New Musical Express, August 1972

"NOT 'ALF Sam Cooke's been an influence on me," Rod Stewart was saying in his NME interview last week, adding that the inclusion of "Twisting The Night Away" on his "Never A Dull Moment" album represented a long standing intention of his to eventually get a Cooke number down on record.

The possessor of virtually all the old Sam Cooke singles and albums, Stewart admits to being a Cooke aficionado of several years standing.

Yet, sadly, few of those who buy Rod's album will remember anything much beyond the name of Sam Cooke, the artist who once sold in excess of 15 million records and more than anyone else was the father figure of soul music as we know it today.

Indeed, such is the obscurity invoked by the passing of time that they've even spelt Cooke's surname without the final “e" on the "Never A Dull Moment" album credits (a fact which much angered Rod),

THE USUALLY accepted definition of soul music as being "Gospel feeling with secular words" might well have been coined to sum up Sam Cooke's music.

Though he at one-time seemed in grave danger of becoming submerged under cabaret-club-style slush material -as Presley has been so often –Cooke always managed to retain his individuality, injecting a certain under-stated vet potent vibrancy.

When the man died in a tragic motel shooting on December 11,1964, the music world mourned one of its true innovators, a man whose spirit jives on in the work of so many others.

Under Cooke's tutelage, his good friend Cassius Clay (sorry Ali) recorded a version of 'Stand By Me" which, unbelievable as it sounds, was every bit as good as Ben E. King's original. Cooke Actually made a BBC TV appearance via Telstar once on a "Sportsview" interview with Cassius who said: "I am the greatest but my man Sam Cooke is the greatest when it comes to singing!"

Once he’d given up trying to sound liked a second-hand Little Richard, the late, great Otis Redding tuned to Cooke as his source of inspiration, adopting much of his style then carrying it a stage further till it became his own distinctive hiccupy sound,

“A Change Is Gonna Come" was arguably Redding's greatest ballad performance, it was a Cooke song, Redding's protege Arthur Conley admits to owing just as much to Sam Cooke and it was re-workings of old Cooke hits like "Yeah Man" ,which became "Sweet Soul Music” which gave him his own success.

The Rolling Stones owed more to Cooke's incredible version of "Little Red Rooster" (which had Billy Preston on piano) than to the Howlin' Wolf performed-Willie Dixon composed original, and black singers like Lou Rawls, with whom he wrote several hit songs, learned much from his style,

Long before he ever thought of singing soul music, or pop or ballads -all of which were to bring him success -Sam Cooke was already an established gospel star as a member of the Soul Stirrers.

In those days, so sharp was the division between church and secular black music that Cooke's early pop efforts were recorded under pseudonyms and, even so, he was eventually squeezed out of the Soul Stirrers because the rest of the band thought, as purveyors of sacred music, that his activities in pop cast a stigma on them, With the group, Cooke recorded for Speciality Records in Los Angeles, He offered them his early solo recordings but they declined them

However, Bumps Blackwell, Little Richard's manager, who was then working as A & R man at the company, thought "You Send Me", a song written by Cooke's brother Charles, had potential, so he bought Cooke's contract and the master-tape from Specialty and took them to Keen Records.

The result was a two-and-a-half-million seller, which shot to No. 1 in the US charts and led Specialty to hastily dig out one of the other Sam Cooke numbers they’d put on ice, "I'll Come Running Back To You" – which also rapidly earned a gold.

That was in '57 and in the next seven years, Cooke logged 15-million sales including five gold singles. Born in Chicago in 1937, one of eight sons, Cooke seemed to have been blessed with the luck of a seventh son.

He switched to RCA Victor Records and in 1960 his own song "Wonderful World" earned gold, quickly emulated by "Chain Gang", and in 1962 he rode the twist craze to a million-seller with "Twistin' The Night Away" and a best-selling album.

That he could get deep into the blues was evidenced by his version of "Driftin' Blues" and his very finest album, the incredibly atmospheric  "Night Beat", produced by Hugo and Luigi and including his own "Laughin' And Clowning", one of the best new blues compositions of the 'Sixties.

Songs like "Shake", "Good News", "Tennessee Waltz", "Cupid", "Only Sixteen" and "Shake Rattle And Roll" were all classics in their own way, each entirely different, running the gamut from soul to rock to pop to blues to jazz to standards yet each imbued with his own inimitable stamp.

Cooke's untimely death was a stupid tragedy. It appears a hotel clerk gave him the wrong room key and number. As he entered, the woman inside thought it was a burglar and shot him[1], He left behind a legacy of brilliant recordings, often weak material but always a superlative reading, and an influence which lives on till today.