The
Best of Sam Cooke
The
Best of Sam Cooke
Releases:
Songs:
Digitally remastered by Rick Rowe
Sale: At Amazon.com for $7,97, $6,99 as MP3 album.
Information: There are many different versions of this album with different fronts and different order of tracks. Premier Records who released the same tracklisting but a different front.
These are from the RCA International Album PJL-1-8005, made in Germany
These pictures are from the new release
Text in the new release.
Sam Cooke was a great artist
and major hit maker in the late 1950s and early 1960s. For a while he was RCA
Records' second best-selling singles artist, after Elvis Presley. But for all
his talent, Same Cooke was not a superstar during his lifetime. His fame did not
rival of Ray Charles or Frank Sinatra. Sam Cooke was a succesful rock and roll
singer (when the term still encompassed R&B) woh was interested in crossing over
into the mainstream, to the sort of adult respect accorded to Sinatra and Nat
"King" Cole. Cooke had lots of big hits, but he saw himself at the start of a
long journey. At the time he was killed, in December of 1964, he thought his
major work, the work for which he should be remembered, was still in front of
him.
Cooke's early death froze him in time, with all his possibilities unplayed. It
is possible had he lived that he would have moved into the mainstream, had
middle-of-the-road hits like Johnny Mathis. Or he might have gone to film and TV
stardom. After all, he was an exceptionally handsome and charming young man at
the moment when television and movies were about to become racially integrated.
Had Cooke lived to follow that road, he might have been Sidney Poitier or Bill
Cosby.
But there's another way to look at it. The year before Cooke's death saw him and
the country challenged by new ways of thinking. Martin Luther King led the march
on Washington. JFK was assassinated. The Beatles arrived in America. Cooke stood
at ringside as his friend Cassius Clay who pulled Cooke into the ring and
embraced him and shouted to the TV cameras, "Sam Cooke - the greatest rock and
roll singer in the world!" Along with Clay, Cooke became aquianted with the
radical leader Malcolm X and began studying the philosophy of Black Power. He
had a library of black history had a name.
When his protégé Bobby Womack complained that some of the new rock singers could
not really sing, Sam told him that from now on it was not going to be about who
had the prettiest voice, it was going to be about who was the most believable.
From now on, people who wrote the songs would be singing them.
When Cooke heard Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," he said it should not have
been left to a white boy to write that song, and composed his own great anthem
of integration, "A Change Is Gonna Come." Cooke donated the song to an album
Martin Luther King assembled for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Had Sam Cooke followed this path, he might have become a powerful voice for the
struggle for equality. He might have gotten there ahead of Curtis Mayfield,
Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, who were all influenced by Cooke and all achieved
great success in the years after his death.
And none of that considers what Cooke had begun as a businessman. He had started
his own label, SAR Records, and was signing, producing and recording other
artists - while giving them a fairer deal than other labels did. Sam Cooke the
enterpreneur might have given Berry Gordy a run for his money. He might have
pulled off the dream of an artist-controlled label that the Beatles later
attempted with Apple.
Cooke retains a great hold on the popular imagination in part because of what we
dream he would have become if he had lived. But Cooke died young and tragically,
shot to death by a motel clerk after he was robbed by a prostitute with whom the
clerk may (or may not) have been in cahoots. It was a sad way to go, and the
circumstances of his death, for a while, diminished Cooke's reputation.
In the months after he died, the world Cooke knew was turned upside down.
Malcolm X was assassinated, Lyndon Johnson sent combat troops into Vietnam,
Motown became "The Sound Of Young America," Dylan released "Like A Rolling
Stone" and the Stones put out "Satisfaction." Sam Cooke's influence was alive in
the Temptations and Smokey Robinson, but for a few years he was pushed into the
oldies section. Times were changing too fast to look back.
Here is where Sam Cooke began to defy convention. While most popular music
becomes less vital as it gets older, the sheer quality of the songs Cooke wrote,
produced and sang made them endure and grow in stature. By the early seventies,
Cooke's acolytes were singing his songs and his praises. Rod Stewart
appropriated much of Cooke's swaggering, cackling vocal style and often covered
Cooke's songs, including "Having A Party" and "Twisting The Night Away." The
Band covered "A Change Is Gonna Come," Tony Orlando had a huge hit with "Cupid"
(which Tom Waits reclaimed in concert), Cat Stevens topped the charts with
"Another Saturday Night," Van Morrison covered "Bring It On Home To Me," Simon
and Garfunkel and James Taylor recorded "Wonderful World" and on and on.
It's been that way ever since. Van Morrison wrote a song about listening to Sam
Cooke and used Cooke's "Send Me Some Lovin" as a template for his own "Vanlose
Stairway." Bruce Springsteen named a song about the solace found in old records
"Meet Me At Mary's Place," after a Sam Cooke song. The Pretenders' "Back On The
Chain Gang" evoked Cooke's old hit for a new song about music allowing departed
heroes to live on after death. Sam Cooke had achieved an almost impossible feat:
after he died, his music earned him the superstardom he had worked toward his
whole life.
The Best Of Sam Cooke album was the beacon that kept Cooke's most popular songs
in the public eye during the long years when most of his catalog was out of
print. For a couple of generations this was the first - and often only - Sam
Cooke album they owned. Although there are more ambitious collections that show
Cooke's remarkable range and diversity, this is still the best starting place.
These are Sam Cooke's biggest commercial hits. This is the message in a bottle
that brought his gifts to millions of people.
You can't help thinking, it it's lasted this long, it will probably last
forever.
- Bill Flanagan, New York, 2005
When Bob Keene (has to be
Keen - MB) sold Sam Cooke's contract to RCA Records in 1960, this large
recording company not only got a new, important addition to its list of
recording artists. It was also able to reissue on the RCA label the recordings
Cooke had made from 1957 for the Keene label. A few years later, RCA had no
trouble in compiling a record entitled "The Best of Sam Cooke," since they had
all Sam's great successes on hand, from his million seller "You Send Me" (1957)
to "Bring It On Home To Me" (1962). "The Best of Sam Cooke" came out in 1963. On
the record cover, Hugo and Luigi, the Italian producers who had brought the
singer to RCA, advised everyone "to follow the career carefully of this
particularly successfull young singer ..." Unfortunately, this career was soon
shortlived. Sam Cooke died in a shoot-up in a Los Angeles motel on December 10,
1964.
Sam Cooke (the "e" was added later) was born in Chicago on January 22, 1931 to a
preacher father and, like many black singers, started his singing career in a
gospel group. In 1951, when the renowned Soul Stirrers lost their lead tenor
Robert (Rebert, MB) Harris, Sam, who was then singing with the Highway
Q.C.'s, was unanimously elected to take his place. Not only because of his fine,
moving voice, but also because of his good looks. "When Sam joined the Soul
Stirrers," recounts soul specialist Tony cummings, "teenage girls started to
want to go back to church with their parents again..." Anyway, the Soul Stirrers
enjoyed years of glory in the church and in recording studios after the arrival
of their new lead singer. Who, on the advice of producer Bumps Blackwell, also
started exploring the pop market in 1956 under the name Dale Cook. With success,
forcing the Soul Stirrers to look for a new lead singer in 1957, Sam Cooke
became musical world news with "You Send Me". The teenagers had one more new
favorite!
More hits followed. "Only Sixteen" and "Wonderful World," for example, in 1959,
"Chain Gang" and "Sad Mood" in 1960. In 1961 "Cupid". And "Twistin' The Night
Away," "Having A Party" and "Bring It On Home To Me" in 1962. By this time, it
had become really high time to assess Sam Cooke's most significant hits -
resulting in this record.
Sam Cooke. He has been called "the black Frank Sinatra," since he felt at home
in all possible styles. Even with the most unsympathetic arrangements to back
him up. Sam still knew how to make something happen with any type of song - from
a jet-black rhythm 'n' blues piece to a lilywhite evergreen. And his influence
on a multitude of other singers in undeniable. Just listen to the records from
the sixties of Otis Redding and Al Green, of Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye, of
Johnny Nash and many, many others. Without their Great Example, they would have
sung differently. Sam Cooke stood at the front of the entire sweet soul ballad
tradition. It will always be a pity that he never experienced the big
breathrough (it seriously was spelled like this on the cover - MB) of
soul.
SKIP VOOGD