Sam Cooke, black balladeers and the dreams of an era

by Brian Ward in his excellent book Just My Soul Responding

One of the defining features of the black pop era was the emergence and biracial success of a large number of male r&b-pop balladeers, including Brook Benton, Gene McDaniels, Sammy Turner, Dee Clark, Mel Carter, Ed Towsend, Tommy Hunt, Wade Flemons, and Garnet Mimms. Clyde McPhatter was a big influence on these smooth black stylists, some of whom would later record in a much more soulful vein. So, too, were the first wave of crossover vocal groups with their resolutely romantic visions. But the key figure was Sam Cooke. “They all had to come by Sam Cooke after he hit the scene”, recalled Harold Battiste, who worked with Cooke regularly. “He was the model”[1].

            Cooke was born in 1931, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, son of a Baptist preacher. He moved to Chicago as an infant and after singing with various little league gospel groups joined the majors in 1951 as a replacement for the legendary R.H. Harris in the Soul Stirrers. Nothwithstanding his contemporary standing as one of the most charismatic, sensual and emotive gospel stylists of his generation, and his posthumous deification as the father of soul, Cooke’s earliest secular forays were firmly in the teen pop vein. Indeed, in 1957, the enormous popularity of Cooke’s “You send me”, along with “Diane” by Canada’s teen crooner Paul Anka, did much to consolidate the trend towards romatic beat balladry initiated by teen vocal groups like the Penguins and Spaniels.

            While the glutinous strings and perfunctory female choruses on records like “Lonely island” and “Cupid” could never entirely swamp the grace of Cooke’s mellifluous vocals, he was not, as Bernice Reagon Johnson charitably put it, particularly “challanged as a singer” on these early secular recordings. Aside from his trademark note-bending glissandi “woah and oh and woah oh ohs” and immaculate timing, they offerend only fleeting glimpses of either Cooke’s gospel roots or his subsequent pop-soul explorations[2].

            Nelson George has attributed the saccharine quality of Cooke’s early secular sides to “The obnoxious studio input of white producers, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore”, although he insists elsewhere that “Cooke always remained his own man”. The last is much nearer to the mark. Peretty and Creatore did not even work with Cooke until his move from Keen to RCA in 1960, by which time his wistfully romantic pop style had already been perfected in collaboration with black arranger-producer Bumps Blackwell. Even at RCA, with the exception of his first outing for the label, “Teenage sonata”, Hugo and Luigi generally left Cooke, manager J.W. Alexander and arranger René Hall in charge of studio production. Moreover, the slushy “Teenage sonata”, with its “obnoxious studio input”, was actually one of only a handful of Cooke recordings which, thanks to Cooke’s loyal black fans, made the Rhythm and Blues charts, but not the pop listings[3].

In reality, Sam Cooke probably had more control of his career, both artistically and commercially, than any of his black or white pop contemporaries. In conjunction with Alexander and his road manager, the former Soul Stirrers S.R. Crain, he founded his own song publishing company (KAGS), two record labels (SAR and Derby), and later his own production company (Tracey). From the fall of 1963, Tracey supplied Cooke’s recordings to RCA for marketing and distribution. “Control was very important to Sam”, recalled Hugo Peretti, who even interpreted Cooke’s songwriting primarily as a means to maximize both his artistic freedom and the financial rewards from his recordings. “He saw what had happened to a lot of other black artists, and he didn’t want to get ten percented to death”.[4]

It was symptomatic of the mood of the times that Cooke chose to exercise this rare artistic license and relative economic power to court a biracial market for his singles and an overwhelmingly white audience for his albums of, mostly, Tin Pan Alley standards – a notable exception being the low-key, midnight-blues songs of the Nightbeat album. Just as signigicantly, his core black audience appears to have generally accepted the stylistic gestures which initially cropped his gospel roots and made such a crossover possible.

In the period between his 1962 recording of “Bring it on home to me”, on which Cooke traded exhortations with fellow gospel refugee Lou Rawls against the backdrop of a churchy organ, booming blues guitar and muted strings, and his death in 1964, Cooke allowed his gospel influences to come more to the fore – as on the ecstatic horn-led dance stomp “Shake”, or on the gorgeous, long-lined, pop-spiritual “A change is gonna come”. Yet even during this period, Cooke remained extremely concerned not to alienate the less musicalle adventurous sections of his white audience by offering up too generous a dose of gospel fervour. Many of his most powerful and influential secular performances were never actually released during his lifetime. Instead, they could be found on demos of his own compositions like “Soothe me,”, “Lookin’ for a love”, and “Meet me at Mary’s place”,  which he cut to illustrate to the likes of the Sims Twins and Johnnie Morrissette precisely the sort of gospel-pop fusions he had in mind for the more exclusively black-oriented artists he signed to SAR and Derby.

Cooke’s desire to reach and maintain a mass white market was also reflected in his live performances, which were vastly different according to the racial and generational composition of his audience. At the Harlem Square Club in Miami, he was vocally and emotionally unfettered, alternately cooing and roaring his way through blistering reinterpretations of many of his pop ballads and transforming the concert hall into a revival meeting. At the Copacabana, where he bombed in 1958 but triomphed in 1964, he offered fans who were generally white, wealthy and well beyond their teens a smooth blend of showtunes, soaring strings and carefully prepared arrangements and choreography. In his 1964 club appearances, however, Cooke insisted on including a galloping version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the wind”. This appears to have been simultaneously a reflection of his own growing political sensibility and a simple acknowledgementof folk’s enormous popularity with whites at the time. The black pop era was full of such complicated negotiations between the demands of rising racial consciousness and commercial considerations.