers dressed in nurse's whites prepared to attend to any of the congregation who were overcome. The Cooks didn't shout, but Annie Mae would cry sometimes, her children could always tell when the sermon really got to her and her spirit was full by the tears streaming down her cheeks. The other ladies in the congregation were equally moved, for despite his stern demeanor, the Reverend Cook was a handsome man — and despite his numerous strictures, as his children were well aware, the Reverend Cook definitely had an eye for the ladies. Annie Mae sang in the choir, which was accompanied by a girl named Flora on piano, and different groups would come out occasionally to present spiritual and gospel music programs. One group in particular, the Progressive Moaners, became regular visitors — they always got a good response — and that is what gave the Reverend Cook the idea for the Singing Children.

The Cook children were all musical, but Charles, the next-to-oldest, was the heart and soul of the family group. He was eleven, "and I had to sing every Sunday in church, my daddy used to make me sing all the time, stop me from going out in the street and playing with my friends." He and his big sister, Mary, sang lead in the five-member quartet. Hattie, who was eight, sang baritone; Sam, already focused on music as a career at six, sang tenor; and L.C., the baby of the group, was their four-year-old bass singer.

They practiced at home at first but soon were "upsetting" the church on a regular basis, taking the Progressive Moaners' place at the center of the service and in the process reflecting as much on their father, Reverend Cook, as on themselves. They sang "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" and "They Nailed Him to the Cross" with Flora accompanying them. "We just practiced our own selves and decided what songs we was going to sing," recalled Hattie. "Every time the church doors opened we had to be there."

Before long they were going around to other churches and leading off their father's out-of-town revivals in Indianapolis and Gary and Kankakee. The entire family traveled together, all nine of them, generally staying with the minister, but not infrequently having to split up among various church households due to the size of the group. Each of the Singing Children had a freshness and charm. They were a good-looking family, even the boys had pretty, long bangs, and the church ladies used to cluck over that baby bass singer who put himself into the music so earnestly, and the handsome lead singer — he was a big boy who carried himself in a manly fashion — but no one missed the little tenor singer, either, the one with the sparkle in his eye, who could just melt your heart with the way he communicated the spirit of the song. Sometimes, when he got too many preaching engagements, Reverend Cook would send them to sing in his place. "When they'd come back, the people would tell me, say, ‘Anytime you can't come, Preach, just send the children to sing.'"

All the children were proud of what they were doing, both for themselves and for their father. And their father was proud of them, not only for causing the Cook family sound (his sound) to become more widely known but for adding substantially to his store of entrepreneurial activities: the church, the revivals, the riders he carried out to Reynolds each day for a fee in his nearly brand-new 1936 Chevrolet, soon to be replaced by a Hudson Terraplane, and, when Charles was old enough to drive, a pair of limousines ("Brother, I made my money!" he was wont to declare in later years with unabashed pride).

But Charles, a gruff, sometimes taciturn boy with a disinclination to show his sensitivity, soon grew disenchanted with the spotlight. "Aw, man, my daddy used to make me sing too much. I used to get so tired of singing I said, I'm gonna get up there and mess up, and he won't ask me to sing no more, but once I got up there, that song would get so good, shit, I couldn't mess up. I couldn't mess up. But I said, if I ever get grown, if I ever make twenty-one, I'm not going to sing for nobody. And I didn't."

Meanwhile, Sam, the irrepressible middle child, made no secret of his own impatience for the spotlight. Even L.C., who slept in the same room with him and appreciated wholeheartedly his brother's wit and spark, was taken aback by Sam's undisguised ambition. Charles could easily have resented his brother's importunity, but instead he retained a strictly pragmatic point of view. "Well, he had such a pretty little tenor — I mean, it was kind of undescribable, his tone, his singing. But we didn't have nobody to replace him. So we wouldn't let him lead. We were the lead singers, my sister and I. We pretty much had the say-so."

It was a busy life. The children all went to Doolittle Elementary School just two blocks west of the Lenox Building, and they were all expected to do well. Both parents checked their homework, though even at an early age the children became aware that their mother possessed more formal schooling than their father, and she would even substitute-teach at Doolittle on occasion. Reverend Cook, on the other hand, conveyed a kind of uncompromising rectitude and pride, which, in all of their recollection, he was determined to instill in his children. "He had a saying," said his youngest daughter, Agnes, "that he would write in everybody's course book when they graduated, and he would recite it to you constantly: ‘Once a task is once begun / Never stop until it's done / Be the labor great or small / Do it well or not at all.' He always told us, ‘If you're going to shine shoes, be the best shoe-shine boy out there. If you're going to sweep a street, be the best street sweeper. Whatever you strive to be, be the best at it, whether it's a small job or working in top management.' He always felt that you could do anything that you put your mind to."

Everyone was expected to contribute. The girls did the housework. Willie, the oldest, the adopted cousin, was already sixteen and working for the Jewish butcher at the chicken market across the street. At eleven, Charles went to work as a delivery boy for the Blue Goose grocery store. Even the little boys helped their mother with her shopping.
Charles joined the Deacons, a neighborhood gang. Sam and L.C. freely roamed the streets, but there was only so much you could get away with, because the neighborhood functioned, really, as an extended family; if you got too out of hand, the neighbors would correct you, even go so far as to physically chastise you, and Reverend and Mrs. Cook would certainly do the same.

There were still white people in the neighborhood when the Cooks moved in, but by now almost all its residents were black, the shopkeepers uniformly white — and yet the children for the most part thought little about segregation because their exposure was limited to the fact, but not the experience, of it. Reverend Cook, on the other hand, was unwilling to see his children, or anyone else in the family for that matter, treated like second-class citizens. One time the police confronted Charles on the street, and Reverend Cook, in his children's recollection, came out of the house and said, "Don't you mess around with my kids. If there is something wrong, you come and get me." And when the policeman touched his holstered gun, their father said, "I'll whip that pistol off you." He meant it, according to his children, "and the police knew he meant it. Our daddy wasn't bashful about nothing. He always told us to hold our head high and speak our mind. ‘Don't you all run from nobody.'"

It was a family above all, one that, no matter what internal frictions might arise, always stuck together. Charles might feel resentment against his father and long for the day when he could find some escape; the girls might very well feel that it was unfair that the boys had no household responsibilities; Sam and L.C. might fight every day just in the course of normal events. "We was always together," said L.C. "We slept together, we grew up together. Sometimes we'd be in bed at the end of the day, and Sam would say, ‘Hey, we didn't fight today,' and we'd fight right there in the bed — that's how close we were!" But the moment that the outside world intruded, Cooks, as their father constantly reminded them, stood up for one another. Mess with one Cook, mess with all.

The children all took their baths before their father came home from work ("We could tell it was him by the lights of his car"). Then they would sit down at the round kitchen table and have dinner together, every night without exception. They weren't allowed to eat at somebody else's house ("If you had a friend, bring them home"). Their mother, who addressed her husband unfailingly as "Brother Cook," never made them eat anything they didn't like and often cooked something special for one or another of her children. Chicken and dumplings, chicken and dressing, and homemade dinner rolls were the favorites, along with red beans and rice. None of them doubted for a moment that Mama loved him or her best of all. She lived for her children, as she told them over and over, and she prayed every night that she would live to see them grown, because "she did not want a stepmother over her children."

After dinner, in the summertime especially, they might go for a drive. They might go to the airport to watch the planes take off; they might go to the park or just ride around downtown. On weekends they would all go to the zoo sometimes, and every summer they had family picnics by the pavilion at Red Gate Woods, part of the forest preserve, family picnics for which their mother provided baskets of food and at which attendance was not optional.

Once a year the family attended the national Church of Christ (Holiness) convention in Annapolis, Detroit, St. Louis, and every summer they drove to Mississippi, spending Reverend Cook's two-week vacation from Reynolds shuttling back and forth among their various relatives all over the state, with Reverend Cook preaching (and the Singing Children accompanying him) wherever they went.

The preparations for the trip were always busy and exciting, with Mama staying up the night before frying chicken and making pound cake because there was nowhere on the road for a black family to stop. Papa did all the driving, at least until Charles turned fifteen, and after the first hour or so, everyone started to get hungry and beg Mama for a chicken leg or wing out of the shoe boxes in which she had packed the food. They all sang together in the car, silly songs like "Merrily, We Roll Along," and read off the Burma-Shave signs that unspooled their message sign by sign on the side of the highway. They all remembered one sequence in particular year after year. The first sign said "Papa liked the shave," the next "Mama liked the jar," then "Both liked the cream," and, finally, "So there you are!" One time, Agnes recalled, they ran out of bread for the cold cuts, and Papa sent her and her sixteen-year-old sister, Mary, into a grocery store — she couldn't have been more than five or six at the time. "Well, Mary went in and picked up the loaf of bread and put it on the counter just like she do anywhere else, just like she would do at home, and the man said, ‘You're not from around here, are you?' So she says no, and he said, ‘When you come in here, you ask me for what you want, and I'll get it for you.' So she said, ‘I'm buying it. I don't see why I can't pick it up. I'm taking it with me.'"

It was a very different way of life. Charles and Mary went out in the fields to pick cotton, but, L.C. said, he and Sam had no interest in that kind of work ("We were out there playing with the little girls, trying to get them in the cotton gin"), and Hattie, who did, was forced to take care of Agnes. One time Sam and L.C. were watching their grandfather pull up some logs in a field, "and he just throwed the horse's reins down when he seen us coming," said L.C. "Well, Sam got tangled up in the reins, and they had to run and catch the horse. And we got Sam back to the house, and he was all right, but I never will forget, he said, ‘That horse tried to kill me.' I said, ‘No, Sam, the horse was just spooked. She wasn't trying to kill you.' He said, ‘No — Nelly tried to kill me!'"

They met far-flung relatives on both sides of the family who had never left Mississippi, including their mother's cousin Mabel, who lived in Shaw and was more like a sister to her, and their father's brother George, who sharecropped outside of Greenville. Their grandmother, L.C. said, was always trying to get Sam and him to stay with her. "She would say, ‘You got to come live with us,' but I had a little joke I'd tell her. I said, ‘You know what? If Mama and them hadn't of moved and left Mississippi, as soon as I'd gotten big enough to walk, I'd have walked out!' They used to laugh at me and say, ‘Boy, you're so crazy.'"

Papa preached and they sang all over the state. To Hattie, "It was really a learning experience," but from Charles' point of view, "We was glad to get there, glad to leave."
They saw their father as a stern but fair man, but their mother was someone they could tell their secrets to. She treated their friends with the same kind of gentle consideration that she showed all of them, never reluctant to add another place to the table or take a mattress and lay it on the floor. "I don't know where one of you all might be," she told them by way of explanation, "maybe someone will help you some day in the same way." If any one of them was in a play and just said "Boo," why, then, to their mother, they were "the best booer in the world."

None of them was ever really singled out. Papa whipped all of them equally, and Mama rewarded them all the same — but even within the family Sam stood out. To L.C., bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, someone who by his own account, and everyone else's, too, "always thought like a man," Sam was similar — but at the same time altogether different. "Hey, I thought I had a personality. But Sam had the personality. He could charm the birds out of the trees."

If you tried to calculate just what it was, you would never be able to figure it out. There were other little boys just as good-looking, and there were undoubtedly others just as bright — but there was something about him, all of his siblings agreed, whether it was the infectiousness of his grin, or his unquenchable enthusiasm, or the insatiable nature of his curiosity, he possessed a spark that just seemed to light a fire under everyone he was around. He was a great storyteller and he always had something to tell you — but it was the way he communicated it, the way he made you feel as if you were the only person in the world and that what he was communicating to you was something he had never told anyone else before: there was a seemingly uncalculated spontaneity even to what his brothers and sisters knew to be his most calculated actions. He was always calling attention to himself. "He loved to play little pranks," his sister Agnes said, "and he could think of more jokes than anyone else." But why his actions failed to cause more jealousy or resentment than they did, no one could fully explain. Unless it was simply, as L.C. said, "he was just likeable."

To his older sister Hattie, Sam always had his own way of doing things. Sam and L.C. and Charles all pooled their collection of marbles, "but Sam liked to be by himself a lot, too, and he would take those marbles and have them be like boxers in the ring — he made up all kinds of things."
For that same reason, to his ninety-eight-year-old father looking back on it all thirty-two years after his son's death, "Sam was a peculiar child. He was always headman, he was always at the post, from a kid on what he said went. He'd just be walking along the street and make a song out of it. If he said it was a song, it was a song all the way through."

The others could see the contributions their next-to-youngest member made even to such familiar spirituals and jubilee numbers as "Deep River," "Swing Down, Chariot, Let Me Ride," and "Going Home," not to mention the more modern quartet style of Birmingham's Famous Blue Jays and the Five Soul Stirrers from Houston, both of whom had recently moved to the neighborhood. Spiritual music was at a crossroads, with the older style of singing, which the Reverend Cook favored — "sorrow songs" from slavery times along with the more up-tempo "jubilee"-style rhythmic narratives of the enormously influential Golden Gate Quartet — giving way to a more direct emotional style. This was the new quartet sound, with five- or six-member groups like the Stirrers expanding on the traditional parts while featuring alternating lead singers who egged each other on to a level of histrionics previously confined to the Pentecostal Church. Their driving attack mimicked the sound, as well as the message, of gospel preaching, and their repertoire, too, frequently sprang from more accessible personal testimony, like the "gospel blues" compositions of Thomas A. Dorsey. To the Singing Children it made little difference, they sang it all. Their repertoire was aimed at pleasing their audience, but they were drawn to the exciting new quartet sound. Anything the Soul Stirrers or the Blue Jays sang, they learned immediately off the record. But Sam's ability to rearrange verses or rhyme up familiar Bible stories to make a song was not lost on any of them, least of all the Reverend Cook.

It wasn't long before the Singing Children had a manager of their own, a friend of their father's named David Peale who owned a filling station and had plenty of money. He set up church bookings for them, established a firm fee structure ("We charged fifteen cents' admission, and we wouldn't sing if we didn't get paid"), drove them to their engagements in a white Cadillac limousine, and collected the money at the door. They had quite a following, according to Agnes, still too young to join the group. "Everywhere they went, they would turn the church out."

Sam accepted Christ at eleven, in 1942, just after America had entered the war — but like all of his brothers and sisters, the religion that he embraced seemed to have less to do with the Church of Christ (Holiness) or their father's strictures than the simple precepts that Reverend Cook had taught them: show respect to get respect, if you treat people right, they in turn will do right by you. At the same time, as Reverend Cook was equally quick to point out, there was no prohibition in the Bible against worldly success; in fact, there were many verses that endorsed it, and as proud as he was of his ability to put enough food on the table to feed a family of ten — and to have recently acquired two late-model limousines, a radio, a telephone, and a brand-new windup phonograph — he was equally determined that his children should learn to make their own way in the world.

Sam took this lesson in the spirit, but perhaps not quite in the manner, that his father intended. He established his own business with a group of neighborhood kids, with his brother L.C. serving as his chief lieutenant and himself as CEO. "Yeah, tearing out people's fences and then sell it back to them for firewood at twenty cents a basket. We did that; Sam didn't do it — he get the money. Sam would have me and Louis Truelove and Slick and Dan Lofton (there was about five of us) to go tear out the fence and chop the wood up — naw, they didn't know it was their fence — and then as soon as we get the money, he take half of everybody's but mine."

He was a mischievous, inquisitive child, always testing the limits but, unlike L.C., not inclined to measure the consequences of his every action. He went to the movies for the first time at around thirteen, at the Louis Theater at Thirty-fifth and Michigan, somehow persuading his younger brother to accompany him. "I said, ‘You know Papa don't believe in it.' He said, ‘Nobody gonna say anything, and you ain't gonna tell anyone.' I said, ‘Noooo . . .' ‘Then how he gonna know?'

"After that we went all the time — me and Sam had a ball. One time there was no seats, and Sam called, ‘Fire!' Shit, they wanted to put our ass in jail. But we got a seat. We used to get tripe sandwiches at this little place on Thirty-sixth, they be all covered with onions and pickles, and you get in the theater and just bite down on it, and everybody in the show want to know, ‘Who got them tripe sandwiches?'"

Their older sister Hattie still hadn't gone to the movies herself. "I wanted to go so bad, but I was scared of a whipping. Everyone in our group was going to the show, and I had to tell them I couldn't. They even offered to pay for me, 'cause I was too embarrassed to say, ‘My daddy won't let me.' But then I finally do go, and who do I see first thing in there? Sam and L.C. And they said, ‘Girl, we was wondering when you was going to wake up!'"

Sam, as L.C. saw it, "said just what he thought, whether you liked it or not. If Sam thought something, he would tell you, it didn't make no difference. One time we was going to the movies at the Oakland, on Thirty-ninth and Drexel, and we stopped to get some caramel corn. We come out of the store, and here are these three fellows, and one of them says, ‘Hey, man, give me a quarter.' And Sam just looks at him and says, ‘Hey, man, you too old to be out here mooching. Why don't you get a job?' He say, ‘Hey, man, what you say?' Well, Sam and I put our popcorn on the ground and get ready to fight. But then one of the other boys say, ‘Hey, man, don't mess with them. Don't you know they're Charlie Cook's brothers?' Said, ‘Charles'll come down here and kill everybody.' So that's what made the boys back up. But Sam didn't care. He said, ‘I got a quarter, and I'm going to the show with my quarter. You need a job!'"

His imagination was inflamed by the cowboys-and-Indians movies that ran at the Louis and at the Oakland Theater, too, and when they got home, he and L.C. played at all that "cowboy jazz," which, of course, inevitably led to yet another brotherly fight. There was no question that Sam lived in the world as much or more than any other member of his family: he was bright, he was daring, he was driven by ambition. But at the same time, much of the vision that fueled that ambition came from an interior view, a life of the mind, that was very different from his brothers' and sisters', that was almost entirely his own. Radio, like the movies, offered a vehicle of escape; he was completely caught up in the comedies, dramas, and ongoing serials. But books were his principal refuge from the humdrum reality of everyday life. He and Hattie (and later Agnes) were the readers in the family, each one taking out five books at a time, the maximum you were allowed, from the Lincoln Library on Thirty-ninth. They read everything — adventure books, mysteries, the classics (Sam's favorite was Huckleberry Finn) — and they swapped the books around, so that in one week, by Hattie's estimation, they might read as many as ten books apiece. "I mean, the whole family read. We would take turns reading tales out of different books, because our parents, even though they didn't go far in school, really valued education. But Sam was really a bookworm, he was a history buff, but he would read just about anything."

He started high school at Wendell Phillips, just a ten- or fifteen-minute walk from home, over on Pershing near the library, in the fall of 1944. His big sister Mary had recently graduated, Charles was entering his senior year, and Hattie was a junior, but Sam, despite his slight stature and some initial reserve, quickly made his mark. It was impossible, his classmates would later acknowledge in the Phillipsite, the high school yearbook, to imagine Sam Cook "not being able to make a person laugh." His teachers described Sam as "personable and aggressive," which might charitably be taken as a stab at summoning up something of his bubbling good nature, his vast appreciation of life in all of its dimensions. But whatever his schoolmates' or teachers' opinions of him, however much or however little he may have impressed them, he was probably better known as big Charlie Cook's brother than for any accomplishments of his own. And although he sang in the glee club, where sufficient notice was taken of him that he was given a solo at the Christmas show in his junior year, few of his classmates seem even to have been aware of the existence of the Singing Children, let alone their celebrity in certain circles.

He took over his brother's job at the Blue Goose when Charles started driving for a fruit-and-vegetable vendor. According to his little sister, Agnes, "Sam always drew a crowd, the kids would go in the grocery store just to talk to him." And he joined one of the local "gangs," the Junior Destroyers — more like a teenage social club, according to his brother L.C., which served as a badge of neighborhood identification and mutual protection. "We had to belong to a club to go to school," according to Sam, but he enjoyed the growing sense of independence, the thrill of confrontation not infrequently followed by unarmed combat, above all the camaraderie of belonging to a group that was not defined by his father's church. Everyone's memories of Sam at this time come back to his laugh, its warmth, its inclusiveness, the way he would indicate, simply by timbre, that for him there was no such thing as a private joke. There was another boy in the gang, Leroy Hoskins, known to everyone as "Duck," whose laugh was so infectious that Sam vowed he would one day capture it on record.

For all of his social skills, he continued to insist on his own idiosyncratic way of doing things, no matter how trivial, no matter how foolish this might sometimes make him seem. Charles had by now started working the 3:45 to 11:45 P.M. shift out at Reynolds ("I lied about my age. I got the job because I loved clothes; I was always the best dresser in the family"), and L.C. was working as Charles' assistant on the fruit-and-vegetable truck and pestering Charles to teach him to drive. "I was eleven, but Charles taught me, put me on two telephone books in my daddy's car so I could see. He was gonna teach Sam at the same time, but Sam said, ‘No, man, I'll learn myself.' You couldn't tell Sam nothing — he had to do it on his own. He tried to put the car in gear with his feet on the brakes instead of the clutch, almost stripped the gears in my daddy's car. Charles said, ‘Sam, you gonna strip the gears.' He said, ‘No, man, don't disturb me now.' You know, sometimes I think he thought he was the smartest person in the world."

The war impinged in various ways. Most directly because Willie was in the Army Corps of Engineers overseas — he was in one of the first units to cross the Rhine, and they eagerly followed the news of his division's movements and looked forward to his letters home. Sam and L.C. explored the city, roaming far beyond the confines of the neighborhood, sometimes walking along the lake all the way to the Loop and back, a distance of some three miles, and observing a hub of activity, a sense of entitlement and economic well-being, from which they knew black people were systematically excluded. They read the Chicago Defender, too, the pioneering Chicago journal that served as a kind of Negro national newspaper, and took a job selling the weekend edition of the paper on the street every Thursday night when it came out. Their growing interest in girls took them to the skating rink up by the Regal Theater on Forty-seventh Street, where all the big stars of the day appeared — but, true to the strictures of their father, while they may have gazed longingly at the marquee, they never ventured inside to see the show.

They continued to sing every chance they got, going from apartment to apartment in the Lenox Building, with Sam performing pop numbers by the Ink Spots he had learned off the radio and L.C. taking care of the business end. "Sam would do the singing. I just get the money."

The Singing Children continued to perform all around town, wherever their father was preaching or their manager could get them bookings. For all of his reluctance, Charles was a more and more compelling performer who was not about to be distracted from his song. One time when he was little, L.C. watched in amazement as "this lady got happy and jumped up and grabbed Charles — I mean, she was shaking and wiggling him all around — but he never stopped singing. She wouldn't have had to shake me but one time, brother, and I'd be gone, but Charles was bad." At the same time, Sam's gift was increasingly apparent to Charles, who couldn't help but recognize the gulf that existed between a God-given but unwanted talent like his own and the wholehearted commitment that Sam brought to his music. But each of the children, with the possible exception of Hattie, was at this point disaffected in his or her own way. Charles at eighteen couldn't wait to get out of the house and out from under his father's rule. Mary, a year and a half older and working at Reynolds now, too, was going with a young minister at Westpoint Baptist across the street whom she would soon marry, and simply felt that she was "too old to be getting up there singing": it was, in a sense, embarrassing to her.

Even Sam seemed tired of living so much in his father's shadow. "This Little Light of Mine" was the Reverend Cook's favorite song, the one he would sing almost every Sunday before he would preach, and one day, when he was around fifteen, Sam announced, "Papa, I can beat you singing that song." Reverend Cook, never one to take a challenge lying down, said, "Son, I beg to differ. That's my song." But he agreed to let Sam test his theory.

When Sunday came, Reverend Cook announced that his son was going to sing with him, and Sam strode confidently to the pulpit in front of the whole congregation. "All right, Papa," he said, "you start." No, Reverend Cook replied, it was his song, and Sam could start. Then, just as Sam got the people right where he wanted, his father held up a hand and said, "Okay, boy, you can back up now." Bewildered, Sam said, "What you talking about, Papa?" But his father just said, "You can stop singing, it's my song, and it's time for me to sing." And so he did, according to L.C. "Papa took that song, and he wore Sam out with it. Afterwards, Sam said, ‘You know I was getting ready to turn it out.' And Papa said, ‘Yeah, you was getting ready, but I turned it out. Like I told you, it's my song.' And Sam laughed and said, ‘Yeah, Papa, it's your song.'"

To his brothers and sisters it was one more example of Sam's stubborn belief in himself, perhaps the closest that any of them could come to their father's sense of divine mission. And while they chuckled among themselves on those rare occasions when Sam got his comeuppance, no one ever thought to question his good intentions, merely his common sense.

The one time they saw his confidence falter was when the whole family went to hear the Soul Stirrers at a program at Christ Temple Cathedral, the Church of Christ (Holiness)'s mother church at Forty-fourth and Lawrence. It was the first time that any of the Singing Children had seen the Stirrers in person, and they were expecting to get up and do a number themselves. But when they heard R.H. Harris' soaring falsetto lead, and upon its conclusion second lead James Medlock just matched him note for note, they looked at one another with a combination of astonishment and fear. "I mean, we thought we were bad," said L.C., "but that was the greatest sound we ever heard in our lives." They were mesmerized by the intricate patterns of the music, the way in which Harris employed his patented "yodel" (a falsetto break that provided dramatic counterpoint to the carefully worked-out harmonies of the group), the way that he interjected his ad libs to visibly raise the spirit of the congregation, then came down hard on the last bar of each verse without ever losing the thread of the song. That baldheaded old man just stood up there flat-footed and delivered his pure gospel message, with the women falling out like the Singing Children had never seen. After a couple of numbers, Sam shook his head sorrowfully and turned to his younger brother. "Man, we ain't got no business being up there today," he said. And though the others all tried to persuade him otherwise, Sam remained resolute in his refusal to sing.

It was during the war that they first heard their parents talking openly about segregation, about what you could and couldn't do both inside and outside the neighborhood. Their father was growing increasingly impatient with the lack of visible racial progress, and he was beginning to grow impatient with his own little ministry as well. More and more he was drawn to the traveling evangelism with which he had started out in Mississippi and which he had never entirely given up. "He was just kind of a freelance fellow," Church of Christ (Holiness) bishop M.R. Conic told writer David Tenenbaum, and soon Charles Cook started traveling again in ever-widening circles, shifting his exclusive focus away from his little flock. He thought he could do better for himself and his family.

The Cooks by now had moved around the corner to 724 East Thirty-sixth, and David, the baby of the family, who was born in 1941, would never forget his fifteen-year-old brother Sam getting in trouble with the neighbors, not long after they moved in, when the couple downstairs became involved in a noisy altercation. "We was all up there having fun, and [heard] this commotion on the floor below, so Sam goes out and leans over the bannister and calls out, ‘What's all this noise out here?' The guy shot upstairs — I mean, he was serious — but we all went back inside, and Sam said, ‘Well, that's all right, he won't make any more noise.'"

With the war over, Willie went back to work at the chicken market, Mary settled into married life, and Charles enlisted in the air force at the age of nineteen. He was stationed in Columbus, Ohio, and despite his unwavering determination to quit singing altogether the moment he turned twenty-one, he joined a chorus that traveled widely with a service show called Operation Happiness.

But that was the end of the Singing Children, and the extension of another phase of Sam's singing career. Just as he and L.C. had gone from apartment to apartment in the Lenox Building, serenading the various tenants with one of the Ink Spots' recent hits, they had begun in the last year or so to greet passengers alighting from the streetcar at Thirty-fifth and Cottage Grove, the end of the line, in similar fashion. Sam's specialties continued for the most part to derive from the sweet-voiced falsetto crooning of Bill Kenny, the breathy lead tenor for the group that had dominated black secular quartet singing (and in the process enjoyed a remarkable string of number-one pop hits) for the last seven years. Among Sam's favorites were Kenny's original 1939 signature tune, "If I Didn't Care," the group's almost equally influential "I Don't Want to Set the World On Fire," and their latest, one of 1946's biggest hits, "To Each His Own." As in the apartment building, Sam would sing, and L.C. would pass the hat. "People would stop because Sam had this voice. It seemed like he just drew people to him — he sang the hell out of ‘South of the Border.' The girls would stop, and they would give me dimes, quarters, and dollars. Man, we was cleaning up."

Sam and L.C. harmonized with other kids from the neighborhood, too ("You know, everybody in the neighborhood could sing"). They sang at every available opportunity — Johnny Carter (later lead singer with the Flamingos and Dells), James "Dimples" Cochran of the future Spaniels, Herman Mitchell, Johnny Keyes, every one of them doing their best in any number of interchangeable combinations to mimic Ink Spots harmonies, "singing around [different] places," as Sam would later recall, just to have fun.

His mind was never far from music; one day, he told L.C., he would rival Nat "King" Cole, another Chicago minister's son, whose first number-one pop hit, "(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons," was one of Sam's recent favorites. But somehow he never seemed to contemplate the idea that he might have to leave the gospel field to do it. Nor did he allow the music to distract him from his main task of the moment, which was to finish high school. Reverend and Mrs. Cook were determined that each of their children would graduate from Wendell Phillips — and it seemed as if L.C. was the only one likely to provide them with a real challenge ("Everybody else liked school; I didn't"). Sam saw education as a way to expand what he understood to be an otherwise narrow and parochial worldview. Reading took him places he couldn't go — but places he expected one day to discover for himself. He was constantly drawing, caught up in his studies of architectural drafting at school but just as quick to sketch anything that caught his interest — he did portraits of his family and friends, sketches to entertain his little brother David. In the absence of inherited wealth, he placed his faith in his talent and his powers of observation, and despite an almost willful blindness to his own eccentricities, he was a keen student of human nature. Which was perhaps the key to his success with girls, as his brother L.C. saw it, and the key to his almost instant appeal to friend and stranger, young and old alike.

His father had full faith in all his children, but perhaps most of all in his middle son. He was focused in a way that none of the others, for all of their obvious intelligence, ambition, and good character, appeared to be — and Reverend Cook had confidence that neither Sam's mischievousness nor his imagination would distract him from his mission. It was Sam's mark to sing, as his father was well aware. "He didn't bother about playing ball, nothing like that. He would just gather himself on the steps of buildings and sing."

It was a gift of God, manifest from when he was a baby, and the only question in Charles Cook's mind was not whether he would achieve his ambition but how.

Then one day in the spring of 1947, two teenage brothers, Lee and Jake Richards, members of a fledgling gospel quartet that so far had failed to come up with a name for itself, ran across Sam singing "If I Didn't Care" to a girl in the hallway of a building at Thirty-sixth and Rhodes. He was singing so pretty that Lee and his brother started harmonizing behind him, and it came out so good that they asked him who he was singing with. "I don't sing with nobody," Sam told them, and they brought him back to the apartment building where they lived on the third floor, at 466 East Thirty-fifth, just a block away, and where Mr. Copeland, the man who was training them, and the father of their fourteen-year-old baritone singer, Bubba, had the apartment at the back.

Copyright © 2005 by Peter Guralnick


Related NPR Stories: