Keep Movin' OnKeep Movin' On
Label: Abkco 3563 (2003)
Songs:
Cover Illustration: Angelo Tillery
Restoration: Steve Rosenthal
Personnel includes: Sam Cooke (vocals); Clifton M. White (arranger, conductor, guitar, strings); Rene Hall (arranger, conductor, guitar, piano, organ); Glen Campbell, Bobby D. Womack, Cecil Womack, Howard Roberts (guitar); Emmet Sargeant (violin, cello); Tiber Zelig (violin, strings); Darrell Terwilliger (violin); Alexander Neiman (viola, strings); Jesse Ehrlich (cello); William E. Green (flute, saxophone); Melvin C. Lastie (saxophone, trumpet, trombone, piano); Gerald S. Wilson (trumpet); James A. Decker (French horn); Vernon H. Porter (trombone); Ray Pohlman, Russell Bridges (piano); Buddy Clark (bass); James E. Bond, Jr. (upright bass); John Boudreaux, Jr. (drums, percussion); Hal Blaine, Robert O. Bryant (drums).
Producers include: Sam Cooke, Luigi
Creatore, Hugo Peretti, Al Schmitt.
Compilation producers: Jody H. Klein, Teri Landi.
Engineers include: Dave Hassinger, Bones Howe, Dick Bogart.
Recorded between 1959 and 1965.
Sale: At Amazon.com for $14,99.
Liner Notes
Sam Cooke's vision never ceased to grow. Just nineteen when he joined the nation's #1 gospel
quartet, he took his place seemingly without a moment's doubt ("I had never seen anything like it;' says singer
Lloyd Price. "I was the hottest thing in the country with
'Lawdy Miss Clawdy; and here was this guy who just stood there and sung, and he rocked them") and gave the
Soul Stirrers their greatest commercial success with "Jesus Gave Me
Water" the first recorded number on which he sang lead.
Six years later, in 1957, after conducting a sometimes
contentious debate with himself for over a year, and with the active encouragement of Specialty a&r man
Bumps Blackwell, he became the first of the gospel stars to go pop, enjoying a #1 hit with his first release,
"You
Send Me:' With former Pilgrim Travelers' manager J. W. Alexander he established his own song publishing
company, Kags, the following year, and in the fall of 1959, spurred on by the idea that there was nothing that a
white business establishment could do that they were
not capable of doing, he and Alexander, together with Soul Stirrers founder S.R. Crain, established their own
label, SAR Records, as much as anything, J. W. said, to record "people we liked. Sam loved producing, and he
wanted to give young artists a chance."
With his signing to the RCA label in 1960, it might have seemed as if all of his most manifest
ambitions had been fulfilled: he had achieved the kind of respectability that Nat "King" Cole had found at
Capitol, he was being offered the opportunity to expand his musical horizons beyond the parochial boundaries that
limited so many rhythm and blues artists to the "race" market exclusively. Between 1960 and 1962, he generated
one classic hit after another ("Chain
Gang", "Wonderful World',
"Cupid", "Having a
Party", "Bring It On Home To
Me"-but by the end of that year, after a triumphant English tour co-headlining with Little Richard, it was
clear that he was restless. In January he debuted his new stage act (after Europe, said
J.W. Alexander, and the challenge of matching Little Richard night after night,
"Sam finally got back into doing his gospel thing, you know, the real fervent approach"). In February he
recorded an intimate, in-the-wee-small hours concept album: "Night
Beat", that was almost its stylistic opposite, and by summer he and Alexander had their biggest pop
hit, Mel Carter's "When a Boy Falls In Love,' on SAR's sister label Derby. But it was an almost chance business
meeting in March of that year that would have as liberating an effect on Sam Cooke's career as any step he had
taken to date.
Actually it was a chance meeting on one side only. Allen Klein was a 31-year-old accountant, much of
whose work focused on the music industry. Three years earlier he had met disc jockey Doug "Jocko" Henderson
through his association with rhythm and blues star Lloyd Price, and he had just gone into partnership with Jocko with the idea of finding more music business
clients. Together they had overseen the refurbishing of Philadelphias cavernous State Theatre, where
Jocko, whose Rocket Ship radio show was a hit in New York and
Philadelphia but who had never been able to break into the concert promotion business in his native
Philadelphia, hoped to challenge the hegemony of fellow Philadelphia DJ Georgie Woods. The star of Jocko's
opening show on March 8, 1963, was Sam Cooke. It was
Jocko who recommended that Sam talk to Allen about bis business.
I'm the guy who said, 'Sam this guy would be
phenomenal for you: The record manufacturers didn't treat anybody good, but the black artists, they tried to
make sure they got absolutely nothing, absolutely, positively nothing. Allen was my accountant and my
very close friend, and Sam was happy with him:' By May 1 Allen Klein had been designated Cooke's
official representative to bath RCA and BMI, the licensing agency that collects performance royalties for
songwriters and publishers. By September he had gotten Sam $119,000 in back royalties, a $50,000 BMI
advance (payable over two years), and a brand-new record deal which not only paid the artist $450,000 over
five years but guaranteed full creative control under the aegis of the newly formed Tracey Ltd, a self-created
manufacturing company which would license Sam Cooke's records to RCA for a period of thirty years. The
idea, says Klein, whom Sam asked at this point to
become his official manager ("I told him I had never managed anyone before. He said, 'Look, I never wrote a
song before I wrote my first one"'), was to give Sam "total artistic freedom, total control over his back
catalogue, and the ability to be completely self-contained:' an idea coinciding almost exactly with sentiments that
Cooke himself was expressing at just about the same time. "My future lies more in creating music and
records than in being a [live] performer:' Sam told Billboard in early 1964, and while it may not have been
retirement precisely that was on his mind, he was definitely planning a major change. "Sam saw the business
changing,' says Bobby Womack. "He told me, 'There's something coming, and it's coming fast." It was a whole
new way of doing things, according to Sam. "It wasn't about uniforms or how you dressed or same false world
that you go to:' It was about talent, individuality, and the ability to control, and own, your own work.
The first full-scale session under the new arrangement
came just before Christmas, 1963. Like nearly all of Sam's sessions, there was no question who was in charge
("I love talent, 'cause then you don't have to do anything!" says Luigi Creatore, who with his cousin and partner
Hugo Peretti, had signed Sam to RCA). This was only the second time, though, that Sam would be going into the
studio with the explicit intention of creating something more than a succession of hit singles or an album-oriented
"theme" (Cooke's Tour, a collection of "travel songs:' was an early RCA example; Tribute to the Lady, a memorial to
Billie Holiday on Keen, was a more ambitious one). He
had been home since Thanksgiving with the idea of concentrating solely on the upcoming session ("I told him
to go home, you don't have to worry about money:' says Allen Klein) and to same extent, on the first night of the
session, the tension may have shown.
He opened with "Ain't That Good News" a recent
composition that was little more than an adaptation of the old gospel number-with two significant
differences. One was the aid-timer banjo that opened the track ("Sam liked all kinds of music;' gays
Luigi. "Stick a banjo in and get a different sound, that gives you something"); the other was the strong sense of
wistful fatalism undercutting the overt cheerfulness of
the song. "I think that's because of the way he used the sixth chord rather than the [more common] dominant
seventh;' says New Orleans songwriter/producer Allen Toussaint, who points out, "It caused him to be hip but
not rowdy, extremely hip but the kind of hip that carries a comb, not a knife:' What is even more
striking, though, as I think Toussaint might agree, is the war in which 'this very elegance of
delivery is set off by an unaccountable melancholy, a kind of bittersweet quality
that lies at the heart of all of his best work, from, his 1957 "teen romance" hit,
"You Send Me" on.
It was this very bringing together of opposites, the
manipulation of conflicting emotions With the most familiar of musical settings ("You're singing for
people who don't sing;' Sam told Bobby Womack, explaining the simplicity of his compositions) that
enabled Sam to achieve such direct communication in a manner that in same wars appears obvious (the
warmth of his voice, the directness of his words) but in
other ways defies logical analysis. "Good
Times" for example, the second song of the session would appear to convey the most
unambiguous of social exhortations ("Come on and let the good times roll/We gonna stay
here till we soothe our souls/if it takes all night long") in the most transparent of fashions. Clearly inspired by
Louis Jordan's seminal 1946 hit, "Let the Good Times Roll,' it never abandons its good-time theme, and yet it
convers that same sense of wistful melancholy while at the same time, like nearly all of Sam Cooke's songs,
deliberately inviting its audience to sing along.
It look twenty-five takes to achieve that simplicity, with
numerous overdubs by the singer himself of all the background parts and a sense of perfectionism that
would seem to belie the easygoing nature of both the singer and the song. What he was aiming at in his
delivery, he told a disbelieving Bobby Womack, was a kind of natural, conversational tone. "He said, 'You know who I
try to sing like? Louis Armstrong.' I said, 'Louis Armstrong?' I thought that was crazy! But he
said, 'Don't listen to the voice. Listen to the phrasing. It's not like a
song, it's like two people rapping:" And, for all the indisputable beauty and natural grace of Sam's delivery, you
realize that it's true. It wasn't until Sam and Louis Armstrong were long dead that Bobby finally snapped to
it, "and I heard Sam's voice saying, 'Didn't I tell you,
fucker? Didn't I tell you?'"
Sam came into the studio to sing, that's all. And his wife came with him. She sat in the back. We were all
conscious of what had happened. But we did what we had to do. -Luigi Creatore on the somewhat subdued mood of the
December session, just six months after the drowning death of Sam and Barbara Cooke's 18-month-old son
In the wake of that death, perhaps in denial of it, Sam
had worked harder than ever, remaining on the road almost constantly from one week after the funeral in June
until Thanksgiving. "You never saw anger, but you saw depression;' says Lou Rawls. "He never really opened
up, though, and let it go. I guess you would say he was introverted in that sense. Sam had the kind of charisma,
when he walked in a room you just felt the glow of someone special. He never wanted to leave anybody with a bad taste
in their mouth:'
Perhaps that is what comes through in the music, both the charisma and the sorrow. On the second night of
the session, after a buoyant "Basin
Street" complete with supper-club ending, and "Home" another '30s standard
(not coincidentally also recorded by Louis Armstrong), he embarked upon a pensive original by his longtime
guitarist, Cliff White. "No Second
Time" sounds as if it was written specifically for Sam-and it may well have
been, given the rarity of Sam recording anyone's originals but his own-but what is most striking about
it is its tone of muted anger, the kind, of emotion that Lou Rawls and almost everyone close to Sam says he
would never directly express. "The Riddle
Song" the traditional Appalachian ballad which under other circumstances might invite charges of
saccharinity, conveys emotion of a different soft. When he sang the answer to the final riddle ("How can there be a baby
with no crying?"), Sam himself started to cry, according to string section leader Sid Sharp. "You could hear his
voice break:' Sharp told Cooke biographer Daniel
Wolff. "He definitely was crying:' By the time that he returned to the studio in January
of 1964, Sam had taken another step in another
unlikely direction. In the fall he had met up again with an old friend, Harold Battiste. Battiste, a former school-teacher and New Orleans native, had just gone to work
for Specialty Records when Sam recorded "You Send
Me" and in the intervening years had struck out on his own, forming a musicians' collective called AFO
(All For One), with which he had sought, in the terms of his 1959 Manifesto, to take control of the means of
production. In the summer of 1963 he and his fellow group members, known collectively as the APO Executives,
had moved to Los Angeles, where union rules proved a stumbling block to regular work, and they were on the
verge of going home when they ran into Sam. By January Sam had put them on retainer and made up his
mind to use them on his sessions with the idea, said J. W.
Alexander, of "broadening his sound:' and with a commitment to the same political goals that Harold
Battiste, then a Black Muslim, espoused: political and economic self -determination.
Not everyone was happy with the new musical arrangement. Bobby Womack for 
one, not yet
twenty and recently plucked from his brothers' group, the Valentinos, to play guitar for Sam, saw the AFO as a
kind of step backward. "I didn't like it, I thought it was old-fashioned, but Sam heard something in New
Orleans that he felt should be brought back to LA. I thought Sam's stuff was too pretty for the way they
voiced, but he said it was going to be a whole new thing: he was really trying to create something different:'
The first date on which they played was a January 21 Johnnie Morisette session for SAR that Sam produced.
A week later, on January 28, they were back in the studio for the first day of a split, two-day session with
Sam. Taking advantage of a Soul Stirrers gospel session he had scheduled for earlier that day, Sam not only produced
two very different-sounding gospel sides on the quartet with the AFO band providing support; he added the
Stirrers' unmistakable gospel harmonies (and LeRoy Crume's guitar) to his own session, to create a melding of
gospel fervor and New Orleans rhythms on a pair of songs he had already recorded on two of his SAR artists
plus a country-and-western standard. “Rome
(Wasn't Built in a Day)" had itself started out life in very different fashion when it was first recorded by
country singer Johnny Russell in 1958. Originally written by the Prudhomme twins (Betty and Beverly), Los
Angeles songwriters who had met Sam in the wake of his earliest pop success, it had captured Sam's fancy and he
had rewritten it for former Soul Stirrer Johnnie Taylor's first pop hit in 1962. For his own version Sam slowed the
tempo down and, once again, imparted a wistful quality
to it, giving each verse the same clipped conversational tone that he admired in Louis Armstrong, then permitting
the chorus to swell in the more languorous legato fashion that he felt encouraged the
audi
ence to sing along. "Meet Me at Mary's
Place" was a variation on "Meet Me
at the Twistin' Place" a hit he had written and produced on the irrepressible Johnnie Morisette two
years earlier, with, once again, a very different approach from the original. Sam seemed to
hear a melody that stood almost in opposition to the raucous party-like
atmosphere of Morisette's version (and Sam's original lyrics), while the Stirrers' good-natured background
vocals reinforced its gospel feel and underscored its new message (sent out to Mary Trap, a gospel promoter in
Charlotte, North Carolina, whose house was a kind of headquarters foT all the traveling quartets), an affectionate
salute not just to a single individual but to a fondly recoIlected era. Even
"Tennessee Waltz," the Patti Page
standard, had a strong gospel flavor to it, with the opening reminiscent of Roy Hamilton's
gospel-intlected "You Can Have Her" and the high note Sam reaches for in the
chorus ("I never thought he was going to make it;' says
LeRoy Crume with wry amusement) providing an ironic moment of almost triumphant emotionalism in
a sad song originally written m three-quarter time. "A Change Is Gonna
Come,” the first song he took upat the full-orchestra session scheduled just two days
after the Soul Stirrers AFO date, was born of the contradictions Sam Cooke had observed all his life and
experienced almost daily. Like most black entertainers, he had been conflicted for some time as to how to
respond to racial conditions, particularly in the South, where he had been touring constantly for well over a
decade, first with the Soul Stirrers, then on his own. In 1961, for example, he had refused to play a segregated date
in Memphis in the face of threats of jail and financial penalties, but for the most part he had made the same
choice as other performers, confining himself to small, if meaningful, acts of personal
liberation. By 1963, though, the civil rights revolution was
exploding all around him and every other entertainer out there ("We travel all over the country,” said
Sam's friend and early mentor Clyde McPhatter, "having the opportunity to observe first-hand the plight of
[our people]"), and it was in tact conversations with student
sit-in demonstrators in Durham, North Carolina, in May of 1963 after a show, that first inspired the
idea tor the song. This was followed almost immediately by his hearing Bob Dylan's
"Blowin' in the Wind" ("He listened to
that;' said J. W. Alexander, "and he said, 'Alec, I got to write something. Here's a white boy writing a song like
this...:') and his own arrest in October for trying to register at a segregated Shreveport motel. With that the song came to
him, almost, he said, as if it were dictated in a dream. "He was very excited;' said J. W. Alexander, "and when he
finished it, he explained it to me-his reason behind the lyrics. Like, 'I don't know what's up there beyond the sky'
-it's like somebody's talking about I want to go to heaven, really, but then who knows what's really up there? In other
words, that's why you want justice on earth. Or, you know, in the verse where he says, 'I go to my brother and I
say, Brother, help me please: -you know he was ta1king about the establishment-and then he says, 'That motherfucker
winds up knocking me back down on my knees: He said,
'I think my daddy will be proud: I said, 'I think so, Sam:" Everyone in the studio seemed to know how
significant the song was, if only by the way that Sam was treating it. According to Rene Hall, a New Orleans
native who arranged the vast majority of Sam's sessions from "You Send
Me" on, it was the only song Sam ever gave to him to fully orchestrate. Under ordinary circumstances
"he would tell me what line he wanted, he'd hum what he wanted the bass to play, hum the string [part] and various
instruments. The only tune that I can ever recall where he said, 'I'm going to leave that up to you,’ was
'A Change Is Gonna Come' and I wanted it to be the greatest thing in
my [life]:' The wash of strings set off by a French horn, J. W. Alexander said, gave the song a particularly mournful
sound. "It was very deep:' says Luigi Creatore, who with his partner Hugo Peretti left RCA shortly after the
session. "It was a serious piece, but still it was his. 
He was really
digging into himself for this one,”Sam rarely gang the song in public-there is no otherrecorded performance, save for an appearance on
the Johnny Carson show just one week later. By the time that he went into the studio again in March, he had
attended the Clay-Liston fight in Miami, where he was summoned into the ring by Cassius Clay and hailed by
the new champion as "the World's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Singer:' An inveterate reader from childhood
on, he was focused more and more now on race issues,
studying W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, and Black Muslim readings recommended by
Malcolm X, with whom he spent a good deal of time in Miami ("I ain't no Muslim;' he told his brother L.C,
"and I ain't gonna be, but they got some good ideas").
He was focusing on his musical future, too. With the coming of the Beatles and singer-songwriters like
Bob Dylan, he saw the musical climate rapidly changing, a change he urged his SAR artists to embrace. On
March 24 he produced a session on the Valentinos, known as the Womack Brothers when Sam first signed
them to SAR as a gospel quartet three years earlier. The centerpiece for the March session was a song that
Bobby Womack had written with his sister-in-law called "It's All Over Now" When the Rolling Stones
covered the song just as it was taking of a few months later, Bobby was heartbroken, and angry, too. "But Sam
said, 'Bobby, you'll never regret this: I said, 'Man, them cats ain't even hittin' the notes: He said, 'Bobby, this
group will change the industry. They gonna make it loose for everybody, and there ain't no sense in fighting it. It's
just gonna make you bigger:" At that same March session the Womacks were fooling
around with a song called "If I Got My Ticket,” "Sam told us it needed work, it wasn't ready yet:' The next day
Sam went into the studio, with Bobby and his brother Cecil joining Harold Battiste's New Orleans contingent,
and used the same melody for a dance song that he called "Yeah
Man,“ It would become better known in Arthur Conley's version as "Sweet Soul Music"-but its infectious
rhythm and genial tone echoed Sam's view that popular music more and more was "almost all sound. It used to be
that sound brought attention to the lyric;' he explained, but what uou needed to do today was to find sounds that
could "emotionally move" an audience, "inject [the kind of] fervor that makes people want to dance”That direction was taken several steps further inhis final session, in November, when he cut a song
inspired by Bobby Freeman's "The Swim” a pure rhythmnumber propelled by bass, toms, and Bobby Womack's
guitar. "He was trying to get a new beat, a new dance thing going;' recalls Al Schmitt, who had taken over a&r duties
from Hugo and Luigi in March. "Everybody in the studio was excited. We thought we had started a whole new
thing:'
Real gospel music has got to make a comeback
- Sam Cooke in Melody Maker, July 4, 1964
Actually if you listen to this album you might deduce that Sam's original gospel sound never really went
away. "A Change Is Gonna Come" could be seen as an
extension, both melodically and lyrically, of gospel music's greatest tradition: delivering good news in bad
times. "Ain't That Good News" makes the connection
even more explicit, while "Ease My
Troublin' Mind" and "That's Where It's
At" provide a kind of template for the gospel-based '60s soul that came to dominate the charts
for the next three or four years. Even "Tennesse
Waltz" suggests the underlying gospel feeling of almost all of Sam Cooke's
work. But if you listen to this album in another way, it stands as testimony to the diversity of Sam Cooke's
musical interests as well, to the restless exploration that led him to insist stubbornly on his own interpretation of
George Gershwin's "Summertime" against the advice of
his musical elders at his very first full-fledged pop session. "Sam listened to everything," says his brother L.C.
"Hillbilly. Opera. There wasn't nothing Sam didn't like. And he could sing it all:' The range of music that he
took on in the last year of his life pretty much beats out this statement: standards like
"You're Nobody Till
Somebody Loves You" a dreamy teen ballad like "When a
Boy Falls in Love" the lush orchestration of Harold Battiste's "Falling in
Love" corny but heartfelt chestnuts like "Country
Boy" a ricky-tick novelty like "Cousin of
Mine" (which Sam persuaded a very credulous Bobby Womack was a true story)-banjos, flutes, French
hams, and gospel harmonies all meld together to create satisfyingly unpredictable whole. "An artist isn't buried in
one section;' says Luigi Creatore. "He's aware of music all around him:' "He always seemed to have a vision of how
to make the music sound;' says Harold Battiste, whose own taste leaned more to progressive jazz. "He's a
unique, original singer-I don't know what makes him that, but it's like with Charlie Parker, it's hard to get around singing
after Sam without getting same part of Sam:' His approach to each song is different; his diction will
vary, depending on context, from the correctness of "Country Boy" to the more idiomatic voice of
"Troublin' Mind:' And yet it is always Sam. Listening to a rough cut of the album with Bobby Womack, I am struck by how
visibly excited Bobby becomes as he hears the previously unreleased "Keep
Movin' On" (from a session on which Bobby did not play) for the first time. "Yeah;' he
says, singing along with its simple inspirational message. "I remember playing this in the car. I didn't realize he ever
cut it. He' d always say, 'I like that song: keep moving on, you know:" It expressed, gays Bobby, a kind of
philosophy. "Sam would say, 'You know, You'll keep going, and one day you'll realize when you firt start, it's when You're at
your best. You don't even think about what you're doing, and then all of a sudden twenty years later you
trying to come up with a record: Well, you know, you
start thinking about it. Today you're young. Tomorrow you're old, and, you know, it's all gone past and it's
somebody else's turn. It don't make death such a horrible thing. It's just another stage:'
On December 10, the last night of his life, Sam met with longtime arranger Rene Hall to go over the
new act he was putting together for a Christmas engagement at the Deauville Hotel in Miami. They
taped some new songs, sketching out the arrangements, until Sam had to leave for dinner with Al Schmitt and
his wife at a Hollywood nightspot. There the discussion focused on the new album Sam was planning, a blues
album for which he was just beginning to come up with material. "Sam told me, 'This is what I want to do,”says Schmitt. "It was the first I had heard of it!" Wecan, of course, only imagine what that album might
have been like. We Can only imagine what the rest of
Sam's life would have been like if he had not been shot and killed, at thirty-three, in a senseless incident later that night
But this is more than the story of a future that never fully came to pass-though it is that, too. We hear
many stories of unfulfilled promise, but the focus in the case of Sam Cooke should be on the remarkable things
he achieved in his fourteen years in the spotlight, the gifts with which he left us. We know one thing: Sam's voice
remains unquenchable: the rest, the joy, the unvanquishable spirit with which he embraced life sings out in the
songs. He wasn't worried about others imitating him. He knew, says Bobby Womack, that "nobody sound like Sam
but Sam. Just like nobody sound like Ray Charles but Ray. He said, 'I don't even know why I do what I do. When I do
it, it just comes" And that's the way this music sounds: as spontaneous,
as elegant, as full of mirth, sadness, and surprise as when it first came out of his mouth, translating somehow
across the ages in wars that have little to do with calculation or fashion and everything to do with spontaneity of
feeling, with a kind of purity of soul.
Peter Guralnick is currently working on a biography of Sam
Cooke to be publishedby Little, Brown.