Sam Cooke: Soul and Inspiration
Featured Album
Possessed of a purity of voice and an unerring sense of pop metaphysics, the incomparable Sam Cooke was a singer of soul and inspiration who stands at the crossroads of the divine and secular.
I am feeling that sense of predestination myself: On the very day I begin this overview of Sam’s life and song, I’m in Mississippi on an unrelated mission. I take a side excursion to Clarksdale to stand at the meeting place of Highways 69 and 41, to that fabled spot where Robert Johnson supposedly marked his contract with the devil. There, eating BBQ at Abe’s and touring the Delta Blues Museum, I recall that Sam was born here, on January 11, 1931, which only reinforces the fertile creative nature of the Mississippi floodplain upon which I am standing.
He didn’t stay long in the South, his preacher father following the great depression-era migration north to Chicago and settling Sam’s family there. It was only natural for the young’n to soon be singing in the black church, and when gospel fervor began reaching new heights in a postwar jubilee of salvation, Sam’s God-gifted talents elevated him quickly within the ranks. He led the up-and-coming Highway QC’s and then, in 1950, when lead singer R.H. Harris left the Soul Stirrers on the verge of their becoming one of the most successful groups of the era, Sam stepped into his prominent position.
He had a cooler, more laidback feel than many of the gospel shouters at the time, his voice sliding in liquid ease as it maneuvered along the higher registers. It set not only him, but the Stirrers as a whole, apart from the ecstatic frenzy that was the gospel caravan in the early ’50s. As the genre grew in parallel with R&B (the legendary 1955 concert at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles shows that the hysteria and excitement generated were of a par with anything happening in secular music), Sam carved out his unique identity.
The most comprehensive overview of Sam’s career, Portrait Of A Legend, is bookended by Sam’s work with the Soul Stirrers – “Touch The Hem Of His Garment,” and “Jesus Gave Me Water” – and it’s intriguing how little his approach to song changes as he moves into his later, more familiar pop repertoire. There are the same upward glides and lithe glissandos, the whao-oh-oh‘s and the ability to quiet an audience so they listen to him, an intimacy that at first seems at odds with the speaking-in-tongues reactions gospel groups elicited from their sanctified audiences, and then is revelationed as natural and one-on-one as a baptismal dunk in the river. He was less fire-and-brimstone than slow burn, and the audience – especially the ladies – responded.
Soon enough, the pop world beckoned. When R&B acts started crossing over to the mainstream, with rock ‘n ‘roll further blurring the lines between “race” categories like blues and country, it provided an irresistible lure and shortened the distance between church and state. Bumps Blackwell, newly employed as an A&R man for the Soul Stirrers ‘label, Speciality, had attended that “First Annual Mid-Summer Festival of Gospel Music,” better known as The Great 1955 Shrine Concert (featuring the Pilgrim Travelers, Dorothy Love Coates and the Original Gospel Harmonettes, and the Caravans with Albertina Walker and James Cleveland shouting hosannas), and after watching Sam work the crowd, suggested to label owner Art Rupe that he might test the holy waters and see how Sam would fare in the pop marketplace. Though the idea was met with stony silence, Bumps’s instincts began to seem more prescient when he brought Little Richard back from New Orleans with “Tutti Frutti” in tow.
Yes, it was the “devil’s music,” and yes, Sam had already seen singers like Ray Charles and Clyde MacPhatter and Sonny Til utilizing tricks they’d learned from gospel inflections. But Cooke, with his stage presence and songwriting ability, knew it was only a matter of time before he made the move. In 1956, he and Bumps recorded “Lovable,” a transliteration of his gospel hit, “Wonderful,” and from this original sin there was no looking back, though in deference to his audience base, the single was released by Specialty under the pseudonym of “Dale Cook.”
Even wearing a pop disguise, there was no mistaking Sam’s voice. Over a six-year span, he would be at the helm of some of the Top 40′s most recognizable hits – “You Send Me,” “Twisting The Night Away,” “Shake,” “Having A Party,” “Only 16,” “What A Wonderful World,” – bolstered by his unerring ear for a chorus amidst verses that relate vignettes of time-and-place, framing the deceptively simple lyrics. Is there any more visual image than “Cupid, draw back your bow/ And let your arrow go/ Straight to my lover’s heart/ For me,” or the men working on a “Chain Gang”? Portrait of a Legend also shows him trying on standards (“Summertime,” an uptempo “Tennessee Waltz”) and suggestive blues (“Little Red Rooster), rising to his most beloved composition, combining the promise of moral absolution at the heart of both gospel and pop music, “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
Written in response to Bob Dylan‘s “Blowin ‘In The Wind,” the song became a Civil Rights anthem, his pop and gospel sides aligned in righteous balance. It was originally part of Ain’t That Good News, Sam’s final album, released in 1964. The title track was a gospel chestnut that substituted “my baby’s coming home” for the second coming of Jesus, and, staying in domestic mode even as his family life was quickly falling apart, he shone a light on “Home,” an Irving Berlin song that puts Sam in a lineage of preeminent stylists. Other collections, such as Keep Movin ‘On, duplicate track listings but add some of the more experimental backwaters of Cooke’s catalogue, such as “You’re Nobody Til Somebody Loves You,” in which his lowered vocal sounds closer to Frank Sinatra than Smokey Robinson (who surely listened and learned from Sam’s approach.) My only disappointment is that none of these anthologies contain my favorite Sam Cooke song, the soaring “Teenage Sonata,” produced by Hugo and Luigi, and though perhaps more consciously directed at the pop market, captures for me his sense of wonder and marvel, defining Cooke’s pop grandeur and classicism.
By then Sam wasn’t just a recording artist now. He was also a businessman, having learned the ropes about publishing and creative control. Sam Cooke’s SAR Records Story gathers together the material released on his own label, which had begun as an outgrowth of his production company and blossomed into a full-blown venture with Pilgrim Traveler J.W. Alexander. The two-disc set encompasses the Soul Stirrers, whom Sam rescued when they were dropped by Specialty; the Womack Brothers (including Bobby); the rollicking Simms Twinst (“Soothe Me”); the Johnnies Taylor and Morisette; Sam’s brother L.C.; and best of all, the Valentinos, whose “Looking For A Love” and “It’s All Over Now” became rock standards in the respective hands of the J. Geils Band and the Rolling Stones. The album also contains one of the first recordings of organist Billy Preston in “Greazee Part I and II,” Sam’s own demo of “You Send Me” performed with just guitar backing, and some you-are-there studio chatter. The overall SAR sense of experiment and exploration of the meeting ground between pop and gospel architects – as did Sam – a template for what would become soul music as the ’60s progressed, when Cooke’s shadow would loom large over the music’s evolution.
Unfortunately, Sam would not be present to hear what he begat. His untimely, somewhat scandalous shooting death in December, 1964, at a seedy motel outside Los Angeles in circumstances that were as sordid as his life was illuminated, cut him short in mid-voice.
Yet he left testaments, gospels according to the canonized clubs in which he performed. Sam Cooke at the Copa is slick and sleek, with a beautiful version of “When I Fall In Love” and a romping “”Bill Bailey,” very much geared to the tuxedo set; Live at the Harlem Square is the other side of the coin, Sam letting loose on “Twisting The Night Away” and “Having A Party,” that famously smooth voice beginning to rasp as he exhorts and brings the crowd to a fine boil. He returns to his gospelized fervor, shouting “Somebody Have Mercy,” the audience call and responding. Bringing it on home.
