Hits!
Label: RCA Camden Deluxe 74321783222, BMG 4321783222 in Europe. Released in 2000.
Songs:
Compilation Produced By Paul Williams for House of Hits Productions, Ltd. Audio Restoration: Bill Lacey
Digital Transfers: Mike Hartry Compiled and sequenced by Buzz Ravineau Production Assistance Bob Santos.
Sale: Amazon.com for $18,99, also try Gemm or e-mail me
Inside Text
Sam Cooke was, according to one of his album titles, "the man who invented soul"
That may have been a record company boast, but few would challenge the spirit of the claim. Sam was not so much an inventor as an innovator, who brought into the pop arena the unique phrasing and calmly charismatic presence that had first electrified the gospel world. He had crossed over from the sacred to the secular, but left behind none of the fervor. Even at its most sensual, his work never lost its stirring, spirital quality - it never lost its soul. His candor, his self-assurance, his passion attracted millions of fans and inspired countless artists, from Otis Redding to Marvin Gaye and far beyond. During Sam's RCA years, in which he cut the classic sides compiled here, his most notable lable mate was Elvis Presley. It's fitting that Sam should share a record company roster with the Kong of Rock and Roll because both these native Mississippians had taken the sound of their roots - for Elvis it was country, for Sam, gospel - and created something new. And each of them, in their own way, changed the world.
Sam Cooke was born on January 22, 1931 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the son of
Annie May and the Reverend Charles Cook. Not long after Sam was born, the Cooks,
like so many Depression-Era families, migrated north from the Mississippi Delta
to the teeming streets of Chicago's South Side where they settles in an
African-American neighborhood known as Bronzeville. Sam performed gospel tunes
with his siblings in a group called the Singing Children, and they often sang at
services where the Rev. Cook would prech. Sam was always drawn to music; if he
wasn't singing in church or listening to the older gospel quartets, he was
checking out doo-wop groups with pals like Lou Rawls, who would eventually
follow a path similar to Sam's, from gospel talent to pop star. As part of a
Bronzeville vocal quartet called the Teenage Highway QC's, Sam toured the
midwest and the south, and started to make a name for himself beyond the South
Side. But it wasn't until he was asked to replace the retiring lead singer of
the well-established gospel quartet the Soul Stirrers that Sam developed the
style that would make the crowds go crazy.
Veteran soul man Jerry Butler, who was also raised in Chicago and watched Sam become a gospel star, recalls, "I once heard Sam described as the person who could sing as sweet or as raunchy as he wanted to. Which is unusual. Normally, if a person has a real sweet voice, he can't squall and scream and get that gutteral sound. But Sam could do that and then just go back to being sweet and mellow as you please."
Sam may not have been the most powerful gospel singer, but he became on the most magnetic. He found his own unique way to move around a melody, stretching out a line, hesitating behind a beat, breaking up a single-syllable word into several new parts, bridging lyrics with wordless vocalizing. There was jazz in the way he sang; there was blues. And, of course, he could rock. Author Daniel Wolff, who wrote the excellent and exhaustively researched Cooke biography, You Send Me, called Sam't special style a yodel and Lou Rawls used the same word to describe Sam's phrasing. Vamping, improvising, scatting, yodeling - words can define but not quite capture the feeling of a certain sound. You simply have to hear it.
Many have tried to sing the deceptively plain tune of Sam's first pop hit, "You Send Me", released independently in 1957 on the Keen label, but none could lift it heavenward as Sam could with a falsetto, "Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh..." Sam seemed to savor each word he sang, as if he were weighing the emotional import of every word he uttered. You could clearly understand what he was saying and what he was feeling.
Sam had originally tried to launch his pop career with the Specialty label,
for whom he had recorded with the Soul Stirrers. But label head Art Rupe, a
gospel maven and R&B fan, thought Sam was taking his sound too pop. (Rupe
wasn't afraid of secular hits - he helped launch the careers of Lloyd Price and
Little Richard, among others.) So Sam went to a new label called Keen, and the
tiny company almost immediately found itself overwhelmed once "You Send
Me" hit the streets. He also added an "e" to "Cook" out
of superstition, to give his full name an even number of letters.
Although the tremendous success of "You Send Me" brought a certain pressure to maintain tat artistic and sales level in the fast-moving and fickle world of pop, it also brought Sam the freedom to explore his ideas in the recording studio - and he had a lot of them. Sam was never merely a voice for hire; he wrote, arranged, produced and performed. The business today is full of multi-hyphenates who control every aspect of their recording situations - and stars like the prodigious D'Angelo spend years perfecting their sound - but Sam was unique among his peers. He may not have played an instrument beyond rudementary guitar, which he used to sketch out arrangement, but he could tell a musician how they should sound.
On
Keen, Sam maintained his pop profile with hits like "For Sentimental
Reasons," "Everybody Loves To Cha Cha Cha," and "Only
Sixteen." But within two years, his relationship with the overburdened
label faltered; word spread quickly through the industry that Sam was ready to
move up to a major. RCA wasn't the only big label to bid for Sam's services -
R&B powerhouse Atlantic was in the mix, along with Capitol, the home of Nat
King Cole (and later Lou Rawls) - but the label ultimately managed to outclass
the competition and sign him in 1960. Though Sam preferred to run things himself
in the studio with a close-knit group of familiar musicians and arrangers, RCA
nonetheless assigned to Sam a pair of in-house producers, Hugo Peretti and Luigi
Creatore, who, like Sam, had risen out of the fast-and-loose indie world and
also happened to be cousins. The billied themselves professionaly as Hugo and
Luigi. This unlikely duo got off to a rocky start with Sam; their first single,
"Teenage Sonata," was a relative flop. As Luigi explained to Rolling
Stone, when Sam was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in
1985, "We made one record with him and nothing happened. Then we said,
'Listen, Sammy, you write some things and bring them in the next time we do a
session.' So he did. He came by and played several things. 
Not
everything he wrote was good. We just said, 'That's nice, what else have you got?'
He said, 'Well, I'm working on a thing and it goes like, 'Uh, ah, uh, ah, I hear
the sound of the men working on the chain gang.' So we postponed the session, he
finished that, and of course 'Chain Gang' was a smash for him."
"Chain Gang," with its sound of clinking metal and rhythmic grunts, Sam's sunny-on-the-surface delivery and hints of sadness beneath, reached No. 2 on both the R&B and pop charts, and it became Sam's biggest hit after "You Send Me" and "Wonderful World," a wistful pledge of love that was one of Sam's last Keen sides. And it began a remarkable string of singles that often matched "Chain Gang" in ingenuity and soulfulness, if not always in chart numbers. "Sad Mood" was another of those deceptively simple tunes, the spareness of the arrangement keeping the focus on Sam's carefully enunciated, reined-in delivery, which only seems to accentuate the sorrow.
In contrast, "That's It - I Quit - I'm Movin' On," despite the title, is one of those best-part-of-breaking-up-is-making-up songs, with a downright goofy pop arrangement and a nimble vocal delivery. Sam seems to skip blithely over the words, keeping everything light-hearted, even in those moments that might call for some gospel belting. "Cupid" has another clever aural gimmick like the chink and clank of "Chain Gang," a vocal whoosh under the line "let you arrow go..." Like any of the devices Sam employed to make his arrangements novel, it adds some sparkle, but the real magic remains in Sam's Voice, in the way it rises on the word "Cu-pid," in his prayerful plea at the fade-out. He brings a soulfulness to a song that could turn insufferably cute in the hands of a straight ahead pop singer.
The there's a trilogy of party songs: "Twistin' The Night Away," "We're Havin' A Party," and "Another Saturday Night." With "Twistin'," Sam pays tribute to a craze, just like his contemperaries were doing, but he wasn't merely cashing in. The song swings, for sure, but it's Sam's lyrics that are so remarkable, the wonderfully vivid description of a place "somewhere up in New York way" where young and old are "twistin' the night away." He does exhort everyone to dance, but he somehow looks deeper at the scene he's created, making it seem more like a refuge than a party: "they have a lot of fun/putting trouble on the run." Similarly, "We're Havin' A Party" has a melancholy edge, with Sam entreating the deejay, the higher power, at this particular soiree, to "keep those records playin' / 'cause I'm having such a good time/dancin' with my baby." "Another Saturday Night" is about missing the fun entirely - "another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody" - and that seems like a bit of a joke, because no one would ever imagine Sam in a situation where he "ain't got nobody." He puts lots of humor in his vocal, but he still manages to give the words a rueful quality. The version included here is an alternate take of Sam's hit.
The A side of "Havin' A Party" was "Bring It On Home To Me" - the tunes charted seperately in 1962 and both landed high on the pop and R&B charts. "Bring It On Home To Me" recalled Sam's gospel years more closely than perhaps any of his songs from this period. Lou Rawls served as Sam's vocal foil in the studio, singing behind him in the verses and egging him on with a call and response in the chorus. Longtime friend Rawls helps draw out the grit in Sam's voice, resulting in a raw and impassioned lead vocal performance. This was an unguarded moment, like singing in the family. As Rawls explains, "Every time he came to town...we would get together and hang out. I would go to his house or he would come to my place, and he would sit down in the floor with his guitar and write songs. That's why I was on a lot of his records, because I knew the songs. We knew each other vocally, we knew each other other musically, we used to harmonize all the time."
Sam got even looser during the sessions for his now legendary 1963 Nightbeat album, an intimate exploration of the blues with a small combo that included former Little Richard organ play Billy Preston. With Sam, so much simmered under the surface of his songs; their sensuality was more suggested than spelled out, and that added to their power. "Lost And Lookin'" from Nightbeat slowly smoldered, the stripped-down arrangemtn giving Sam's vocal an almost haunted quality. But "Little Red Rooster," another track from that session swings in a more lascivious way. Sam's brilliant diction accentuates every double entendre and, just in case you didn't get the point, Preston underscores each barnyard boast with positively leering organ riggs. Sam never courted controversy with the tone of his work, but he inadvertently run into some trouble with his 1961 single, "Feel It," which some programmers found too risqué. The pop arrangement was fairly innocuous; it's a backhanded acknoledgment to Sam's considerable sex appeal that the self-proclaimed moral authorities could read so much into the tune. Just what, they wondered, was Sam suggesting his partner feel? Sam would just tell them, it was the beat.
This collection also includes three songs that have a strong spiritual undercurrent, though each of them deals with romance. "Hold On," written by soul singer Don Covay, is particularly special since it's never been released before. "It's All Right" is full of gospel-style call and response. "Somebody's Gonna Miss Me" is a bit of a tease to a skeptical lover. "I know you're gonna miss me," Sam sings, "when I'm gone."
Sam Cooke is an artist who was gone too soon, shot to death at the age of 33 on December 11, 1964, in an altercation at a Los Angels motel. Jerry Butles, who first heard the news of Sam's death on a car radio while he was on tour, says, "The death of Martin Luther King would be the only tragedy in the black communcity that surpassed that of losing Sam. Because the church felt the loss, the children felt the loss, everybody was into his music." And we still are: these songs, thank God, live on.
Michael Hill, 2000
Due to legal restrictions we were not able to include some other key tracks that you may have wanted on this album. However, we hope you enjoy the great music that is included here.