Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 10

  But he had a contract on Harris, Rupe persisted stubbornly. And he wanted Harris to honor that contract.

  J.W. was unfazed. “I said, ‘Art, Harris has left the group.’ I said, ‘You haven’t even heard the kid. Why don’t you give him a chance?’”

  RUPE WAS STILL NOT altogether convinced when they entered the Universal Recorders studio on Hollywood Boulevard on March 1, but, he told Alexander, only half joking, he was willing to allow him one mistake. He hadn’t gotten this far in a hard business without learning to trust his instincts. It continued to bother him that Crain had given no advance warning—that was no way to do business. And while there was no question that the kid could sing, he didn’t have Harris’ authority, he didn’t have Harris’ command, and there was a real question, it seemed to Rupe, of whether he would ever have Harris’ fans. Still, with the group assembled and rehearsed, it seemed like it was worth the gamble—and, in fact, it didn’t compare with all the calculated gambles he had already made in setting up and establishing his company.

  He had first come to California in 1939 as Arthur Goldberg, from McKeesport, Pennsylvania, with the idea of going into the motion picture industry, but he soon discovered that the record business offered a far greater window of independent opportunity. In 1944 he put several hundred dollars of his savings into a company called Atlas Records, which had advertised in the newspaper for “investor partners.” What he got from this experience, as he often liked to say, was an enduring lesson in how not to run a record company. One of the principal elements of that lesson was that there was no point in trying to challenge the mainstream record companies—RCA, Columbia, Decca, with their vast catalogues of popular songs—on their own turf. So, having grown up in a mixed neighborhood with a broad exposure to both blues and black church music, he settled on “race music” as his field and invested $200 of his remaining $600 in a selection of 78s, which he played “until they got gray” in order to discover exactly what went into a race-records hit. With a stopwatch and a metronome he made a detailed study of length, beat, feel, and lyrical content, “and I established a set of rules or principles which I felt would enable me to make commercial records. Some of the music moved me so much it brought tears to my eyes.”

  At this point the logical next step was to establish a company of his own, and this he did, first with the Juke Box label, then with Specialty in the fall of 1946. His study of what constituted a hit paid off with a string of Top 10 chart entries by Roy Milton, Joe and Jimmy Liggins, Camille Howard, and, in 1950, Percy Mayfield, whose inspired plea for racial understanding, “Please Send Me Someone to Love,” had hit number one just three months prior to the Soul Stirrers’ session and was still riding high on the r&b charts. This number represented not just the commercial culmination of Specialty’s efforts to date but the marriage of retail and aesthetic success for which Art Rupe had always striven (Mayfield, a homegrown poet from Minden, Louisiana, was in Rupe’s view “as great as Langston Hughes” in his own way). At the same time, his guiding principle in business remained, necessarily, to stay in business. He prided himself on his ability to make the best deal possible from the standpoint of both survival and self-interest (he saw the competition as fierce and, frequently, unprincipled) and then, uncompromisingly, to adhere to it. His guiding principles in the studio were to be well rehearsed, use the best equipment, place the vocals up front in order to emphasize the words—and, above all, bring out the feeling in the music. “Gospel was my favorite type of music, not for religious reasons but because of the feeling and the soul and the honesty of it. To me it was pure, it wasn’t adulterated, and that’s why I reacted to it.” As for his own role: “I guess my talent was having empathy for what they were doing and truly feeling it, and also, I guess, being discriminating to a degree, being a hairsplitter. To me the performance was the thing. Making a record to me was analagous to producing a play, with an introduction, development of a plot, even acts and a coda, or an ending. That was the principle that I followed.”

  THEY BEGAN THE THURSDAY-afternoon session with what Art considered to be eminently sensible choices. Among the songs the group had presented to him at rehearsal were two by Thomas A. Dorsey, the acknowledged father of contemporary gospel music. The new singer took the chorus on the first one, “Come, Let Us Go Back to God,” a morality tale decrying today’s sinful ways, his high, plaintive voice coming perilously close to breaking at times as he seemed determined to impress everyone present with the intensity of his feelings. His voice did, in fact, break and even go out of tune a little on the second, a 1939 composition called “Peace in the Valley,” which Dorsey had written for Mahalia Jackson but which neither Jackson nor any other gospel singer of note had yet recorded. As the Soul Stirrers did it, the song, with its relaxed, almost country-and-western flavor, turned into a vehicle perfectly suited to showcase the contrast between Sam’s lilting gift for melody and Paul Foster’s unreservedly exhortatory second lead. They ran through four full takes of the song, each hovering right around the two-minute-forty-second mark that Rupe believed to be optimal for airplay, as Paul doubled the chorus and took the song home while the group chanted hypnotically in the background.

  The session continued with varying degrees of success over the next couple of hours. The kid could certainly sing, but Rupe took exception to the easygoing, almost lazy way he sometimes went about it. On the fourth song, “I’m on the Firing Line,” which amounted to virtually a solo vehicle, he sang his lead as though he were crooning a pop song, while the group offered little more than the restrained prompting you might find on an Ink Spots record. If this was meant as some kind of new “intimate” approach to gospel, it was clearly one with which the producer had little sympathy, and he cut the group off after one take while writing “nothing happens” on the session sheet.

  They quickly did two takes each of three more songs, the highlight being an original Sam Cook number called “Until Jesus Calls Me Home,” which once again showed off not only the boy’s oddball approach but his capacity to project the kind of warmth that Alexander and Crain swore put him across with the sisters in the amen corner. They had done seven songs at this point, with four, maybe even five, in Art’s judgment, usable. He had no complaints about the session. The group had, as always, come in well rehearsed, and he was satisfied that the newcomer at least brought something different to the table. He might even have been tempted to call it a day, except that both Crain and Alexander were insistent that Cook have a chance to do his showpiece number, “Jesus Gave Me Water,” which, against all common sense, was the same song the Pilgrim Travelers had had a hit with just five months earlier.

  Art argued against it to no avail. Crain and Alexander wouldn’t let go of the fact that it was the number that went over at all of their programs, it was one of the songs that Sam had brought with him from his old group, the Highway QCs. Art said he didn’t give a damn about the Highway QCs, Alex ought to realize they had just sold twenty thousand copies of the song in a heavily promoted package of five Pilgrim Travelers singles that had been released the previous October.

  “You will think that we have gone crazy,” Specialty had announced at the time in a publicity release that detailed “an arrangement with Randy’s Record Shop of Gallatin, Tennessee to give these five numbers . . . concentrated promotion over a 50,000 Watt Station, WLAC, in Nashville, Tennessee.” WLAC operated on a “clear channel,” with an unimpeded signal enabling it to reach more than half the country at night. Because it sold much of this time to advertisers like Randy’s, which in turn sold its own advertising and used the programming to serve a huge mail-order business, this was perhaps the single forum on which rhythm and blues and gospel records could get national exposure, similar to the Grand Ole Opry’s more conventional outreach to country music fans on Nashville’s other fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel station, WSM.

  Rupe’s unconventional strategy had worked, selling nearly 115,000 copies of the five simultaneously released records and vali
dating his promise that they all had a “profit pedigree.” How much more profit was to be mined from any of the songs, let alone “Jesus Gave Me Water,” which had already seen competing versions by Clara Ward and the Ward Singers and the Famous Blue Jays as well? Crain and Alex were adamant, though, that he should at least give Sam’s version a chance. And in the end he relented.

  From the very first notes, as Sam’s tenor wafts over the Soul Stirrers’ repeated background chant, it is obvious that he is singing with a confidence and flair that have not appeared so unambiguously until now. With the introduction of the narrative itself, as the first verse kicks in behind the chorus, it is equally obvious that here is something completely different from the Pilgrim Travelers’ funereal presentation, that Sam is here to tell a joyful story, that he will relate the entire text of the Bible tale in three richly diversified verses and four choruses—and all in the same length of time it took the Travelers to complete the single verse and chorus that made up their record. The brisk, almost dancing vocal arrangement gives free rein to the most flexible and playful elements of Sam’s voice, and the melisma that Rupe sought to encourage in all his singers here is used to draw out the story line in much the same way that the insertion of additional adjectives into the basic text (“Living, loving, lasting water”) postpones resolution to bring home the point. Several times in the course of the song, Sam fully develops that lilting manner of teasing out the melody that he has only experimented with before, elongating the pronunciation of the central element of the story until it becomes a kind of patented ululation (“wa-a-a-a-a-ter”) that occupies the listener’s attention in a manner that becomes its own text. There are moments in the performance in which there is evidence of strain—there are a lot of words, Sam has a lengthy story to tell, and he becomes breathless and a little hoarse here and there. But all in all it is a bravura piece, a startlingly bold performance from the fresh-faced twenty-year-old, and it was clear that for all his doubts Art Rupe was finally won over. Only two takes of the song (with one second’s time difference between them) were necessary to get it right, and there was little question, in Rupe’s or Roy Crain’s or anyone else’s mind, what the next Soul Stirrers single was going to be.

  The rest of the session was anticlimactic for the producer. The group did a couple of takes of “He’s My Rock,” a showpiece for Paul Foster, but Art didn’t see any commercial potential in it, and he dismissed “How Far Am I From Canaan?,” the song Sam was proudest of, the one he had learned from Reverend Brewster in Memphis, as lacking the kind of unrestrained spirit or drive that he was looking for from all of his spiritual singers. “Put all the showmanship that you can in your voices,” he wrote to one of his gospel groups. “SING LIKE YOU ARE IN A BATTLE WITH THE BLIND BOYS, THE SPIRITS, AND THE PILGRIM TRAVELERS, and you are following them and they have done such a good job that they already tore the building down, and it looks like you all can’t do much more. Then you all come on and really shout and make everybody happier and make the old sisters fall out and REALLY TEAR DOWN THE BUILDING!!! NOW, THAT’S THE WAY YOU MUST SING ON THESE RECORDS!”

  Sam, in contrast, sang the familiar Brewster number with an ease that set the song apart, with even more of the casual insouciance that he had brought to “Jesus Gave Me Water”—but it ran to nearly three minutes, too long by Rupe’s exacting standards, and the producer clearly did not recognize the intensity that was imparted by the very effortlessness of its performance. For the first time the seductiveness of Sam’s voice is showcased—it is a truly masterful performance replete with all of his most accomplished vocal curlicues and embellishments—but Rupe never seriously considered it for release. Still, even as they ran out of time on yet another demonstration of the kid’s peculiar inclination toward melodic delicacy and fancy filigree, and on a number (“Christ Is All”) that Art almost certainly felt the Harris-led Soul Stirrers had done stronger and better at their last session, he and everyone present had reason to feel proud and optimistic about the future. In the face of the most daunting adversity, as even Rupe himself would have had to admit, young Sam Cook had come through.

  IT HAD NOT ALWAYS SEEMED so certain, even to Crain and Alexander, Sam’s staunchest supporters. Crain in fact had had his gravest moments of doubt when the Soul Stirrers and the Pilgrim Travelers had played their first few dates together, starting in Pine Bluff in early December. Alexander’s quartet was one of the most flamboyant groups on the road, self-described “Texas cowboys” who, in J.W.’s own words, would stop at nothing to get the crowd: “We’d jump off the stage and run up the aisles, we got to moving and people got to shouting [while] the Stirrers would stand and put one hand in their bosom and just sing.” The Travelers had two superlative lead singers, Kylo Turner and Keith Barber—the first could mesmerize an audience like Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots while bending his notes with all the intricacy of R.H. Harris; his cousin, Barber, could scream with the best of them. And the two of them together could always be counted on to wreck the house.

  The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi were on the same bill, and while the Highway QCs had generally managed to hold their own against the Blind Boys when the two groups were just starting out, the Blind Boys’ lead singer, Archie Brownlee, probably the most intense of all the screamers, had come a long way since then. “You could stand next to Archie onstage,” J.W. Alexander said, “and he could shake you.” The Blind Boys’ other lead singer, Reverend Percell Perkins, who functioned as their sighted manager, was a screamer, too, and, according to Crain, “Perkins could make Archie jump offstage quicker than the boys could see.” With their latest release, “Our Father,” the kind of hit the crowd started calling for even before they reached the stage, the Blind Boys were a force to be reckoned with, and their entrance alone, with the five of them trudging down the aisle, each with his hand on the next one’s shoulder amidst a mounting crescendo of screams from the audience, was pure theater in and of itself.

  “In Pine Bluff, Archie and Turner and them Travelers just [tore] the house down,” Crain always liked to recount, as if it were a treaty-signing ceremony that he was recalling at which the Stirrers, like Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, were forced to admit defeat. “We sang ‘Jesus Gave Me Water’ and ‘How Far Am I From Canaan?,’ but they just whipped us about the ears. They was glad to get back at us, because we was tumbling on them when Harris was there.” It didn’t stop with the end of the program, though. Both of Alexander’s lead singers and the Five Blind Boys stayed on Sam, ragging him as a “lightweight” and calling him “the rookie.” Percell Perkins even went so far as to say, “Boy, don’t you try to holler with us, we gonna lay the wood on you,” and Crain was so disturbed that he went to Alexander and asked if he had made a mistake. Alex just looked at him gravely and shook his head. “Crain, I like him,” he said, “and if you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to him.”

  So he took Sam aside and told him not to pay those fellows any mind—they were just jealous of the way the young girls had flocked around him after the program. “You don’t have to holler with those guys,” he said. “Just be sure you’re singing loud enough for the people to hear you—and then be certain they can understand you.” It was all, J.W. said, about getting your message across. And Sam accepted it. “He soaked it up like a sponge. Because [he could see] that I was not a screamer, but I could come up behind the screamer and always get the house.” That, said J.W., with his calm, imperturbable manner, was what Sam, too, would be able to do. He simply had to be patient.

  But it was at times an extraordinarily painful process. Every night, it seemed, he faced the same humiliation. The Blind Boys and the Travelers killed him. No matter what he did or how hard he tried, they showed little compassion for his youth onstage, even as they warmed up to him in the midst of all the camaraderie, hardship, joy, danger, and outright prejudice that they inevitably shared offstage. “Archie could make an audience cry,” said another young singer just coming up in that world. “I mean, the whole place would be sh
outing and falling out, and he would tell Sam, ‘See, that old pretty shit you doing ain’t about nothing.’” Sam took it even more to heart because Archie was the only singer out there who could make him cry. Archie made him look bad—and the audience kept on calling for Harris. It was “devastating,” Sam told a friend, to have to get up onstage when he knew the people didn’t want him. It challenged his very belief in himself.

  But he persevered. He gave no thought to quitting, as Alex and Crain continued to reassure him, and Crain coached him patiently day after day. It was Crain’s gift, as he saw it, to train singers—he didn’t have the voice to lead himself, but he had trained Harris to fit into the Soul Stirrers’ system, and now he was determined to train Sam. “It might seem a little braggy-like, but it’s no brag. S.R. Crain could see something in singers,” he declared self-referentially. “It wasn’t a matter of me fitting into Sam’s life, it was a matter of Sam fitting into mine. Of course he was a good learner in every respect. He kept an armful of books. [Whatever you tried to teach him] he could learn.”

  Some of the other Stirrers were more dubious. In fact, with the exception of R.B. Robinson, who had so effectively trained the QCs himself, they were almost as doubtful at first as the Blind Boys and the Pilgrim Travelers. Some ten to twenty years older than their new lead singer, they cast a baleful eye on both his youth and what they viewed as his stylistic immaturity. “Sam started as a bad imitation of Harris,” commented J.J. Farley, the baritone singer from Crain’s hometown of Trinity, Texas, who had joined the group in 1936. And even Paul Foster, the thirty-year-old second lead who fully recognized that the group needed a “seller” out front, worried at first that Sam didn’t have either the weight or rhythmic intensity of Harris. “‘Jesus Gave Me Water’—that’s easy. You can sing that without even perspiring. [But] you get up there and sing ‘By and By,’ you got to work that number to get something out of it, because there ain’t nothing in there to sell. ‘Peace in the Valley,’ ‘Love the Lord,’ all those hard gospel numbers—you got to lay off them [sometimes] because you can hurt your own self.” Sam, as Foster saw it, was too inclined to lay off. Paul would be looking to Sam to lift him, just like Harris always had, and Sam would just try to turn it back over to him. “I was slow, draggy, I had the voice, but I wasn’t in no hurry until I could see I had it to do. Sam would say, ‘Come on, help me, man, we’re going to get in the house.’ I said, ‘I done give it up. You go on in it.’ He’d keep working, and he’d keep begging me. [But] if I didn’t want to do it, I wouldn’t do it.” Gradually, though, they worked out an accommodation, and Paul came to see that Sam had the potential to be even better than Harris at selling, if he could just absorb some of the lessons that Crain, not to mention Archie and the rest of them, was teaching him.