SAR Records - Sam
Cooke's Soul Label
(Instead of writing some brilliant piece
myself I am posting here an article from the Goldmine Magazine by Ray
Funk) August 26 - 1988
While Sam
Cooke's legacy remains strong, with a number of excellent recent reissues and
film and print biographies in the works, his legacy as a record company owner
and record producer has received little exposure. Cooke and his long-time friend
and singing associate J. W. Alexander started the Sar label in 1957. It was
dissolved shortly after Cooke's death in 1964. The rights to the recordings and
the publishing were bought up shortly thereafter by Allen Klein, who was Cooke's
last manager. Fifty-seven singles and Four LPs were issued on the Sar label and
11 45s and two LPs on its companion label, Derby Records.
Sar
records were geared for the rhythm 'n' blues market, while Derby was more
pop-oriented material. Both Cooke and Alexander were long-time gospel quartet
singers who had left that field for the glamor and money of pop and R&B.
Their two record labels showcased their skills as songwriters and producers;
they did most of the production and a great deal of the songwriting on
everything they recorded. Along with the record company, they had their own
music publishing companies: Kags Music Co. (BMI) and Malloy Music Co. (ASCAP).
While
record companies might sound like big affairs, in Sar's case this was not so.
The offices of Sar Records, at 6425 Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, was a
small affair: just two desks and a piano. Session work was done at various
independent studios around town. Experienced bandleader and arranger Rene Hall,
who had worked extensively for Specialty throughout the '50s, was the
"house" arranger. He had an office around the corner and put most of
the sessions together.
Many of
the records have a strong Sam Cooke sound; if you're a Cooke fan, they'll very
likely appeal to you. Very little material from Sar bas been reissued, and all
Sar and Derby records remain very collectible, though not particularly expensive.
Hopefully, someday someone will plot out sensible compilation LPs of most of the
issued cuts and the best of what may remain unissued.
The
artists on the label are largely singers and musicians that Cooke and Alexander
knew through their years on the "Gospel Highway" as quartet singers.
The label can't be properly understood without understanding how strong the
gospel connection was with almost every artist on the label. In a much smaller
and more intimate fashion, Sar was the kind of family-affair record company that
Motown tried unsuccessfully to be. Close friends and long-term associates from
their years as quartet singers out on the road touring the country were called
in by Cooke and Alexander to record for the label.
After
growing up in Chicago and singing with the Highway QCs, Cooke joined the Soul
Stirrers in 1950; with his voice, they soon became the best-selling gospel group
for Specialty Records and one of the top-drawing quartets on the circuit. The
other successful gospel quartet for Specialty was the Pilgrim Travelers, managed
by their tenor singer, J. W. Alexander. From 1950-57, they were two of the
hottest acts in gospel, appearing on big gospel package shows going from the
Apollo Theatre in New York to the Howard in Washington, O.C., and the biggest
auditoriums around the country. The two groups of ten worked together, and over
time Cooke and Alexander became friends.
The story
of Sam Cooke recording for Bumps Blackwell as Dale Cook has often been told. His
success led him to leave the Soul Stirrers and try his luck with secular
recordings. Meanwhile, the Pilgrim Travelers shortly thereafter made a brief try
at pop stardom themselves, touring as the Travelers, with Lou Rawls as their
lead singer. They recorded a few R&B numbers for Andex, most notably the
novelty number "Teenage Machine Age." When Cooke went on the road as a
pop singer, the Travelers toured with him. It was during such a tour that a car
accident hospitalized Lou Rawls and ended the Travelers' career. With the
breakup of the group, J.W. Alexander went into production and management, and
started working closely with Cooke. His involvement sparked the start of Sar.
The first
records on the label were by the group that Cooke had left when he entered the
pop field, the Soul Stirrers. Specialty, the label that had the Soul Stirrers
under contract since 1950, lost interest in the group when Cooke's replacement,
Johnnie Taylor, did not generate the sales that the Soul Stirrers had when Cooke
was the lead singer. Cooke's new-found wealth and loyalty to the group led him
to issue Soul Stirrers recordings himself if Specialty wasn't interested.
The
company's name, SAR, supposedly came from the initials of the first names of its
founders, a shortened form of Sam and Alex Records. The name for the music
publishing company, Kags, was taken from the nickname of Lou Rawls' father.
After
releasing the Soul Stirrers 45, the label tried its hand at the rhythm 'n' blues
market. The first secular recordings issued were by Kylo Turner. Though little
remembered now, he had been one of the two lead singers for the Pilgrim
Travelers throughout the '50s and had generated a great deal of excitement as a
lead singer.
He had
left the group a few years before Alexander and had been replaced by Lou Rawls.
However, the record went nowhere and Turner recorded only one other pop 45 in
the early '60s. He never made the transition to pop, and continued to sing with
a gospel group in Chicago, the Glorybound Singers, until shortly before his
death a few years ago.
The next
artist recruited was Johnny Morisette. Born in the South Pacific, Morisette had
been raised in Mobile, Ala., where he had grown up singing with a local quartet,
the Bells of Heaven. Though the group never recorded, they appeared on local
radio and television. They were on local programs when nationally known quartets
like the Soul Stirrers and Pilgrim Travelers would come to town. At the time,
Mobile was a regular stop for touring black gospel quartets. Morisette and Cooke
became friends during one of his tours through Mobile. In 1952, Johnny Morisette
decided to abandon gospel and hitchhiked out to Los Angeles. He did a bit of
recording for Dootone and Specialty before recording for Sar. In an interview
with Tim Schuller, he recounted how he came to record with Cooke:
"I'm
in the streets, at a friend-of-mine's breakfast club called Master's, and when I
come out the door I seen Sam. We got to rappin', went over to a Chinese
restaurant and he told me they were gonna start a record company and did I want
in? So we were in Rene Hall's office and Sam got his guitar and started singin'
'I’ll never come back to you,' and I said, 'Yeah, I like that!" "That
was 'Never,' my first Johnnie Morisette record. The others were all under
Johnnie Two Voice. Sam and them said, 'You got a pretty name, man; why don't you
use your own name?' So that's when me became me. When that record hit man, bam!"
"Never" was the first of eight singles that Morisette had on Sar. His
second release, "Dorothy," is an interesting adaptation of a
traditional gospel number, "I've Got Heaven on My Mind." The only onee
to make the charts was his biggest hit, "Meet Me At The Twisting
Place." It was on the Billboard R&B charts for four weeks in 1962,
rising to # 18. It was onee of Sar's all-time best sellers -but top sales must
go to the next group.
The
Sims Twins had the best-selling record that was released on Sar. A Sam Cooke
composition, "Soothe Me," first hit
the charts in October 1961 and stayed there for 22 weeks, Reaching #4. Of course,
the Sims Twins had been gospel singers. They started out in a 1arger family
gospel group, the Sims Brothers Sextet, who recorded two obscure records for
Dootone in 1952 (so obscure that no copies are known to survive of either
record!). The group was active only around Los Angeles and never did much
traveling.
When they
broke up, the youngest members, Bobby and Ken Sims (who really are twins),
started singing as a duo in churches. It was there that Sam Cooke heard them and
convinced them to come and do same background singing. They went in the studios
to sing background on "Cupid." Then he
was working on "Soothe Me," a song he wrote, and he again wanted them
to sing backup. When he was listening to a studio tape of their singing on it,
he never did record his voice over theirs as he originally intended, and issued
it as the record.
One of
the most important additions to the label in 1961 was Sar's first and only
employee, an experienced white songwriter named Zelda Samuels. Samuels came to
the label when Sar and the two music publishing companies had grown sufficiently
to need someone full-time to handle the day-to-day business. She was perfect for
the job, having previously worked for Decca Records in distribution, its
subsidiary Coral Records in A&R, then for Fred Fisher Music in music
publishing, where she also wrote lyrics. She stayed with Sar until it folded.
With both
Cooke and Alexander on the road most of the time, on most days she was Sar
Records. She worked closely with Cooke and Alexander, co-authoring many
compositions. Since the label folded Samuels has continued to write songs (over
200 have been published) and for 23 years has been Mel Carter's manager, an
association that started when she was with Sar.
The
Valentinos were the only other rhythm 'n' blues vocal group to chart for Sar.
Their record, "Looking For A Love," hit the charts in July 1962 and
stayed on for eight weeks, reaching #8. Originally a family group, the Womack
Brothers (Bobby, Cecil, Harris, Curtis, Friendly), from Cleveland, Ohio, were
very popular locally before they came to Cooke's attention through the efforts
of Roscoe Robinson. They started touring with Cooke, and Bobby Womack also
worked as the guitarist in Cooke's band. While their parents wanted them to
stay in
gospel, the brothers decided to try heir fortunes with rhythm 'n' blues. As the
Valentinos, they were successful for several years until Bobby Womack decided to
go off on his own. While they recorded a great gospel record on Sar, it was the
transformation of their arrangement of the gospel standard, "I Couldn't
Hear Nobody Pray," into "Looking For A Love" that became a hit.
Zelda
Samuels had heard the group singing around the studio with "I Couldn't Hear
Nobody Pray." It was to that melody that she first wrote the lyrics to
"Looking For A Love," which she gave to J. W. Alexander, who tinkered
with the words as the song took shape. But it was Cooke, in town to supervise
the recording session, who added the hard-driving "looking, looking"
refrain that added the extra power that helped make this song memorable.
Sam Cooke
also got his younger brother L.C. Cooke to record for Sar. L.C. was, however, no
newcomer to music or recording. He started out as his brother did, singing
gospel while barely a teenager. His first group was the Nobleairs, a religious
quartet made up of friends from his neighborhood. From the Nobleairs, L.C. got
drafted into the Army in 1952 and continued to sing until his discharge in 1954.
In 1956, in Chicago, he served as a member of the Magnificents, a popular
Chicago rhythm 'n' blues group that had earlier hit with "Up an The
Mountain."
His
recordings for Sar were the start of a solo career that lasted about 10 years,
including records for Chess, Destination, and other labels. Sar featured three
female singers: Jackie Ross, Patience Valentine, and Linda Carr. Jackie Ross was
only 16 when she recorded her first record for Sar. The daughter of a
husband-and-wife evangelist team, she had known Cooke since she was very small.
He was visiting her family in Chicago where she was singing gospel, and was so
impressed that he convinced her family to let him record her on the bluesy
"Hard Times." She decided not to go to Los Angeles as Cooke requested,
and had had a moderate career issuing several excellent sides on Chess and other
labels. Patience Valentine was a local Los Angeles singer who seems to have
slipped into obscurity since her few numbers for Sar.
Sar had
only two istrumental issues. The first was by Clifton White, who was the
guitarist in Cooke's band. The other was by local Los Angeles bandleader Gus
Jenkins, who had several releases on other labels.
The Derby
label was started as a companion label to Sar for pop recordings. Alexander
chose the name because he wanted a name that connotated class and had an easily
definable image for a label logo. Derby featured the first release by Billy
Preston and several by Mel Carter.
(The
story of Mel Carter's career bas been told at length in Goldmine No. 121.) His
recording of "When A Boy Falls
In Love" was the only record the labels produced to enter the pop
charts. But -as if you couldn't guess by now -Preston also started as a gospel
singer, as a member of the Raymond Rasberry Singers. He continues to be a
popular singer, actor and has also recorded recently in the gospel field,
gaining a Grammy nomination in 1985 for an album on Onyx International Records.
In 1956, he was voted the best tenor singer by the National Association of
Choirs.
The act
that the label most extensively recorded was not a pop singer or group but the
group that Cooke came from, the Soul Stirrers. After Johnny Taylor left, the new
lead was a singer named Jimmy Outler. A fine lead, again very much in the Sam
Cooke mold, he was with the group the whole time they were on Sar. He also
followed his predecessors to popular music, recording one record on Okeh before
before being murdered in 1964. The two albums by the Soul Stirrers on Sar are
two of the rarest and most collectible gospel items around. The most popular
number that the group recorded on Sar and the title of their first album was
"Jesus Built A Fence Around
Me." Another Cooke composition, this song ranks with "Touch
The Hem Of His Garment" as one of the best gospel numbers he wrote.
The other
gospel groups that recorded for the label also had close connections to the Soul
Stirrers. R.H. Harris was the legendary lead singer whose departure from the
Soul Stirrers in 1950 led to Cooke joining the group. Though he had left the
Soul Stirrers to get off the road, Harris could not give up Quartet singing. He
made several excellent recordings in the first half of the '50s with the
Christland Singers. He then formed the Gospel Paraders and, after one recording
with Specialty, they did six numbers with Sar. The one female ensemble on Sar,
the Meditation Singers, were from Detroit. They were a very strong group that
was formed in the late '40s by Ernestine Rundless. They also recorded for 
Specialty
at the time that Cooke and Alexander were both on the label. Della Reese spent
several years with this group, as did Laura Lee Rundless, Emestine's daughter,
who had a soul career in the '60s and '70s as Laura Lee and bas recently
returned to gospel. The group's connection to the Soul Stirrers comes through
her father, Rev. E.A. Rundless, who was One of the original Soul Stirrers when
they left Houston in the late '30s to move north.
No doubt
the rarest item on the label is an EP of the Soul Stirrers featuring Sam Cooke,
Nearer To Thee (Sar EP 105). It is a live recording that appears to he identical
to that issued in much better fidelity on the Specialty album, Gospel Stars In
Concert (SP 2153). The EP was apparently withdrawn because of contractual
problems from Specialty. Not only couldn't Cooke record on his label, but even
earlier live gospel recordings weren't available! Despite this, Sar Records
featured a number of memorable rhythm 'n' blues performances that still sound
great today.
Sources:
Joe
McEwen, Sam Cooke: A Biography In Words And Pictures. Sire Books (New York,
1977).
Tim
Schuller, "The Johnny Two-Voice Story: Johnnie Morisette," Living
Blues (Winter 1980-81), p. 20.
Robert
Pruter, "Jackie Ross: She's Not Selfish At All," ft Will Stand #29
(1983), p. 6.
Special
thanks to J. W. Alexander, Zelda Samuels, L.C. Cooke, Robert and Kenneth
Sims,
Michael Ochs, David Tenabaum, Pete Grendysa, Dan Nooger, and Robert Pruter.