The Legendary Sam Cooke
Label: RCA Camden CDS 1089 for Pickwick International Inc. (LP 1971)
Songs:
Side 1
The Legendary Sam Cooke
It's His Heart You Hear Singing.
Sam Cooke is gone,
but his singing lingers longingly with the taste of a life fully lived and a
song fully sung. Sammy Davis, Jr. said of his friend, Sam Cooke, "What you hear
is the sound Sam Cooke was born with-a sound as spontaneous and uncontrived as a
child's laughter or a mother's tears. What Sam knew about music, he knew in his
heart...and it's his heart that you hear singing." Sam Cooke was a natural.
Nobody taught him how to lay down the lines of a tune; it came out the way Sam
was feeling at the moment of performance or recording. But he certainly got
inside a lyric and he conveyed the insistence of those lyrics to his listeners.
Sam's singing got the heart of the matter. His emotional probing also got to
your guts. Sam brings back the memories of past loves and sweet experiences. He
swings the ballads and turns them around so that they reverberate with a
rhythmic warmth all his own. His artful phrasing dips into the lyric the way a
sculptor molds clay into form - stretching, compressing, smoothing and soothing
until the message comes soulfully home. He knows how to play the silences. Where
some vocalist might take a number like Don't Cry On My Shoulder and knock it
forward with a Mighty Mouse delivery, Sam just rocks it gently, progressively,
building a spirit of playful aggressiveness which lets you know that he knows
exactly what's happening, and you'd better believe it!
I Fall in Love Everyday is a real softy and appeals the latent romantic which
lurks in all of us. Sam gives it a musing quality, as if he were thinking out
loud instead of singing. The ease with which he projects his personal love could
melt ice cubes in an igloo, causing a miniature ice floe in any distaff frozen
being. Baby, Won't You Please Come Home is associated with several top-notch
male vocalists, notably Joe Williams, who used to kick it around in style with
the Basie boys. Sam Cooke was no novice, however, and he proves that oldies
which really are goodies can never go stale, providing someone digs the song
enough to revive it tenderly and keep it alive with energy and initiative and
character. Sam Cooke makes them all come alive, all the great songs on this
album. Check it out, and you'll come alive, too! - Linda Solomon