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Sam Cooke
(1931-1964)
Biography by Bruce Eder
Sam Cooke was the most important soul singer in history, its primary inventor, and its most popular and beloved performer in both the Black and white communities. Equally important, he was among the first Black performers and composers to attend to the business side of the music business, founding both a record label and a publishing company as an extension of his careers as a singer and composer. Still, business interests never prevented him from engaging in topical issues, including the struggle over civil rights. The pitch and intensity of that battle followed an arc which paralleled Cooke's emergence as a star; his career bridged gaps between Black and white audiences that few had tried to surmount, much less succeeded at doing. Much like Chuck Berry or Little Richard bringin Black and white teenagers together, James Brown selling records to white teenagers and Black listeners of all ages, and Muddy Waters getting 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, Mississippi, 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 was later 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 in the Black community rose to the point where he became a star, possessing his own fiercely admiring and devoted audience, through his performances on "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, while 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 blues singer Blind Gary Davis became "sanctified" -- that is, found religion -- as the Rev. Gary Davis, he had to devise new words for his old blues melodies, and 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. Granted, 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.
Cooke was with Keen for the next two years, a period in which he delivered 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 was the top R&B-oriented label in the country, and Cooke could have signed there and found a happy home, except they wanted his publishing, and Cooke 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 Sims Twins.
Cooke's RCA sides were a 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 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 the bluesy, romantic "Sad Mood"; the idyllic romantic soul of "Cupid"; 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.
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.
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 motel, with a female guest and the motel's night manager, and he 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 later became one of the most sought-after of their original recordings.
![National Lampoon's Animal House [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]](https://rovimusic.rovicorp.com/image.jpg?c=g0qUDDn-ojJMmLhPugDBh1WnbEN5fCjifro6xhIBuB4=&f=2)
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 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, 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 during the mid-'90s, Cooke's final year's worth of releases were separated from the earlier RCA and Keen material, and was 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) issued combined and comprehensive collections of their portions of Cooke's catalog.
Sam Cooke
After years as the reigning voice in gospel music, Sam Cooke burst onto the pop scene with the 1957 release of his million-selling single, “You Send Me.” The song's innovative blend of Gospel, Pop, and R&B earned him the title of "The Man Who Invented Soul.” In addition to being an accomplished singer, songwriter and producer, Sam Cooke is remembered as the first artist to take a political stand and refuse to sing to segregated audiences. He also recognized the politics of the music industry early in life. At a time when record labels often left even the most talented and successful artist broke and penniless, Sam Cooke was one of the first artists, black or white, to buck the system and demand ownership of his career. He signed an unprecedented deal with RCA in 1960 after coming to the agreement they let him retain control of the copyrights to his music. Sam Cooke was one of the first artists to capitalize on the crossover appeal of popular music by intentionally recording songs that targeted both the black and white markets. He was the first African-American artist to own a record label, and he established his own management company and music publishing company as well. Even more remarkable, he did all of these things before his 34th birthday. Overshadowing his photogenic smile and business acumen, however, were Cooke's distinctive tenor and his unique, shivery way of hitting the high notes; this style would later become a trademark of soul singers like Otis Redding and Al Green, but it was something he had perfected ages ago when singing lead in a gospel quartet that sometimes pitched their harmonies too high by habit. It was this borrowing from one African American musical genre to help create another that added to Cooke's achievement, and made his untimely death all the more tragic. Cooke was born January 22, 1931, in Clarksdale, the heart of Mississippi's Delta country. His father, Charles Cook Sr. (the "e" was added later by his son) was a Pentecostal minister who also worked as a domestic servant. When economic repercussions from the Great Depression worsened the already-hardscrabble life in the Delta region, Charles Cook moved to Chicago and found work there as an assistant pastor, and soon sent for his family. Cooke began singing in the church choir at age six. By the time he was in his teens, he and his siblings had formed a singing group that was actually earning them pocket money.
In high school Cooke began singing with the Highway QCs, a gospel quartet and one of many in his hometown at the time. It was an extremely popular format: the quartets--with their tight vocal harmonies sung a cappella style-- were a near-secular version of gospel music that played to packed church audiences. Cooke's angelic lead voice, combined with his winning smile and onstage charm, made him a star from the start. The Highway QCs, however, were but a copy of another gospel quartet, the Soul Stirrers, and when the Stirrers' lead singer quit in 1951, Cooke was invited to replace him. The Soul Stirrers became extremely popular with Cooke as frontman; they had just signed a recording contract, and in short time they traveled to Los Angeles to record for the Specialty label. Cooke's recording career with the Soul Stirrers faded along with the popularity of gospel during the 1950s. The singles became fewer and far between, and each sold less and less. But it was during this era that Cooke perfected a signature vocal trick that would later make him famous. One night in 1953, when he was singing "How Far Am I from Canaan?," Cooke could not hit the high notes, so "he just floated under," this would become his signature style. As the decade progressed, Cooke saw that religious music was losing ground as rock and roll--in many ways, a less threatening hybrid version of several black musical traditions--gained in popularity. In 1956, Cooke wrote his first pop song, "Lovable," and recorded it on the sly with under the name Dale Cook. It was not a success, and many of Cooke's gospel fans saw through the ruse immediately since his tenor was so distinctive. Cooke signed with a fledgling pop label, Keen Records, and released a single in September of 1957. "You Send Me" hit No. 1 on both the R&B and pop charts and sold 1.7 million copies. After legal and royalty disputes with Specialty, Cooke was determined to retain legal and financial control over his artistic career from then on. He soon became partners with J. W. Alexander in the already-formed KAGS Music, his friend and advisor's song publishing company. This meant Cooke would receive his own royalties. It was groundbreaking at the time for artist to have financial control over his songbook. Cooke went in pursuit of a more solid foundation for his artistic abilities than the small Keen label. He desired a major-label contract, and with it the powerful manager and solid marketing people who would push his records. Cooke's decision to leave Keen ignited a bidding war among the big labels, and it was the team of Hugo & Luigi, two cousins who were A&R men at RCA, who managed to lure Cooke there. After Harry Belafonte, a calypso singer, Cooke was RCA's first significant African American signee. His first single for the label, "Teenage Sonata," was released in early 1960 to dismal results, but its follow-up, "Wonderful World," released in April, fared much better; his third that year, August's "Chain Gang," gave him another gold record. Cooke had formed his own label, SAR, in 1959, and the first act he signed was the Soul Stirrers, whose career had declined considerably after Cooke's departure. SAR headquarters, at 6425 Hollywood Boulevard, was also home to several other gospel and R&B acts, including Lou Rawls, Billy Preston, and a young Cleveland family of gospel singers known as the Womacks. Cooke's excellent ear for pop hits gave him the confidence to experiment with different musical styles in his solo career on RCA. Most of Cooke's singles for RCA charted in the Top Forty. In the summer of 1962 he released "Bring It on Home to Me," cited by McEwen as "perhaps the first record to define the soul experience" for its audacious borrowing directly from the gospel call-and-response style and the seen-it-all mood of Cooke's vocals. Its B-side, "Having a Party," also fared well, and remained an unusual statement on the cross-racial appeal of Cooke's music. In his hotel room one night, Cooke penned "Another Saturday Night" there, which yielded him another No. 1 hit and his biggest success of 1963. Cooke's life came to a mysterious, scandal-obscured end one night in December of 1964, when he checked into a motel on South Figueroa in the rough Watts section of Los Angeles with a woman who had a criminal record for prostitution. He and Lisa Boyer had met earlier at a restaurant, where Cooke's companions there remembered him pulling out a large wad of cash--as he usually carried on him--when it came time to pay for drinks. All the cash, his license, and credit cards and a ring were missing when police arrived and found him dead in the motel manager's office later that night. The manager, claimed that Cooke--looking for Boyer who had fled with his clothes and money--had kicked down the door and lunged at her, so she shot him in self-defense. His last words were, "Lady, you shot me." RCA released "Shake" eleven days after Cooke's death, but the song's B-side, "A Change Is Gonna Come," may have been more indicative of Cooke's legacy to black music. The song was reportedly inspired by the Bob Dylan protest song "Blowin' in the Wind," and he had performed it on the Tonight Show shortly before his death. "Curtained with shimmering strings," wrote McEwen in the Rolling Stone homage, "and anchored by a dirgelike drumbeat, `Change,' like Martin Luther King's final speech, in which he told his followers he had been to the mountaintop, was appropriately ominous, as if to anticipate the turbulent years facing black America," he continued. Cooke was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one its first honorees in 1986, and honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievment Award. Sam Cooke, the man who invented soul!
Source: James NadalSAM COOKE
ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME BIOGRAPHY
Sam Cooke: Born January 22, 1931, Died December 11, 1964
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
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
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.
This coming Sunday would have been Sam Cooke's 75th birthday.
(Soundbite Sam Cooke singing 'You Send Me’):
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.
Books
Tracing the Highs and Tragic End of Sam Cooke
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.
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
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Fordham Professor Mark Naison on Sam Cooke's Legacy Oct. 31, 2002
Sam Cooke was a trailblazing recording artist who helped shape the soul and pop scene with hits like “You Send Me,” “Chain Gang,” and “Sad Mood.”
(1931-1964)
Who Was Sam Cooke?
Sam Cooke sang with the gospel group the Soul Stirrers before going on to land huge hits like "You Send Me," "Wonderful World," "Chain Gang" and "Twistin' the Night Away." Forging a link between soul and pop, he had a diverse repertoire that attracted both black and white audiences, and started his own record label and publishing company. Cooke died on December 11, 1964, in Los Angeles, California.
Early Life
Sometimes called the father of soul music, singer Sam Cooke first reached the top of the charts in 1957 with "You Send Me." A string of pop and R&B hits soon followed, but he actually started out as a gospel performer. Born Samuel Cook in Clarksdale, Mississippi, he grew up in Chicago as the son of a minister.
Cooke began performing with his family as a child. In his teens, he formed a quintet called the Highway QCs. Cooke modeled his early work after one of his greatest inspirations, the Soul Stirrers, a popular gospel group. Not long after graduating from high school in 1948, he got the chance of a lifetime: being asked to join the Soul Stirrers, which provided him with an opportunity to hone his craft.
Career Highlights
After six years with the Soul Stirrers, Cooke began to branch out into secular music. He recorded his first single, 1957's "Lovable," under the pseudonym "Dale Cooke." Later that year, Cooke released his first number one hit, "You Send Me." Music fans loved this ballad so much that it toppled Elvis' "Jailhouse Rock" from the top of the charts. Before long he put his crystal-clear, velvet-smooth voice to work on such up-tempo tunes as "Only Sixteen" and "Everybody Loves To Cha Cha Cha."
In addition to being a talented singer and songwriter, Cooke had business smarts. He established his own publishing company for his music in 1959 and negotiated an impressive contract with RCA in 1960. Not only did he get a substantial advance, but Cooke would also get ownership of his master recordings after 30 years. Getting this was a remarkable feat for any recording artist at the time. He continued to be a pioneer behind the scenes, founding his own record label in the early 1960s. Working with other artists on his label, Cooke helped develop the careers of Bobby Womack and Billy Preston, among others.
More hits followed Cooke's move to RCA, including 1960's "Chain Gang." Behind the song's catchy rhythm mimicking the sound of prisoners breaking rocks, the song also served as a social commentary by Cooke. He continued to win over fans with a variety of musical styles, from the 1960 ballad "Wonderful World" to the 1962 dance track "Twistin' the Night Away." In 1963, Cooke once again charted with his ode to loneliness, "Another Saturday Night."
Tragic Death and Legacy
No one knows for certain what exactly happened in the early hours of December 11, 1964. Cooke had been out the night before, reportedly drinking at a Los Angeles bar where he met a woman named Elisa Boyer. The pair hit it off and eventually ended up at the Hacienda Motel. There the couple had some type of altercation in their room, and Cooke then ended up in the motel's office. He reportedly clashed with the motel's manager, and the manager shot Cooke. Cooke died from his injury, which the manager claimed was inflicted in self-defense. It was later ruled justifiable homicide.
Thousands turned out to mourn the legendary singer. Ray Charles and Lou Rawls sang at his funeral in Los Angeles, and another service was held in his former hometown, Chicago. The year after his death, Cooke's record company released his song "A Change Is Gonna Come." He wrote this civil rights anthem in response to Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind." It was perhaps his most pointedly political song.
No matter the circumstances of his passing, Cooke left behind a tremendous musical legacy. It only takes a listen to recordings of his live shows, such as his 1963 performance at Miami's Harlem Square Club, to recognize his contributions to soul music. And as a pop icon, Cooke has endured through his songs. Otis Redding and Al Green are among the artists who have covered his work. He was inducted into the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame in 1986.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Cooke
Sam Cooke
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Samuel Cooke[5] (January 22, 1931[6] – December 11, 1964),[5] known professionally as Sam Cooke, was an American singer and songwriter. Considered one of the most influential soul artists of all time, Cooke is commonly referred to as the "King of Soul" for his distinctive vocals, pioneering contributions to the genre, and significance in popular music.[7] During his eight-year career, Cooke released 29 singles that charted in the Top 40 of the Billboard Pop Singles chart, as well as 20 singles in the Top Ten of Billboard's Black Singles chart. In 1964, he was shot and killed by the manager of a motel in Los Angeles.[8] After an inquest and investigation, the courts ruled Cooke's death to be a justifiable homicide.[9] His family has since questioned the circumstances of his death. Cooke is included on Billboard's 2015 list of the 35 greatest R&B artists of all time.[10]
Early life
Sam Cooke was born Samuel Cook in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1931 (he added the "e" to his last name in 1957 to signify a new start to his life).[11][12] He was the fifth of eight children of Rev. Charles Cook, a Baptist minister in the Church of Christ (Holiness), and the former Annie Mae Carroll. One of his younger brothers, L.C. (1932–2017),[13][14] later became a member of the doo-wop band Johnny Keyes and the Magnificents.[15] Cooke was raised Baptist.[16]
Cooke's family moved to Chicago in 1933.[17] There, he attended Doolittle Elementary and Wendell Phillips Academy High School,[18] the same school that Nat King Cole had attended a few years earlier. Cooke sang in the choir of his father's church and began his career with his siblings in a group called the Singing Children when he was six years old.[19] Cooke first became known as lead singer with the Highway Q.C.'s when he was a teenager, having joined the group at the age of 14.[20] During this time, Cooke befriended fellow gospel singer and neighbor Lou Rawls, who sang in a rival gospel group.[21]
Career
The Soul Stirrers
In 1950, Cooke replaced gospel tenor R. H. Harris as lead singer of his gospel group The Soul Stirrers, who had signed with Specialty Records on behalf of the group.[22] Their first recording under Cooke's leadership was the song "Jesus Gave Me Water" in 1950. They also recorded the gospel songs "Peace in the Valley", "How Far Am I from Canaan?", "Jesus Paid the Debt" and "One More River", among many others, some of which he wrote.[4] Cooke was often credited for bringing gospel music to the attention of a younger crowd of listeners, mainly girls who would rush to the stage when the Soul Stirrers hit the stage just to get a glimpse of him.[23]
Crossover pop success
Cooke had 30 U.S. top 40 hits between 1957 and 1964, plus three more posthumously. Major hits like "You Send Me", "A Change Is Gonna Come", "Cupid", "Chain Gang", "Wonderful World", "Another Saturday Night", and "Twistin' the Night Away" are some of his most popular songs. Twistin' the Night Away was one of Cooke's biggest selling albums.[24] He was also among the first modern Black performers and composers to attend to the business side of his musical career. Cooke founded both a record label and a publishing company as an extension of his careers as a singer and composer. Cooke also took an active part in the Civil Rights Movement.[25]
Cooke's first pop/soul single was "Lovable" (1956), a remake of the gospel song "Wonderful". It was released under the alias "Dale Cook"[26] in order not to alienate his gospel fan base; there was a considerable stigma against gospel singers performing secular music. However, it fooled no one[9] — his unique and distinctive vocals were easily recognized. Art Rupe, head of Specialty Records, the label of the Soul Stirrers, gave his blessing for Cooke to record secular music under his real name, but he was unhappy about the type of music Cooke and producer Bumps Blackwell were making. Rupe expected Cooke's secular music to be similar to that of another Specialty Records artist, Little Richard. When Rupe walked in on a recording session and heard Cooke singing Gershwin, he was quite upset. After an argument between Rupe and Blackwell, Cooke and Blackwell left the label.[27]
"Lovable" was neither a hit nor a flop, and indicated Cooke's future potential. While gospel was popular, Cooke saw that fans were mostly limited to low-income, rural parts of the country, and sought to branch out. Cooke later admitted that he got an endorsement for a career in pop music from the least likely man, his pastor father. Cooke stated: "My father told me it was not what I sang that was important, but that God gave me a voice and musical talent and the true use of His gift was to share it and make people happy." Taking the name "Sam Cooke", he sought a fresh start in pop.[citation needed]
In 1957, Cooke appeared on ABC's The Guy Mitchell Show. That same year, he signed with Keen Records. Cooke's first hit, "You Send Me", released as the B-side of "Summertime",[26][28] spent six weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart.[29] The song also had mainstream success, spending three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard pop chart.[30] It elevated him from earning $200 a week to over $5,000 a week.[31]
In 1958, Cooke performed for the famed Cavalcade of Jazz concert produced by Leon Hefflin held at the Shrine Auditorium on August 3. The other headliners were Little Willie John, Ray Charles, Ernie Freeman, and Bo Rhambo. Sammy Davis Jr. was there to crown the winner of the Miss Cavalcade of Jazz beauty contest. The event featured the top four prominent disc jockeys of Los Angeles.[11]
Cooke signed with the RCA Victor record label in January 1960, having been offered a guaranteed $100,000 (equivalent to $1,030,000 in 2023) by the label's producers Hugo & Luigi.[32][33] One of his first RCA Victor singles was "Chain Gang", which reached No. 2 on the Billboard pop chart.[34] It was followed by more hits, including "Sad Mood",[35] "Cupid",[36] "Bring It On Home to Me" (with Lou Rawls on backing vocals),[37] "Another Saturday Night",[38] and "Twistin' the Night Away".[39]
In 1961, Cooke started his own record label, SAR Records, with J. W. Alexander and his manager, Roy Crain.[40] The label soon included the Simms Twins, the Valentinos (who were Bobby Womack and his brothers), Mel Carter and Johnnie Taylor. Cooke then created a publishing imprint and management firm named Kags.[41]
Like most R&B artists of his time, Cooke focused on singles; in all, he had 29 top 40 hits on the pop charts and more on the R&B charts. Cooke was a prolific songwriter and wrote most of the songs he recorded. Cooke also had a hand in overseeing some of the song arrangements. In spite of releasing mostly singles, he released a well-received blues-inflected LP in 1963, Night Beat, and his most critically acclaimed studio album, Ain't That Good News, which featured five singles, in 1964.[42]
In 1963, Cooke signed a five-year contract for Allen Klein to manage Kags Music and SAR Records and made him his manager. Klein negotiated a five-year deal (three years plus two option years) with RCA Victor in which a holding company, Tracey, Ltd, named after Cooke's daughter, owned by Klein and managed by J. W. Alexander, would produce and own Cooke's recordings. RCA Victor would get exclusive distribution rights in exchange for six percent royalty payments and payments for the recording sessions. For tax reasons, Cooke would receive preferred stock in Tracey instead of an initial cash advance of $100,000. He would receive cash advances of $100,000 for the next two years, followed by an additional $75,000 for each of the two option years if the deal went to term.[43]
Vocal ability
Cooke is widely considered one of the greatest singers and most accomplished vocalists of all time. His incredibly pure tenor voice was big, velvety and expansive, with an instantly recognizable tone. Cooke's pitch was remarkable, and his manner of singing was effortlessly soulful. Cooke could go as high as high C without losing purity or volume, and his upper mid-range was coated in a unique rasp. Cooke's vocal style was very adaptable, adopting a rather classical sound on jazz and pop songs while maintaining his trademark stylistic soulful hold on R&B, gospel and soul music.
Cooke's delivery encompassed a wide range of emotions including playful expressiveness to interact with listeners, mellow somberness as a form of reflection, and (in "A Change Is Gonna Come") profound soulfulness. When performing live, he would often play with notes and scales and experiment with melodies and his enunciation, while improvising entire songs. Cooke also began to perform highly charged versions of his songs later in his career.
Cooke's vocal exploits would go on to influence many acts like Otis Redding, James Brown, Rod Stewart, Johnny Nash, Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett, Mick Jagger, Al Green, Paul McCartney, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, Steve Perry, and Stevie Wonder among many others.
Cooke was a central part of the civil rights movement, using his influence and popularity with the White and Black populations to fight for the cause. Cooke was friends with boxer Muhammad Ali, activist Malcolm X and football player Jim Brown, who together campaigned for racial equality.
Legacy
Cooke's contributions to soul music contributed to the rise of Aretha Franklin, Bobby Womack, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Billy Preston, and popularized the work of Otis Redding and James Brown.[82][83][84] AllMusic biographer Bruce Eder wrote that Cooke was "the inventor of soul music", and possessed "an incredible natural singing voice and a smooth, effortless delivery that has never been surpassed."[85]
Portrayals
Cooke was portrayed by Paul Mooney in The Buddy Holly Story, a 1978 American biographical film which tells the life story of rock musician Buddy Holly.
In the stage play One Night in Miami, first performed in 2013, Cooke is portrayed by Arinzé Kene. In the 2020 film adaptation, he is played by Leslie Odom Jr., who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal.
Posthumous honors
- In 1986, Cooke was inducted as a charter member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[86]
- In 1987, Cooke was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.[87]
- In 1989, Cooke was inducted a second time to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when the Soul Stirrers were inducted.[88]
- On February 1, 1994, Cooke received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to the music industry, located on 7051 Hollywood Boulevard.[89][90][91]
- Although Cooke never won a Grammy Award, he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999,[92] presented by Larry Blackmon of funk super-group Cameo.
- In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Cooke 16th on its list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time".[93][94]
- In 2008, Cooke was named the fourth "Greatest Singer of All Time" by Rolling Stone.[95]
- In 2008, Cooke received the first plaque on the Clarksdale Walk of Fame, located at the New Roxy theater.[96]
- In 2009, Cooke was honored with a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail in Clarksdale.[97]
- In June 2011, the city of Chicago renamed a portion of East 36th Street near Cottage Grove Avenue as the honorary "Sam Cooke Way" to remember the singer near a corner where he hung out and sang as a teenager. Many of his family was also in attendance, as many of them are living in the Chicago area.[98]
- In 2013, Cooke was inducted into the National Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, at Cleveland State University.[99] The founder of the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame, LaMont Robinson, said he was the greatest singer ever to sing.[100]
- The words "A change is gonna come" from the Sam Cooke song of the same name are on a wall of the Contemplative Court, a space for reflection in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture; the museum opened in 2016.[101]
- Cooke is inducted into the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame.[102]
- In 2020, Dion released a song and music video as a tribute to Cooke called "Song for Sam Cooke (Here in America)" (featuring Paul Simon) from his album Blues with Friends. American Songwriter magazine honored "Song for Sam Cooke" as the "Greatest of the Great 2020 Songs".[103]
- In 2023, Cooke was named the third "Greatest Singer of All Time" by Rolling Stone.[104]
Discography
- Sam Cooke (1958)
- Encore (1958)
- Tribute to the Lady (1959)
- Cooke's Tour (1960)
- Hits of the 50's (1960)
- Swing Low (1961)
- My Kind of Blues (1961)
- Twistin' the Night Away (1962)
- Mr. Soul (1963)
- Night Beat (1963)
- Ain't That Good News (1964)
Further reading
- Guralnick, Peter (2005). Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. Little, Brown. ISBN 0-316-37794-5.
- Our Uncle Sam: The Sam Cooke Story from His Family's Perspective by Erik Greene (2005) ISBN 1-4120-6498-8
- You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke by Daniel Wolff, S. R. Crain, Clifton White, and G. David Tenenbaum (1995) ISBN 0-688-12403-8
- One More River to Cross: The Redemption of Sam Cooke by B. G. Rhule (2012) ISBN 978-1-4675-2856-6
- Burford, Mark (2012). "Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist—A Reinvention in Three Songs". Journal of the American Musicological Society. 65 (1): 113–178. doi:10.1525/jams.2012.65.1.113. JSTOR 10.1525/jams.2012.65.1.113.
External links
Media from Commons
Quotations from Wikiquote
Data from Wikidata
- Sam Cooke (ABKCO Homepage)
- Sam Cooke at AllMusic
- Sam Cooke at IMDb
- Rosco Gordon interview at the Wayback Machine (archived November 14, 2007)
- "Black Elvis" by The Village Voice
- "Sam Cooke". Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
SAM COOKE: EPITOME OF COOL
Sam Cooke is back in the spotlight with the release One Night in Miami, a feature film set during in the wake of Cassius Clay’s victory over Sonny Liston. That heavyweight fight brought Cooke together with Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Clay, on the eve of the latter becoming Muhammad Ali. There’s more to see of the real-life but seldom-filmed Cooke in an expanded cut of the acclaimed documentary Sam Cooke: Legend being released this week on DVD. PKM’s Benito Vila looked at both films and spoke to Legend director Mary Wharton to reveal what keeps Cooke so current and why his story matters.
There are plenty of reasons Sam Cooke is called “The Architect of Soul”, “The King of Soul”, and, most simply, “Mr. Soul”. His songs brought together gospel, R&B, jazz, blues and doo-wop to create a new cadence, and the way he wrote, the way he sang, the way he performed––and the way he took ownership of his career––led Cooke to be among the first set of artists inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. His selection recognized Cooke’s place among his contemporaries and fellow honorees: Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and Little Richard.
With the exception of Buddy Holly and Cooke, that original class had long and storied musical lives. A famous plane crash on tour took Holly in February 1959 and a nearly forgotten late night bullet killed Cooke in December 1964, the morning newspapers reporting he was shot nearly naked in a motel office. It turns out a woman Cooke had brought to that motel ran off with his money and clothes, sending him to the front office enraged, wearing only shoes and a sport coat. His look and hostility frightened the desk clerk and she fired a gun at him at close range, hitting him in the chest, prompting Cooke to say, “Lady, you shot me.” He kept coming towards her and she whacked him across the face with a broomstick. It broke in two and Cooke dropped dead.
No one could have imagined this sort of ending for Cooke. He was one of America’s favorite entertainers, topping the R&B and pop charts and finding fans of all ages. His voice, songwriting and arrangements had produced some of AM radio’s biggest hits––“You Send Me”, “Wonderful World”, “Cupid”, “Bring It on Home” and “Twisting the Night Away”––songs much of America knew all the words to.
“Bring It on Home”-Sam Cooke, live, 1963:
His sense of style led Cooke and his family to Los Angeles’ urbane Los Feliz neighborhood, to an ivy-covered fairy-tale hideaway, complete with a recording studio, a library, a swimming pool, a collection of cars that included a Jaguar XKE and a Ferrari and the elegant home furnishings to match. He was known to be smooth, in-charge and cool, even in dealing with the No-Coloreds-Jim-Crow practices of his day.
As 1959 touring partner Dion DiMucci recalls, “He was a guy I admired. He was a preacher’s kid and I was guy from the Bronx, about 19 or 20 years old, and rough around the edges. I saw him in a lot of weird situations, some very ugly. He was headlining the tour and he couldn’t eat with us in the diners and the restaurants. I heard some things said to him and one time I said to him, ‘Why don’t you throw that guy a right hook.’ He said, ‘Dion, I wouldn’t lower myself to where that guy is. That’s a peculiar way to become a man. If race matters to you, if it’s significant to you, you’re a racist. It doesn’t matter to us; it’s like shoe color, eye color.’”
By then, at age 28, Cooke had already been on stage for more than two decades, first as a gospel singer and then as a pop star, and he knew the ins-and-outs of show business and staying out of harm’s way. At six years old, Cooke started singing in Chicago churches with his siblings, took the lead singer role as a teenager, joining a local gospel group known as the Highway Q.C.’s. In 1951, he replaced gospel legend R.H. Harris as the lead singer of the nationally acclaimed Soul Stirrers, leading the group to a level of new success by bringing his voice to traditional songs like “Jesus Gave Me Water” and “Peace in the Valley”.
I heard some things said to him and one time I said to him, ‘Why don’t you throw that guy a right hook.’ He said, ‘Dion, I wouldn’t lower myself to where that guy is. That’s a peculiar way to become a man. If race matters to you, if it’s significant to you, you’re a racist. It doesn’t matter to us; it’s like shoe color, eye color.’”
Over the next few years, Cooke’s appeal to young women, and the Soul Stirrers adding instrumental arrangements to their songs, created an uproar amongst gospel traditionalists. In the summer of 1957, Cooke, tired of dealing with the constraints of gospel culture, moved to Los Angeles, added an e to his last name and launched a solo career. His first release from Keen Records featured George Gershwin’s “Summertime” on the A-side, and his original “You Send Me” on the B-side. By the fall, disk jockeys across the country had played “You Send Me” to number one on both the R&B and pop charts. He was booked on the Ed Sullivan Show and when his first appearance there was cut-off, Cooke was quickly rescheduled and on the return date Ed Sullivan apologized to Sam on-air, adding, “I never received so much mail in my life!”
“(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons”-Sam Cooke on The Ed Sullivan Show:
That first hit opened the way to 29 more Top 40 singles in the next six years. Songs like “Chain Gang”, “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha”, “Only Sixteen”, “Having a Party”, “Frankie and Johnny”, “It’s All Right” and “Good Times” gained national prominence, while “Another Saturday Night” and “Twisting the Night Away” topped the R&B charts. His success eventually led Cooke to sign with RCA in 1960, where he became the company’s number two seller, trailing only Elvis Presley. His last RCA album, Ain’t That Good News, released in February 1964, was recorded shortly after the drowning of Cooke’s infant son, Vincent. It offers two different musical sides. One showcases the party melodies Cooke was known for and the other features a set of more reflective tracks, including “The Riddle Song”, an Old English ballad, and “A Change is Gonna Come”. The latter was motivated by years of racist treatment, and inspired by Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and by Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind”.
“A Change Is Gonna Come”-Sam Cooke:
After Cooke’s death, “A Change is Gonna Come” became an anthem of the civil right movement, but due to the complexity of its arrangement, Cooke sang the song live only once, on The Tonight Show, Starring Johnny Carson, on February 7, 1964.
Nearly six decades later, Cooke is still in the spotlight. His music can still be found on radio and it often pops up in party mixes and on soundtracks. Cooke’s influence on the modern music business is undeniable: he created a working model for future singer/songwriters in negotiating contracts with RCA which secured his song publishing rights and allowed him to develop his own label, SAR Records. At SAR, Cooke signed the gospel-based Womack Brothers, five brothers from Cleveland he’d met while touring, and encouraged them to record more secular music. The Womacks released “It’s All Over Now” on SAR as The Valentinos, the song reaching the Billboard R&B 100 in June 1964, and then became the Rolling Stones’ first number one hit later that summer.
His success eventually led Cooke to sign with RCA in 1960, where he became the company’s number two seller, trailing only Elvis Presley.
The Cooke-as-an-astute-record-mogul storyline plays out in the recent Regina King-directed, Amazon Studios-distributed film One Night in Miami, a fictional account of Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Jim Brown and Cooke meeting in a hotel room immediately after Clay beat Sonny Liston for the World Heavyweight boxing title in 1964. [The next day Clay would introduce himself as a Muslim, a follower of Elijah Muhammad, and would later change his name to Muhammad Ali]. One Night in Miami portrays Cooke as a kind party-boy, caring for his wife at the posh Fontainbleau Hotel on Miami Beach before the fight and later pulling up to Malcolm X’s Overtown Hampton House Motel in his Ferrari, flask in his guitar case, to join the celebration. Played by Leslie Odom Jr., [a Grammy and Tony winner for his role as Aaron Burr in Hamilton] the Cooke character is sensitive to the criticisms of Malcolm X in his not producing a protest song like “Blowing in the Wind”. Before the film ends, Odom Jr. sings “A Change is Gonna Come”, re-creating Cooke’s The Tonight Show performance for which there is no existing footage. NBC never saved the tape.
Unseen footage of Sam Cooke, and interviews with the people in his life, will become available on April 30th, when ABKCO Films releases an expanded version of Sam Cooke: Legend on DVD. The original 66-minute documentary earned a Grammy in 2003, in the Best Long Form Music Video Category, and features interviews with Aretha Franklin, Lou Rawls, Bobby Womack and Dick Clark. It also gives voice to Cooke’s family, his siblings and his daughter, Linda, who describe his presence and determination. Cooke collaborators Lloyd Price, LeRoy Crume, Jerry Brandt, Luigi Creatore and radio personality Magnificent Montague temper the “good-guy” talk with stories from the road and the studio.
Before the film ends, Odom Jr. sings “A Change is Gonna Come”, re-creating Cooke’s The Tonight Show performance for which there is no existing footage. NBC never saved the tape.
But it’s the music and Cooke himself that stand out. Director Mary Wharton mixes in lesser-known Cooke tracks––like “Lost and Lookin’” and “(Somebody) Ease My Troublin’ Mind”––to convey the power of his voice.
“(Somebody) Ease My Troublin’ Mind”-Sam Cooke:
She also makes use of clips that reveal how hypnotic a performer he was––it’s hard to take your eyes off him. Sam Cooke: Legend was Wharton’s first feature, and her two most recent films, Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President and Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free, capture cultural shifts of the mid-1970s and early-1990s that are easy to overlook. By email, Wharton described the new Legend DVD footage as “painting an even bigger portrait of Sam Cooke”. When we got on the phone, Wharton went right to what made him “the epitome of cool.”
PKM: When do you first remember hearing Sam Cooke?
Mary Wharton: I think I knew his music before I knew his name, from when I was a kid dancing along to “Chain Gang”. His music came into my consciousness before I was old enough to put together, “Oh, this is sung by a man named Sam Cooke.” My father is a musician; he’s well versed in R&B and blues and gospel, and that kind of music was around me as a child. I absorbed it all without really knowing what it was.
“Chain Gang”-Sam Cooke:
PKM: Do you have a favorite Sam Cooke record?
Mary Wharton: I have two. One is Live at Harlem Square. It’s an amazing live recording and it’s hard to find anything from any artist, as a live recording, that can top that record. The other is an album called Night Beat. It has a song called “Lost and Lookin’” that kills me every time I hear it. There’s something so deeply sad about that song, something intense, that I really connect with.
“Lost and Lookin'”-Sam Cooke:
PKM: What made you want to do this film, as your first feature?
Mary Wharton: I had done a lot of television work, mostly at VH-1, where I did a bunch of episodes for a series called Legends. Bill Flanagan, the executive producer of Legends, put this film project together. He was the one who convinced Allen Klein at ABKCO records to make this Sam Cooke film. Bill asked me if I was interested and I leapt at the chance. I knew it would be challenging because there’s not a ton of footage of Sam, but I knew that ABKCO, and Allen Klein in particular, had always been protective of the Sam Cooke legacy. A number of other people had tried to make a documentary about Sam Cooke and had failed.
PKM: Why Sam Cooke for you?
Mary Wharton: One of the things that’s so great about Sam Cooke for me is that I’d connected to his music as a child. It speaks to the simplicity of his music. It’s kind of that keep-it-simple-stupid thing, that the best ideas are the simplest ideas. Sam had this amazing ability to boil things down to their absolute essence and he was able to tell a story in a direct way, with an economy of language. He had this gift as a songwriter that was just so…[Trails off]. I guess I can admit it: I was just a huge fan. Still, I thought it was important to tell Sam’s story because he was so groundbreaking in terms of understanding that he should own his music at a time when no other artists in the music business understood that. The Beatles didn’t own their music at that time. The Beatles weren’t even around when Sam Cooke first started. He didn’t own his music at the beginning, but he figured out that he needed to own his own music. His brother, L.C., told us a story about Sam telling Fats Domino, “Hey man, you’ve got to own your own publishing.” Fats Domino just laughed at Sam. He thought Sam was crazy. Sam accomplished so much in such a short life. There’s always been a certain amount of debate about who was the first artist to really marry gospel rhythms and gospel melodies with secular lyrics. Ray Charles is talked about in that way, and it’s possible that Sam Cooke and Ray Charles were doing it at the same time. There’s an argument to be made that Sam was the first, but either way, Sam was one of a few people who invented a new genre of music and created the mold that so many artists would follow. I’ve always been fascinated in the way that music morphs through time and through history, and how genres blend together and split apart. Sam––he’s like the supernova in R&B. That’s fascinating to me.
PKM: Why do you think so many people failed at making a Sam Cooke feature?
Mary Wharton: Allen Klein was a tough cookie. He had an imposing reputation for being, like, “It’s my way or the highway”. For me, the challenge was to tell the story I wanted to tell without Allen Klein getting me fired. [Chuckles]
PKM: What’s the ABKCO–Sam Cooke connection?
Mary Wharton: Allen Klein was Sam Cooke’s manager. He made a name for himself by being Bobby Darin’s manager and being one of the first artist-management people to go to the record label and demand a proper accounting. The record companies were notoriously shady about their accounting practices and were not necessarily paying their artists the proper royalties that they had earned. Allen went through their books because he had an accounting background, and found all this money that the label owed Bobby Darin. When he met Sam, Sam wanted Allen to do the same thing for him. Sam was like, “I don’t believe that I’ve been paid fairly. I want you to go have a look and see what you can find.” He became Sam’s manager and negotiated a new deal for Sam with RCA. Sam was able to start his own label and after Sam died, Allen wound up being the gatekeeper for all things Sam Cooke. Later on, Allen set up ABKCO, which now controls all of the labels that Sam was a partner in and released his music on. And basically anyone that wanted to license Sam Cooke music or name or likeness or anything like that had to go through ABKCO.
PKM: Did Sam introduce Allen Klein to the Rolling Stones?
Mary Wharton: I don’t think Sam introduced Allen to the Rolling Stones, but I think the Rolling Stones, from my memory of it, wanted to work with Allen because he was Sam Cooke’s manager.
PKM: ABKCO has put out the new movie, One Night In Miami. Have you seen it?
Mary Wharton: I haven’t seen it yet.
PKM: Your film, which I saw before seeing One Night In Miami, has two stories that surprised me. One was how the Stones came to use the Womack Brothers’ “It’s All Over Now” and the other one was how Sam felt that Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” was a song he should have written. Both of those stories materialize in the new movie.
I don’t think Sam introduced Allen to the Rolling Stones, but I think the Rolling Stones, from my memory of it, wanted to work with Allen because he was Sam Cooke’s manager.
Mary Wharton: Oh, interesting. Very cool.
PKM: How much of the One Night In Miami story is true? The storyline of Jim Brown, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and Sam Cooke coming together.
“The Gang’s All Here”-Sam Cooke & Muhammad Ali (rare and amazing footage):
https://youtu.be/KEBVpxYeqWc
Mary Wharton: As far as I know, it is true. I don’t think there are photographs of all of them together, but in the footage we used in the film, you see and hear Muhammad Ali call Sam up into the ring after he wins the fight against Sonny Liston. There are photographs of Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X and Sam Cooke together from that night. And Jim Brown was ringside at that fight, I think.
PKM: There’s a scene in your film––one that has a still image, a photograph, at a lunch counter or bar, shot from the side––and in that you can see Malcolm X on one side with a camera around his neck, while Muhammad Ali and Sam Cooke are in the center of the counter facing him. That also plays out in One Night in Miami. There’s a scene where the Malcolm X character is taking pictures of everyone with his new camera in a sort of diner/bar. Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali and Sam Cooke are in the middle of the pictures he takes.
Mary Wharton: I don’t recall what our source of information on all that was, but we had the most amazing writer, Peter Guralnick, who had been researching Sam Cooke for at least five years at the point when we did the film. That probably came through him. He would know for sure.
PKM: How sexy is Sam Cooke?
Mary Wharton: Oh, my God. The guy just exuded sex appeal. As you saw in my film, Andrew Loog Oldham tells the story of watching a woman having an orgasm, standing there, just watching Sam Cooke on stage. [Chuckles] I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for people who got to see him in person and meet him. We licensed a little bit of a Mike Douglas Show where Sam was a guest. To me, old TV talk shows from that era are so great because of the way that it wasn’t just about a star making a promotional appearance, coming on and being interviewed so they could plug their product. It was more like a sort of roundtable, where a random collection of people would be on and have a conversation. In that Mike Douglas footage, Sam is so natural and easygoing and charming.
The Mike Douglas Show, Feb. 11, 1964-Sam Cooke, guest performer:
That’s the best example I can think of of how Sam’s the guy that you want to have around at a party, or to have dinner with. He looks like he could fit into any situation and make it seem totally natural. I find that extraordinary. Sam was just the epitome of cool.
PKM: How is it that Sam Cooke remains relevant today?
Mary Wharton: That’s one of the beautiful things about music: a good song will stick around forever. A lot of the messages in Sam’s music are still relevant. A change is gonna come. You would think it would have come by now, but here we are still dealing with the same issues he was writing and singing about. Musically, the sound of Sam’s music is so timeless. It’s easy to say a song like “Chain Gang” places him in that sock-hop vibe. But at the same time, there’s so much of his music that you could play and you just wouldn’t even know what decade it was recorded in. His voice was that special. There are certain voices––Aretha Franklin is certainly one of them and Sam Cooke is another one of them––they cut right through everything and hit you in your soul. It’s otherworldly. When we were in the edit room, my editor got tired of me saying, “Listen to the way he sounds in this verse. His voice is like an angel. He sounds like an angel.” He’d say back, “What are you talking about? Angels sound like high choir voices.” And I kept saying, “No, this is the voice of an angel.” [Laughs]
Aftermath
The last chapter of Dream Boogie, Peter Guralnick’s book, reveals the hell set off by Cooke’s death, talk of conspiracy, cover-up, drugs, booze and pimps feeding into the incredulity of a huge 33-year-old pop star being suddenly gone. Cooke’s 30-year-old widow, Barbara, seemed level-headed in asking Allen Klein to drop an official investigation. Guralnick quotes her as saying, “Allen, I have two kids. There are two questions I’d like to ask you. Can you get Sam out of the room with that woman? Can you bring him back? I just don’t want to put my children through this.” But within weeks she was seen escorted by Bobby Womack, Cooke’s 20-year-old guitarist and back-up singer, and within three months the two were married. That set off a storm within the Cook family, with Womack taking a beating when he attended a family wedding in Chicago. Barbara Womack pulled a gun to protect her new husband from her former in-laws, but within five years she was firing it at him when she discovered that Womack had been molesting Linda, who was then a teenager. Dream Boogie closes in 1966 and that discovery is not in the book, nor is the fact that years later, Linda married Bobby’s brother, Cecil, who divorced Mary Wells when he discovered she was having an affair with his other brother, Curtis. Linda and Cecil became the performing and songwriting duo Womack and Womack, and had seven children. As twisted up as that all might be, Guralnick gives Barbara Cooke, one of Sam’s childhood sweethearts, the last word in his book, writing:
there’s so much of his music that you could play and you just wouldn’t even know what decade it was recorded in. His voice was that special. There are certain voices––Aretha Franklin is certainly one of them and Sam Cooke is another one of them––they cut right through everything and hit you in your soul.
“For Barbara, after all the bitterness and recriminations, even today in the midst of her ongoing argument with Sam, it is the beginning that she always returns to, when snowflakes fell like crystals and diamonds as the two of them huddled together in Ellis Park. ‘That was our spot. It was so quiet and serene, with those beautiful lights [shining] on all that clean, soft snow. We’d walk around the park for hours and fantasize. We didn’t have a dime between us, but you’d have thought I was the princess, and he was the prince. Every time a Cadillac went by, I’d say, ‘That’s our chauffeur. He’s coming to take us [home] to our mansion.’ Sam said, ‘You’re my love. I’ll always love you––forever.’ And I believed that till he died. Do you know that’s everybody’s ending? Everybody wants a happy ending. That’s the way I see it’.”
Sam Cooke: Legend-Official trailer:
THE DIRECTOR OF SAM COOKE: LEGEND:
MARY WHARTON
Salute to Mr. Soul, Sam Cooke.
Celebrating what would have been music legend Sam Cooke's 80th birthday – from an Atlantic City perspective.
- by Jeff Schwachter
At right is video from last year's "Club Harlem" exhibit, featrung Ralph Hunter, of the African-American Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey, as well as interviews with decendants of the former owners of Club Harlem.
A banner with the name Slappy White on it hung across Kentucky Avenue all summer.
(LEFT: Photo courtesy of Atlantic City Free Public Library)
The 33-year-old soul pioneer, who was on the verge of cementing his place as one of the greatest entertainers in the world at the time, was booked at the club from July 23 to Aug. 5. It was his second consecutive summer at the club.
After years of enormous recording success with songs he had written, recorded and performed around the world, now-classics such as the monumental hits “You Send Me,” “Cupid,” “Wonderful World,” “Twistin’ the Night Away” and “Chain Gang,” to name but a mere few, Cooke was invigorated by the rise of the Civil Rights movement at the time, and had penned what would become the movement’s anthem following his death, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” just months before.
Sadly, Cooke wouldn’t live to see the end of the year – one of his most accomplished and prolific.
The line of patrons waiting to get inside Club Harlem on this Friday night — a well-dressed crowd of both blacks and whites — stretched south down Kentucky Avenue towards Atlantic. Across the street, as on most summer nights, there was also a line waiting to get inside Grace’s Little Belmont, a lounge where Sammy Davis Jr.’s mother tended the bar. Davis was slated to appear at Club Harlem a few weeks after Cooke.
Cars and taxis whizzed by dropping off club-goers.
Elsewhere in the city, Ramsey Lewis was at the Wonder Gardens, the Cole Bros. were at The Gables, and, direct from Puerto Rico, Diablito and the Davalos Orchestra was booked at the Around-The-World Room on Albany Avenue. The Steel Pier was advertising the Beatles “sharing their first full-length hilarious action-packed film” on Aug. 5.
Like several night spots in Atlantic City at the time, Club Harlem offered an assortment of entertainment with summer-long acts that year such as Larry Steele’s revue “Smart Affairs of 1965,” which the headline act that week would essentially star in; the “Larry Steele Girls,” a group of gorgeous young dancers that worked seven days a week during the summer, usually until the next morning; Slappy White as emcee; and Johnny Lynch and his Orchestra.
Club Harlem actually housed two showrooms — one up front, the cocktail lounge, where Chris Columbo led the house band behind Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson on this July night, and the main showroom in the back where patrons paid a cover fee to see the headlining acts.
A week of shows went by before Atlantic City Press columnist Ted Schall offered a review of the scene happening over at Club Harlem in the July 29, 1964 edition. The tiny piece, entitled “Harlem Hit,” reads: “Larry Steele has mixed, blended and baked an entertainment-rich cake which he serves with a flourish at the Club Harlem in his ‘Smart Affairs of 1965’ [show]. Recording star Sam Cooke provides a delectable and flavorful icing. Ingredients follow a recipe of fast-faster-and torrid for the hard-working, well-drilled line of girls and boys dance and cavort about the Harlem stage with unbelievable energy.” Schall adds that the “lovely statuesque show girls add interest in the glamour department, helping to pace the show between solo spots.”
The columnist singled out show girl Patti Harris for her “dancing segment” during a “Caribbean spectacular,” and a few other acts and ended with: “Topping the bill is recording star Sam Cooke, who is at home in any mode [and] has the happy faculty of sweeping his audience with him into whatever mood his song dictates and during most of the stint, the mallets provided at the Harlem’s tables beat out a rhythmic accompaniment to his vocalizing.”
Cooke appeared at Club Harlem with a band that included bongos, guitar and bass guitar (one of which was played by Bobby Womack, likely the bass, according to Cooke’s award-winning biographer and music writer Peter Guralnick), with Lynch’s band filling in the holes for Cooke’s set.
At the time, Cooke, who would have been 80 on Jan. 22, 2011, was at the height of his career. Nobody in the Club Harlem audience that summer would have guessed that he was only months away from his tragic, early death.
A gospel sensation as a young man growing up in Chicago before venturing into the world of mid-1950s pop music, where he had unmatched success — and respect — as a black recording artist at the time, Cooke, according to Guralnick’s 2005 biography, the New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, was a complex man.
Known for his majestic, almost angelic voice, which never hit a bad note, Cooke was “one of the most phenomenal successes in the history of show business,” at the time, as the Press described him in a July 30, 1964 profile and interview with the singer. He was not only a pioneer in the realm of soul music — he essentially created it — but a visionary who, by the time of his death on Dec. 11, 1964, had started his own publishing and recording companies, realizing the importance of owning his own songs. It was something that was very rare in 1964, especially for a black artist.
Months before the Club Harlem shows, in January 1964 Cooke, an avid reader of James Baldwin and other modern voices of the time, according to Guralnick, recorded a song that he had just written at the end of 1963. It would become one of his most popular songs, even though he rarely performed it live.
Inspired by and in response to the “protest singers” of the early 1960s and the whole Hootenanny scene, Cooke penned “A Change Is Gonna Come.” He performed the song on the Tonight Show in February 1964, and according to Guralnick, who describes the events during the show taping in spectacular detail in his book, it was a milestone for Cooke, his bandmates, his friends, his manager at the time Allen Klein, and for America.
The larger role that Sam Cooke played in the Civil Rights movement of the mid-to-late 1960s, Guralnick says during a recent phone interview for Atlantic City Weekly, “was in writing a song that became the theme song for the Civil Rights movement, ‘A Change Is Gonna Come,’ which has persisted to this day as an emblem of change and as a ... symbol of the movement as it’s continued.”
The single was never released during Cooke’s lifetime, but it was no secret that during his last two years alive he was becoming increasingly aware and responsive with regard to America’s Civil Rights movement and the segregation and racism that perpetuated it. In the autumn of 1963, Cooke was arrested in Shreveport, La., after refusing to leave a “brand-new Holiday Inn,” when the “man at the desk” said there were “no vacancies,” even though Cooke had called earlier and made reservations for he and his wife Barbara, according to Guralnick’s book.
Following the historic March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963, featuring Martin Luther King Jr., as well as a host of musicians, Cooke was given a copy of the new Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album and was blown away by Dylan’s song “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
As Guralnick writes in Dream Boogie: “He was so carried away with the message [of the song], and the fact that a white boy had written it, that he [said] he was almost ashamed not to have written something like that himself. It wasn’t the way Dylan sang, he told Bobby Womack. It was what he had to say.”
Prior to his Atlantic City engagement, Cooke made a triumphant return to New York’s Copacabana. According to Guralnick, Cooke’s stint there in the late 1950s was poorly received and the feeling stuck with Cooke until he put “the crowd away” at the venue upon his 1964 return.
Working out the Copa show for a while with Sammy Davis Jr.’s arranger, Cooke and his partners cooked up a show that still sounds amazing 47 years after it was recorded for the 1965 Sam Cooke at the Copa (RCA) album.
On the record, which is among four Cooke albums that are currently being offered in high-resolution digital audio files via an agreement between ABKCO Records and HDTracks — the others are Keep Movin’ On, Ain’t That Good News, and the career retrospective (that includes the hard to find recording of “A Change Is Gonna Come”) Portrait of a Legend 1951-1964 — Cooke performs both “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “If I Had a Hammer,” among his hits new and old.
A couple weeks later he would start his Summer 1964 residency at Club Harlem.
Guralnick says he doubts very much that Cooke would have played the same set that he performed at the Copacabana while in Atlantic City. The author says the same about Cooke’s Club Harlem stint the summer beforehand — when he was booked July 11-17 — in relation to his now-famous 1963 “chitlin circuit” gig at the Harlem Square Club in Miami, Fla. The gig was captured and released on the 1985 album Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963: One Night Stand, which captures “a harder, grittier version of the Sam Cooke that [was] known from his records,” as Guralnick writes in the original liner notes for the album.
“The thing is,” says Guralnick, “is that the Harlem Square [recording] was at the beginning of 1963 and he had brought a completely revamped show into the Harlem Square after touring England with Little Richard and just seeing the energy that Little Richard put into his show and the way that Little Richard just commanded attention and took over the audience. So Sam and his business partner J.W. Alexander flew home from England, went to California, worked out a show, which is essentially what the show at the Harlem Square is. And they had debuted it at the Apollo [in Harlem] in [late] 1962. I would doubt very much that he did that exact show at the Club Harlem [during his engagement there in 1963 from July 11-17]. From what I understand the Club Harlem was much more of an uptown [club], what we think of as a Las Vegas show. So it would surprise me if Sam had the identical show to what he was doing at the Harlem Square at the Club Harlem.”
With regard to the summer of ‘64 Copa show and Cooke’s stint at Club Harlem a few weeks later, Guralnick adds, “The show he did at the Copa was completely different from any show he had done before. ... You know, fully orchestrated and there was a lot of trauma putting that together, which is in the book, but the thing is he went almost immediately following the Copa to Club Harlem. And the interesting thing is that [his manager] Allen Klein ... was responsible for getting him back into the Copa — it was Sam’s long-held dream to return to the Copa and triumph. And Allen, who had recently become his manager, supported [his return to the Copa] all the way. ... But Allen went to see Sam at Club Harlem and said the show at Club Harlem was way beyond the Copa show. As much as the Copa show was hailed [Cooke went] way beyond it in energy and connection with the audience.”
The repertoire may have been similar, adds Guralnick, although not identical. “I would guess that Sam would’ve put more of an emphasis on songs like ‘Bring it on Home to Me’ or ‘Chain Gang’ [at Club Harlem],” he says. “I’m sure he would’ve [sung] a lot of those same songs [but] considerably more down home and considerably more soulful
Click here for an amazing photo gallery with rare shots of Sam Cooke in Atlantic City at Club Harlem circa 1964 and more.
Sam & the Show Girls
Cooke was no stranger to the Jersey Shore, having worked joints down in Wildwood as far back as 1958. Guralnick’s book notes that he played the Hurricane Room in Wildwood the same summer he debuted at Club Harlem.
It was during that first Club Harlem stint that he fell for one of Larry Steele’s dancers, a gorgeous young woman named Betty Jo Spyropulos.
“He tried to flirt with me in 1963, but I had a boyfriend that summer,” Spyropulos tells Atlantic City Weekly during a recent phone interview from her Long Island home. “In 1964 I was supposed to have that same boyfriend, but it [didn’t work out,] so Sam and I got pretty close that summer.”
Patti Harris, now an Atlantic City icon, veteran dancer, educator, artist and visionary, was a young (and also gorgeous) dancer at Club Harlem in the early 1960s. By 1964 Steele had her name advertised as one of the dancers to catch at his club.
Although Harris, a dancer and instructor still based in Atlantic City, doesn’t remember too much about appearing in the show with Cooke, she does remember that the superstar had bought a dog for one of the other dancers while he appeared at the club in 1964.
Yvonne Walton concurs.
Walton was going to school at Morgan State in 1964. That summer she was brought to Atlantic City to perform in a dance production for which she was never paid. “I needed to find work to pay for the apartment I was renting in Atlantic City that summer,” she tells Atlantic City Weekly.
First hired as a cigarette girl, Walton too became one of the Club Harlem show girls.
Once the dancers in Larry Steele’s dance production, who would open all the headliner bills and then be asked by management to sit at the bar so that men could buy them drinks all night and boost the booze revenue, told Steele that the cigarette girl Walton could dance, she was hired instantly and would go on to dance at Club Harlem every summer through her college years.
“The main show in the back room would start at 8pm,” recalls Walton, who now resides in Atco, N.J. “We [Larry Steele’s dancers] would open every show. We’d work seven nights a week, including the Breakfast shows [6am every Sunday morning] on the weekend.
“You had to dance or participate in every show. You didn’t have a choice.”
Walton didn’t drink and says that she never liked to be touched or “have a strange man put his arm around my shoulder.” So, instead of sitting pretty at the bar with the rest of the dancers following the end of the show, she would quietly sneak upstairs and hide in the dressing room to read a book.
The back room — the main room — in Club Harlem could hold a couple hundred patrons, recalls Walton. In 1964 when Cooke was in town, the house was always packed, she says.
“We enjoyed working with him very much,” says Walton. “He was such a nice person, you know? Really, really nice and very friendly with everybody. We all took pictures with him. I had my roommate from college come down and my mom came down. They were so excited. He even took a picture with me.”
Walton remembers that “his manager,” Klein, took some of the dancers out to dinner at a “nice restaurant.”
“And [Cooke] would always say, ‘Hi girls, how you doing?’ He was very gregarious, just a really nice person. He never got out of [line.]”
Like Harris, Walton remembers Cooke buying a little dog for one of the dancers.
“I think Betty Jo had a closer relationship with Sam,” says Walton. “She was just so pretty; all the entertainers at the club were crazy about her. And she was so personable and nice.”
Betty Jo Spyropulos grew up in Indiana, where a producer caught wind of her talent and put her in a production that wound up traveling to Michigan. The show included the Four Tops, Jackie Wilson and other luminaries.
She came to Atlantic City in 1960 to work with Larry Steele and spent five years working the summer season (June to Labor day) at Club Harlem. She says she struck up a close relationship with Cooke during that summer of 1964 residency.
The dancers in Larry Steele’s annual revue arrived in the resort in early June and then rehearsed for three weeks until the show opened at Club Harlem in late June, running through Labor Day. The dancers worked seven nights a week until 6am, including Sunday’s legendary 6am “Breakfast Show,” which would attract all of the entertainers in town that weekend.
“He bought me a Yorkshire Terrier, which we named Cookie and I remember driving up to New York City from Atlantic City in a Rolls Royce that Allen Klein gave Sam for the Copa gig [pictured on page 577 of Dream Boogie] because Sam had a photo shoot or something.
“I was about 24 years old, and had worked with many stars at the club by that time, and I wasn’t really impressed with his Rolls Royce and things like that. I remember he had a blank check to get whatever we wanted and I went to buy the dog with Sam’s driver — I forget his name — after we dropped him off at the photo shoot in New York.”
According to Guralnick, this would not have been a rare thing for Cooke to have “girls” in the many cities he performed. “Sam and his wife Barbara had a pretty open marriage,” he says.
Spyropulos remembers that she and the driver picked up Cooke after getting the dog “for about $150.” They named the dog Lady Cookie Harlem the II, of New York.
“That was the name. It was registered with the Kennel Club,” Spyropulos recalls.
Spyropulos tells Atlantic City Weekly that she doesn’t believe that what has been the long-time story of Cooke’s death — which a jury declared a “justifiable homicide” in the official court case — is the real story behind the entertainer’s murder.
“When I went to the wake in Chicago, and I got to see Sam through his glass-top coffin, one of his cousins was there and he told me that the story of Cooke’s death was false and that he’d been dead for a longer time than what was believed,” says Spyropulos.
To this day she doesn’t think that Cooke could have been killed by a $3-a-night California motel manager (Bertha Lee Franklin) because the two, as accused, got into a very violent altercation.
“I have so many good memories of Sam,” says Spyropulos. “And I always defend him because of how his death was reported. He was always a gentleman and so clean cut.”
Although she spent a lot time with Cooke where he was staying in Atlantic City that summer, Spyropulos doesn’t remember where in the resort it was. She does remember going to some off-the-beaten path after-hours joint that Cooke knew of, to get breakfast.
“I had been working in Atlantic City for several summers and thought I knew of all the places to go but Sam, one time, took me to this place to have breakfast. It was an after-hours place, but it was like at somebody’s house.”
Spyropulos says that, sensing that the superstar was interested in her, she used to always pop in to Cooke’s dressing room between sets to let him know she’d be at the bar. The dancers were not permitted to leave the premises of the club.
Spyropulos also remembers the night Cooke’s wife Barbara came to see the show.
“His wife came to one of the ‘64 shows,” says Spyropulos. “And before that I would always wait in the wings of the stage and hold a towel for him. But the night his wife was there I didn’t do it because I didn’t think it was right. And he came running from the stage all the way upstairs to the dressing room, put the towel in my hand, and led me back down to the stage.”
There were two headliner shows a night at Club Harlem. One started at 10:30pm and one at 1:30am.
Nearby a BBQ joint called Sapp’s was busy, as was the club across the street, Grace’s Little Belmont.
“Pop Williams [who was an owner of Club Harlem] didn’t want us to go to the other bars,” recalls Walton. “One time, my mom was in town and we went over to the Little Belmont. And later Pop said, ‘You know you’re not supposed to be doing that.’ And he was serious.”
The businessman wanted to keep all the money on his side of Kentucky Avenue.
And on most nights during the summer season the avenue (dubbed “KY & the Curb”) was packed with party seekers of all stripes. Blacks, whites, men, women, all stood in line wearing their suits, ties, heels and stockings.
“The whole street was filled with people all night long,” remembers Walton. “People and all the entertainers in town would all come down and just have a good time. Kentucky Avenue was the place to go in A.C. Nobody was afraid of anybody hurting them or harming them. It was like New York City.”
The action, says Walton, went all night long at the club, and nearly every entertainer who came to town “had to make it over to Club Harlem” at some point.
Atlantic City historian Vicki Gold-Levi has the banner that hung across Kentucky Avenue with Sam Cooke’s name on it (“It’s more like a canvas material than a regular banner,” she says) and she is in the process of donating it to the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, which is being developed by the Smithsonian to be built on the Mall in Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile, Cooke, whose “brilliant smile ... could disarm both knaves and kings,” as Guralnick writes in Dream Boogie, lives on in his music, his extraordinary life story, and in the memories of those who were close to him.
Cooke didn’t live to see the genre of music he had given birth to — inspiring Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, Al Green, Joe Tex and countless other African-American singers who had strong gospel-singing backgrounds, were well-versed in the blues and R&B, and who would forge the path of soul music in the country for decades to come — but it’s nice to think that he may have been staring down from heaven smiling on that cold November 2007 night in Chicago when President-elect Barack Obama referred to his song “A Change Is Gonna Come” during his acceptance speech at Grant Park.
Click here for an amazing photo gallery with rare shots of Sam Cooke in Atlantic City at Club Harlem circa 1964 and more.
WEB EXTRAS:
First, a blog post thanking sources, references and further reading and listening materials. Click here to read it.
Second, the following list...
Sam Cooke & Bob Dylan: A 'Change' in the 'Wind'
Many writers and critics have noted (with their pens) that Sam Cooke was inspired to write his 1964 song "A Change Is Gonna Come" after hearing Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," recorded in 1963.
As both songs would become meshed with the Civil Rights movement in the mid-1960s, and to this day remain symbolic of the "protest era," both Cooke and Dylan would become "voices" for their respective generations and audiences. While both songs have been performed and recorded by countless artists around the globe, more recent, in 2007 Cooke's "Change" was referenced by Barack Obama after he won the U.S. presidential election and told the tens of thousands gathered at Chicago's Grant Park on that cold November night that, "It's been a long time coming, but tonight, change has come to America." (Bettye LaVette and Jon Bon Jovi did a duet on the song for the We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial program.)
Even including "Blowin' in the Wind" in his repertoire during what would be his final years of performing— Cooke sings it on his posthumous 1965 album (recorded in the summer of 1964) Live at the Copa — it has been said that Cooke admired Dylan's song so much that he was moved to pen one of his greatest songs, "A Change Is Gonna Come" — the title of which gives a tip of the cap to another Dylan song of the era "The Times They Are A-Changin'" — which would, following Cooke's murder in December 1964, become one of the most important songs of the Civil Rights movement.
1. In Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Singers of All Time," Bono pays tribute to number seven on the list, Bob Dylan, with a Sam Cooke story:
"Bob Dylan did what very, very few singers ever do. He changed popular singing. And we have been living in a world shaped by Dylan's singing ever since. Almost no one sings like Elvis Presley anymore. Hundreds try to sing like Dylan. When Sam Cooke played Dylan for the young Bobby Womack, Womack said he didn't understand it. Cooke explained that from now on, it's not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It's going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth."
2. Theme Time Radio Hour with Bob Dylan, Season One, Episode 31, "Tennessee" theme, which originally aired on XM radio on Nov. 29, 2006 featured Sam Cooke's version of the song "Tennessee Waltz" among Dylan's eclectic playlist.
3. Bob Dylan and his band performed what would become Cooke's most inspiring and popular songs following his early death, "A Change Is Gonna Come," at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York, for the eventual TV special Apollo At 70: A Hot Night In Harlem. Celebrating the theater's 70th anniversary, the show aired on NBC on June 19, 2004. Watch Ossie Davis talk about Cooke and introduce Dylan at the show, followed by Dylan's performance:
4. An NPR story from December 2007, entitled "Sam Cooke's Swan Song of Protest," says:
"In 1963, having already scored many hits in the secular pop marketplace, Sam Cooke first heard Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind." Amid the civil rights movement, Cooke was inspired to create his own protest song, according to Peter Guralnick, Cooke's biographer.
As a black singer from the South, racial segregation affected Cooke personally. In October 1963, he was arrested and thrown in jail after refusing to be turned away from a Shreveport, La., hotel which had initially accepted his reservation. In December 1963, Cooke recorded "A Change Is Gonna Come."
Though Cooke didn't live to see its success and reception, "A Change Is Gonna Come" cemented his reputation as a soul-music legend. The song was covered hundreds of times, including by Aretha Franklin.
"He was one of the greatest male singers of all time," Franklin says. "You put him in the category with Caruso and Pavarotti and these other great names. Sam Cooke, bar none, was one of the greatest singers of all time."
Listen to a 10-minute podcast of this story here.
5. Finally, read a July 1963 edition of Billboard magazine, featuring Sam Cooke's Atlantic City itinerary at Club Harlem July 11-17. The following summer, he was back for two weeks.
The Unlikely Story of “A Change Is Gonna Come”
by David Cantwell
The New Yorker
Then I go to my brother
And I say, “Brother, help me please.”
But he winds up knockin’ me
Back down on my knees.
Sam Cooke died on way to being the greatest
As proof, Wikipedia has a two-page compilation of 400 famous names under the category "Singers from Chicago, Illinois," representing a wide range of styles including pop, rock, jazz, soul and gospel (not counting a third, separate Wikipedia page listing 68 Chicago rappers). Included are such immortals as Mel Torme, Mahalia Jackson and Dinah Washington.
Thursday marked the 50th anniversary of the tragic death of one of those great Chicago singers. In fact, if Sam Cooke (Wendell Phillips High, class of '48) had not been killed at the age of 33, he might have become the greatest. Considering vocal ability, style, writing talent and social significance, perhaps only Ray Charles and Nat King Cole are his equals on that Wikipedia list.
Cooke was born in 1931, the throes of the Depression, in Clarksdale, Miss. Two years later, his family made the Great Migration to Chicago and settled in Bronzeville. His father, a Baptist minister, started a gospel group, and young Sam quickly emerged as the featured performer. As a teenager, he was recruited by the famous gospel group the Soul Stirrers. His beautiful voice and captivating looks galvanized church congregations across the South. Had he remained with the Soul Stirrers, he would have undoubtedly become a gospel legend.
Against friends' advice, Sam sought greater fame in the worlds of soul, rhythm and blues, and (horrors!) rock 'n' roll. He abandoned the "sacred for the profane," aiming for the more lucrative white audience, a decision that proved prescient when his first crossover single, "You Send Me," sold more than a million copies in 1957. In 1960, he became one of the first black artists to sign with RCA Records, which was looking for the "black Elvis." But the future of rock 'n' roll was uncertain, so RCA hedged its bets and gave him bland material to sing, which failed to showcase his considerable talents.
Cooke never lost touch with his black fan base and continued appearing in black clubs across the country. But his real breakthrough came in New York City at the Copacabana, the posh Manhattan nightclub that had enforced segregation for years. Heralded by a 20-by-100-foot billboard in Times Square, Cooke became one of the Copacabana's first black singers, joining the ranks of Ella Fitzgerald, Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis Jr. Superstardom beckoned with his memorable live album "Sam Cooke at the Copa."
In early 1964, Cassius Clay (before he became Muhammad Ali) won the heavyweight title by upsetting Sonny Liston, and immediately afterward, Clay invited Cooke ringside, introducing him to reporters from all over the world as "the world's greatest rock 'n' roll singer." Cooke was poised to bring his career — and his social conscience — to a higher level.
That final year of his life, Cooke wrote and recorded his magnum opus: the great civil rights anthem, "A Change Is Gonna Come." He wrote the song during the height of the civil rights movement, after being denied a motel room in Louisiana and a subsequent arrest for disturbing the peace. The song's haunting melody, powerful words and Cooke's incomparable delivery made it an instant classic, as powerful today as it was 50 years ago.
The song has been covered many times and is ranked No. 12 in Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Because of its cultural significance, the Library of Congress selected it for special preservation. According to Cooke biographer Peter Guralnick, "Generation after generation has heard the promise of it. It continues to be a song of enormous impact. We all feel in some way or another that a change is gonna come, and he found that lyric."
Cooke performed the song on national television on "The Tonight Show," but 10 days before the record was released, he was shot to death in a Los Angeles motel.
At Cooke's Los Angeles homegoing, The Staples Singers sang "Old Rugged Cross," Billy Preston played an organ hymn and Cooke's boyhood friend Lou Rawls sang "Just a Closer Walk With Thee." In a second service in Chicago, thousands lined up for blocks outside the packed South Side funeral home in near-zero cold for his viewing.
Today, as events from the 1950s and 1960s gradually recede from memory, Cooke's legacy is unfamiliar to younger generations. Historical accounts cannot completely convey the brilliance and power of his performances. It's still there in some recordings and rare videos, but even those lack context to transmit his excitement and electricity.
Recalling the words of 19th-century poet John Greenleaf Whittier, "Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been.'"
Dr. Cory Franklin lives in Wilmette and is the author of "Chicago Flashbulbs: A Quarter Century of News, Politics, Sports and Show Business (1987-2012)." Copyright © 2016, Chicago Tribune
Celebrating 50 years of "A Change is Gonna Come"
50 years ago this week his song, "A Change is Gonna Come," was released.
"It would just go all through your bones," said Mavis Staples of the Staples Singers.
"Were you surprised that song came from him then?" I asked Staples.
"You know when he came with that song we needed - black people needed black people to do something for us and Sam Cooke was at the top," said Staples.
"A Change is Gonna Come" quickly became a civil rights anthem. But Cooke did not live to see it. He was shot to death in a Los Angeles motel two weeks before its release.
"It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America," said Obama during his victory speech.
Smokey Robinson called it "one of the world's great songs."
"It's the kind of song as a songwriter you want to write because you know it's going to be around forever," said Robinson.
That's something that won't change.
For more information on Sam Cooke and his music visit ABKCO
- Anthony Mason
SAM COOKE - "Bring It On Home To Me”-- (live at Harlem Square Club, 1963):
Record : LIVE AT THE HARLEM SQUARE CLUB,1963-Sam Cooke
Feel
It / Chain Gang / Cupid / Medley (It's All Right - For Sentimetal
Reasons) / Twistin' the Night Away / Somebody Have Mercy / Bring it on
Home to Me / Nothing Can Change This Love / Having a Party
Sam Cooke-- "Live Twistin' the Night Away”- 1963:
Sam Cooke - "You Send Me" (Live):
Sam Cooke "Good News”:
Sam Cooke --"Having a Party"—1962:
