Gospel singer who made his mark with self-penned soul
By Steve Scott (From Record Collector, January 4th 1983?)
A sordid shooting incident in a Los Angeles motel room ended the life of one of the most influential soul performers of all time. The unbecoming nature of the tragedy tarnished the image of a man who had done his utmost to break through into middle-of-the-road acceptance, without ever losing sight of the soulful mock-gospel element of his style that had made his reputation in the first place. Almost twenty years after his death, his repertoire of classic pop and R&B hits still provides a rich hunting ground for singers of all persuasions, while his original recordings are regarded as examples of the best in black popular music.
Sam Cooke could hardly escape a career in music. One of eight children of the Rev. Charles S. Cooke, he was reared in the gospel tradition, and actually performed with two sisters and a brother as the Singing Children in the late Thirties and early Forties. In his teens he graduated to R.B. Robinson’s Highway QCs, who gradually attained a reputation as one of the area’s top gospel vocal outfits. He passed briefly through another prestige group, the Pilgrim Travellers[1], before landing the plum job of lead tenor in the immensely popular Soul Stirrers. Sam was just twenty years old, and had the unenviable task of following in the footsteps of R.H. Harris, one of the most charismatic performers on the gospel circuit. The top gospel performers had the sort of fanatical followings which were more associated with stars like Sinatra or Johnnie Ray, and at first Cooke was tempted to keep too closely to the Harris sound, in the hope of inheriting his popularity. It was only when he forged his own personal style, swooping and soaring over the second tenor of Roy Crain, that he was fully accepted by the Soul Stirrer’s fans, and became one of the most popular gospel performers in the country.
Cooke stayed with the Soul Stirrers for almost six years, recording many sides which rank with the best gospel music ever made. A selection of Soul Stirrers’ tracks can be found on a London compilation LP, “The Soul Stirrers Featuring Sam Cooke”, and on the first side of Sonet’s “Two Sides Of Sam Cooke” LP. Performances like “Touch The Hem Of His Garment” and “Peace In The Valley” show just how quickly Cooke developed his distinctive style, putting together the flourish and attack that was basis of his vocal approach right through his career.
Cooke’s popularity couldn’t help but interest Speciality [sic] A&R man Bumps Blackwell. In 1956, it would have been inconceivable for a gospel star to lower himself by recording pop material; but Blackwell realized that the power and emotional impact of Cooke’s voice would work just as well in the more lucrative pop field. He cut several tracks with Cooke, and trying not to offend Sam’s gospel following, issued two under the rather shallow pseudonym of Dale Cooke. The links with the gospel tradition were still there: the A-side, “Lovable”, was a reworking of the Stirrers’ “Wonderful”, and Cooke’s impassioned vocals betrayed his traditions. The single sold poorly, but gave away Dale’s secret, and Speciality’s [sic] Art Rupe refused to allow any more pop records out under Cooke’s name. Blackwell offered to forget his back royalties from Speciality in return for freedom of contract for Cooke and himself, and took the budding pop star to Bob Keene’s Keen Records. Obviously Cooke had to leave the Soul Stirrers, and so he was replaced by Johnny Taylor, later a very successful R&B recording artist for Stax and CBS.
Contrary to popular belief, Cooke’s career with Keen didn’t start begin with the chart-topping “You Send Me”. Two other singles were released first: “For Sentimental Reasons” and “Lonely Island”. Both made the lower reaches of the Top Fifty, not bad considering the material didn’t display Cooke’s talents at their best. The came “You Send Me”, written (like most of his singles) by Cooke himself. It made No. 1 in the States, and No. 29 when issued as Sam’s first U.K. single in 1957. “You Send Me” took the basic elements of the gospel tradition – emotion, vocal dexterity and commitment – and laid them on a delicate pop background not too far removed from ballad recordings black and white. Cooke indisputably has class: he effortlessly ranged over several octaves, and had an unhurried sophistication that found itself trained on an array of ‘standards’ in the late Fifties. Before that, Art Rupe at Speciality decided that maybe Cooke singing pop wasn’t such a bad idea after all, and rushed out a 1956 recording, “I’ll Come Running Back To You”, which made a very creditable No. 22 in the Billboard charts. This easily outdid the strange reissue of “Sentimental Reasons” and the official follow-up “All Of My Life” on Keen. Further Speciality releases of early material didn’t do so well and it took Sam’s sixth Keen single, the sublime “Win Your Love For Me”, a musical cousin of the Brill Building productions of the Drifters and Ben E. King. The next single “Love You Most Of All”, moved nearer to uptempo pop, a trend to a particular trend or dance craze. “Only Sixteen”, a No. 1 in the hands of Craig Douglas, was even more benign, and it seemed that Cooke’s vocal abilities were hardly being involved, let alone stretched. Things picked up with in 1960 with “Wonderful World”, No 12 in the States and No. 27 in Britain. Similar in form to his previous singles, it had a soulfulness that they had all lacked. Its strength as a song can be gauged by the number of cover versions recorded over the last 23 years.
“Wonderful World” marked the end of Cooke’s contract with Keen. He had made six albums for the label, only one of which – “Encore” – received a British release on HMV. When he joined RCA early in 1960 the company acquired rights to his old recordings as well as his new ones, allowing it to release a compilation called “Hits of the Fifties” in 1961. At RCA Cooke came into the hands of Hugo and Luigi, who had produced the early Isley Brothers recordings for the label a couple of years before. With Cooke they introduced a rougher feel, yet without losing the smoothness that Sam’s voice seemed to demand. The first RCA single “Teenage Sonata”, maintained his hit-and-miss reputation; but with “Chain Gang”, issued in August 1960, the company struck paydirt. The songs was little than a novelty, with grunts, groans and the clanking of chains in appropriate places; with one of his greatest – if least substantial – vocal performances. For the next four years, he made a succession of his singles, usually self-composed, together with albums that leaned more towards nightclub audiences and standard material. Commercial success wasn’t consistent, but once or twice a year Cooke could be relied upon to come up with a winner. “Cupid” is probably his most covered song, with chart remakes by the Detroit Spinners and Johnny Nash coming to mind; “Twisting The Night Away” capitalized on a craze to produce one of the great dance records of all time; “Another Saturday Night” combined a tale of woe with some exuberant vocalizing on another classic of good times romance; while “Sad Mood” showed that Cooke’s ballads were just as assured as his uptempo material. Two records in particular sum up the era. “Bring It On Home To Me” / “Having A Party” was possibly Sam’s best single, certainly if both sides are taken into consideration. The A-side has been heavily covered by artists from the Animals to John Lennon, but Cooke’s gritty rendition has never been equalled. The flip belongs to that long tradition of songs featuring the titles of recent hits in the lyrics, and would have made a fine A-side in it’s own right. Both sides contained the careful stirring of blues, pop and soul into a single pot that characterized Cooke at his most brilliant.
CLUMSIER
By contrast, Cooke’s next but one single demonstrated the clumsier end of his product. “Send Me Lovin[2]” had made a powerful blues for Little Richard; but Sam toned down the vocals and added completely extraneous orchestra and backing vocalists. Without the emotion of the original the song crumpled, leaving nothing more than a mash of ‘classy’ effects with nothing to drape them on. The reason behind these occasional lapses in taste from Cooke can be traced back to a comment he made during his only British tour, before “Send Me Loving” was released. “I will never sing rock’n’roll, he told his interviewer, “not because I don’t like it but because I think I have made enough changes in my career by switching from gospel music to pop music. This was a big sacrifice for me and it was a hard decision to take”. Cooke recalled that on occasions he had veered close to rock’n’roll beat, but that he had always slowed them down. It’s hard not to assume that Cooke wanted to appeal more to the adult market and didn’t want to harm his chances by being too closely associated with a short-lived teenage craze. Had he lived, his career would no doubt have moved close to Sammy Davis Junior than Marvin Gaye.
So Cooke had his aims clearly defined; but that didn’t seem to harm his music. Through 1963 and 1964 he continued on his previous path, save for the occasional aberration like the Dixie-land flavoured “Cousin of Mine”. “Good Times” from 1964, was one of his best records ever (and was covered almost note for note by the Stones on their third album), while “Little Red Rooster” and “Frankie And Johnnie” were interesting adaptations of blues numbers, the first by Willie Dixon (and coincidentally covered by the Rolling Stones) and the second a traditional ballad. Late in 1964, Cooke went into the RCA studios for session that was to produce another contender for his best record of all time. “Shake” was as near as Cooke ever came to Memphis R&B, a punchy rhythmic number that was covered in 1965 by a youthful (but already Cooke-worshipping) Rod Stewart. The second side “A Change Is Gonna Come”, edged towards an early black consciousness, with a lyric that could be interpreted as purely personal or having a wider political significance. Obviously, the song acquired a greater poignancy when Cooke died weeks after it was recorded, but even without that unhappy conjunction of events it would still have been a classic. Whether it signified a new direction for Sam Cooke we will never know, but when it appeared shortly after his death it proved to be a worthy epitaph.
Cooke was shot dead in an L.A. motel on 11/12/64, after an incident in which he was claimed to have raped another guest – though Cooke’s manager, J.W. Alexander, always maintained that Sam was only looking for his trousers. Either way, the motel manageress rushed to the girl’s defence, shooting and then clubbing Cooke to death. Thousands of anguished black fans queued to file past his coffin – proof that for all his leaning towards the wealthy white audience, his own people still appreciated his talents. RCA continued to release ‘new’ Cooke singles for almost two years in the States, while also preparing a series of compilation albums. After 1967, however, sales of these posthumous releases fell away, and it was up to singers to keep Sam’s music alive, as his compositions provided a ready store of hits for artists from Cat Stevens to Otis Redding.
By the time of his death, Cooke had become a highly talented album artist. In the U.S. RCA issued eleven Cooke albums, up to and including “Shake” in 1965. Nine of them (all but “Swing Low” and “The Best Of Sam Cooke”) were also issued in Britain, all but “Shake” in mono and stereo (By the way, if anyone can explain why many albums were suddenly issued in mono only in 1964 and 1965, when previous issues were always available in both formats, we would be very grateful!) Sam is also featured on a couple of notable compilation albums: “Our Significant Hits” (London HAU 2402, February 1962) provided a British release for “Lovable”, “I’ll Come Running Back To You” and “That’s All I Need To Know”; while “Three Great Guys” (RCA RD 7608, February 1964) saw four Cooke songs, including “I Ain’t Gonna Cheat On You No More”, “Talking Trash” and “Tenderness”, alongside selections by Paul Anka and Neil Sedaka.
Since Sam’s death, much of his material has been repackaged on compilation albums. “The Two Sides of Sam Cooke” (Sonet SNTF 5009) is a release of a U.S. Speciality album, with one side devoted to Soul Stirrer’s recordings and another to almost all of Sam’s pop material for the label. Immediate’s “The Wonderful World of Sam Cooke” is a fairly rare hits compilation, as is the RCA International (INTS 1080) “The Late And Great Sam Cooke” album. Another RCA LP, “The One And Only” (INTS 1005) included rarer material, like “Swing Low Swing Chariot” and “Trouble In Mind”. More recently, RCA have provided straight reissues of the “Mr. Soul” and “Twistin’ The Night Away” albums, as well as “Sam Cooke Interprets Billie Holiday” (HY 1030), a selection of songs made famous by the jazz singer. In the last couple of years Audio Fidelity have issued “20 Great Hits” and “Evergreen”, the latter containing twenty tracks in more standard style than most of his output. Probably the best compilation for the beginner, however, is RCA’s “The Golden Age Of Sam Cooke”, a straightforward, chronologically arranged hits collection that includes all of Cooke’s best known sides. At just L3 it is an essential buy for anyone not familiar with Cooke’s music, proving exactly why, even twenty years after his death, Sam’s reputation is still so high.