The Best of Sam CookeThe Best of Sam Cooke
Releases:
Songs:
Digitally remastered by Rick Rowe
Sale: At Amazon.com for $17,98 (also used and on tape), always try Gemm
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