Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Read online

  It was a time of expansive plans and heady optimism, in which J.W. Alexander, less of a skeptic perhaps than Art, foresaw a day when gospel would be promoted just like pop. In fact, he felt, you could already see it beginning to happen, with Mahalia’s popularity reaching into new areas every day and the wedding that summer of flamboyant gospel shouter and guitar player Sister Rosetta Tharpe attracting a crowd of twenty thousand at Griffith Stadium, home of the American League Washington Senators, where tickets were sold at prices of up to $2.50 and the turnout far outdrew the Senators’ usual attendance.

  It was, as many in the community saw it, part of a too-long-delayed recognition of Afro-American culture, with downhome blues emerging as a potent sales force, hailed self-consciously in another Defender article as “a part of our American heritage . . . that we should be proud, not ashamed, of,” and John Lee Hooker, one of the subjects of the story, “personif[ying] a way of life familiar to many of our older citizens who have migrated from the south.”

  And yet even as that way of life was being recognized, it was being overtaken, too, by the arrival of a new kind of music that incorporated elements of both blues and gospel and that had only recently been dubbed “rhythm and blues” by Billboard correspondent Jerry Wexler, who introduced the new nomenclature as “more appropriate to more enlightened times” and would join Atlantic Records to produce some of the best new rhythm and blues records not long afterward. The music itself eschewed the sophisticated voicings of Lucky Millinder’s and Billy Eckstine’s big bands, while at the same time sidestepping both the sly hepness of Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five and the directness of John Lee Hooker’s and Muddy Waters’ blues. It was all about emotion, just like gospel music, but in the case of groups like the Orioles and the Dominoes, whose second single, “Sixty-Minute Man,” topped the rhythm and blues charts all that summer, it was a quivering kind of emotion that combined sexual explicitness with unabashed declarations of romantic love. Gospel-trained voices like those of the Orioles’ Sonny Til and the Dominoes’ arresting falsetto lead, Clyde McPhatter, suggested a different kind of ecstasy than anything they had sung about in church, one that the quartet singers might well identify with but could never publicly admit. More and more, the new music infiltrated their world, and the visible rewards which its more worldly practitioners so often enjoyed were all around them, mocking the meager “offerings” that they took from their programs.

  THE SOUL STIRRERS’ SECOND SINGLE from the March 1951 session, “Come, Let Us Go Back to God,” and “Joy, Joy to My Soul,” which Art issued at Crain’s recommendation at the beginning of October (“The public is crazy about them,” Crain wrote in advocating the release of the two titles), didn’t sell anywhere near as well as their unexpected hit, but it was a measure of Crain’s new standing with his employer that Art took the recommendation seriously, and it gave the Stirrers a nice point of contemporary reference in their programs.

  By the time that Art saw the group again for their next session at the end of February 1952, he was astonished at the improvement the young man had made under Crain’s guidance in just one year. However confident he may now have been of Sam’s talent, though, not to mention the Stirrers’ surprising burst of popularity, he did not trust either one enough to allow the group to explore the intimate sound they had experimented with behind Sam’s quiet lead toward the end of their last session. In fact, in a bow to the kind of “modernization” that had contributed to the success of the Five Blind Boys and many of the other acts on black Houston nightclub owner Don Robey’s Peacock label, Art added drums after the first two takes of the first number, the chief effect being to coarsen the group’s careful harmonic blend along with an occasional rushing of the beat. Sam contributed one original, “Just Another Day,” a pretty melody on which he and Paul traded increasingly insistent verses, and then, after a couple of indifferent numbers, they revisited “How Far am I From Canaan?,” the W. H. Brewster composition with which Art had been so dissatisfied at their previous session. They got it down to two minutes and forty-seven seconds this time, ten seconds off the previous version, and Art was so enthusiastic about their rehearsal performance of the song that he noted, “Best number that we did today. Three As and a plus!” It probably was the best number they did, along with Sam’s original, but it somehow missed the mark—it missed the aching sense of loss, of lostness, that was the unique center of Sam’s voice. More to the point, it made clear that Art still did not have full confidence in the particular properties of his new lead singer’s appeal, the sinuous, almost sexual nature of his style.

  None of the releases in the first six months of the new year sold especially well. Art rushed out “How Far Am I From Canaan?” within a couple of weeks of the session, but it sold only fourteen thousand copies by July, when sales began to dwindle. It was a matter of relative indifference to the group from a financial point of view. With royalties established contractually at two cents a record, the difference between fifteen thousand and thirty thousand total sales (representing the sum of all Soul Stirrers releases in a quarterly royalty period) was very little, and there was virtually no likelihood of ever having more than $600 to divide among five group members at any given time. Records, in fact, were little more than a means to keep the public’s interest alive—record sales were merely important in order to maintain the record company’s interest and thereby ensure money and promotion for personal appearances. By the end of 1952, the Soul Stirrers had five singles out with Sam singing lead (Art released Sam’s composition “Just Another Day” in late August, and it sold somewhat better than “How Far Am I From Canaan?”), but it was still “Jesus Gave Me Water” that audiences called for every time.

  Art meanwhile had discovered a new market whose potential he had suspected from the day he first went into the music business but whose existence no one had ever been able to actually verify until now. With New Orleans-born Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” Specialty Records had the first bona fide industry-wide crossover hit.

  RUPE HAD SET OUT FOR NEW ORLEANS in March of 1952, some two weeks after the Soul Stirrers’ session, not with the idea of crossover success but in hopes of discovering an artist who could match twenty-four-year-old New Orleans piano player Fats Domino’s notable record of commercial success—and thoroughly disarming musical charm—in the r&b market. He set up a series of auditions at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studio on North Rampart Street, where Fats had recorded all of his regional and national hits, but after a week in which nearly every one of the singers sounded to Rupe “amateurish and quite poor,” he was about to give up when this “young fellow showed up just as I was getting ready to leave.”

  The young fellow was twenty-year-old Lloyd Price, and he had heard about the audition through Fats’ bandleader, Dave Bartholomew. He practically had to beg Rupe to listen to his song (“I thought he was going to cry when . . . I told him it was time for me to go”), but when Art heard it, he was knocked out by both the song, which the boy called “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” after a Maxwell House Coffee commercial that local DJ Okey Dokey had put together in his style of rhyming patter (“Lawdy, Miss Clawdy, drink Maxwell House Coffee and eat Mother’s homemade pies!”), and its delivery. “It was,” Rupe recalled, “very emotional, very fervent.” It also had a freshness, a kind of optimistic vulnerability that was reminiscent both of gospel music and of B.B. King’s new gospel-influenced blues. At the same time, though, it possessed a flair that, it seemed evident, no one but this kid, with his engaging manner and wide, open grin, could put across.

  Art quickly organized a session, using Dave Bartholomew as the leader plus the core of the Fats Domino band, with Fats himself laying down those immediately recognizable rolling piano triplets that had established his style. They recorded three additional titles, but “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” was clearly the one, and Art released it without a lot of fanfare a month and a half after the New Orleans session. It entered the r&b charts on May 17 and stayed there for much of the remainder o
f the year, occupying the number-one spot for seven weeks in the summer of 1952 and becoming Specialty’s first bona fide million-seller without any official acknowledgment in the pop marketplace. But it was white under-the-counter sales that raised it from the status of just another “race records” hit.

  “The white retail shops began to carry it because market demand dictates where the product goes,” Rupe summed up years later with the irrefutable logic of the financial analyst. In fact, one of the biggest obstacles to getting the kind of sales for a gospel or rhythm and blues hit that a pop record could achieve was the very absence of conventional retail outlets. Race records promotion was still based primarily on word of mouth within the community, and merchandise was sold at least as often at barbershops, shoe-shine parlors, and taxi stands as at the kind of record store where you might be able to find a wide variety of choices carefully set out in neatly ordered bins.

  The widespread growth of radio, increased teenage buying power after the war, and changing social and racial mores were suddenly beginning to affect record-buying habits, particularly in the white community, something that was not lost on the independent labels that operated on the margins of the business. “As far as we can determine,” wrote Atlantic Records executives Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun in Cash Box in 1954, “the first area where the blues stepped out . . . was the South. Distributors there about two years ago began to report that white high school and college kids were picking up on the rhythm and blues records—primarily to dance to—[and] conservative old line . . . record stores in southern cities found themselves compelled to stock, display, and push rhythm and blues recordings.” They went on to cite numerous examples of this trend which had “swept the rhythm and blues markets and [gone] on to become favorites with many, many young white record fans,” and “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” appropriately—from the standpoint of both chronology and sales—led the list.

  The percentage of white teenagers in this new consumers’ pool was impossible to calculate precisely, but there was no question they were present in ever-increasing numbers, and from this point on, Art Rupe’s attention would turn more and more not so much to reaching them directly as to providing the kind of rhythm and blues with a gospel tinge that was susceptible to crossover success. It was not that he lost his love for pure gospel music—he saw the new hybrid in fact as something of an adulterated derivative, and if it came down to personal taste, there was little question of which he would prefer. But there was equally little question which, as a businessman, he felt it incumbent on him to pursue.

  THE COOK FAMILY SHOWED UP en masse when the Stirrers played Detroit. There was a family group on the program called the United Five, made up of two sisters and three brothers, the youngest of whom was fourteen. Twenty-one-year-old Mable John thought nobody could beat her baby brother, who was known as “Little” Willie John because of his impish face and diminutive stature. Willie could really “sell,” to the young girls and older women alike—the older women would take their hats off sometimes, those big wide hats that Mahalia used to wear, and throw them at his feet. But Sam, she soon realized, was at least his equal, as much for his cool demeanor and his refusal to enter into the common fray as for his undeniable gifts.

  “It didn’t matter who he was up against,” Mable said, “because he didn’t do it as a competitor. All these Baptist sisters would sit down at the front, and they would scream. We would laugh at them because we were kids, but they were serious. They would yell things like, ‘Sing, honey. Sing, child,’ and I often wondered what was going on in some of their minds. Maybe I didn’t need to know. But you know what? Sam never allowed it to distract him. If he saw he had your attention, he could sing directly to you and almost be whispering. And when he got through, you would feel that he was talking to no one else in the room but you. [But then] the whole building would go up in smoke!”

  Sam was so excited driving his family back to Chicago that he kept turning around to tell his sixteen-and-a-half-year-old sister Agnes stories until, finally, she had to tell him that if he turned around one more time, she would never ride with him again. What irritated Agnes even more was the way he continued to try to protect her, as if she were still twelve years old rather than the mother of a one-year-old child herself. Not only did he insist on keeping her away from all the other singers on the program, he kept her away from his own group as well. It was as if he thought she was going to embarrass him in public, even though he would have said that he was just doing it for her own good, she didn’t know these guys like he did.

  To ten-year-old David it was just exciting to see his brother onstage, especially “when he would get into a song and the people started shouting. Everybody loved Sam—he was a lot of fun, always telling jokes and making people laugh. I remember when he used to come off the road we would sleep together [in the same bedroom], and he would wake up in the middle of the night and start humming a tune and then write it down—and I would get peeved sometimes, because I had to go to school the next day. He always exuded confidence. I really admired that. And he was a very good artist, too. He drew all the time.”

  Sam’s older brother Charles started going out on the road with the group around this time. Twenty-five years old, an army vet, and an independent operator who had added drugs and women to his portfolio of convertible assets, he cut a dapper figure, with his draped suits, carefully trimmed mustache, and elaborate process, and the other Stirrers were glad to have him as their driver. Charles for his part found that he loved the road, and he was as mesmerized as everyone else by his brother’s accelerating poise and self-assurance. Sam had grown up with them all, he looked like they did, he even sounded like they did (Papa said it was the “Cook sound” that made him), but for all of the undeniable family resemblance, there was simply no telling where Sam’s compelling power came from.

  Unlike Sam, Charles was a good driver. “They was glad I was along, because they could relax, and I could do the driving while they slept. And they had a big fine car, so that was right up my alley. We stayed in these little small hotels—maybe twelve, fifteen rooms. This one man in Texas built a place up over his garage just for the Soul Stirrers, and his wife cooked for us and everything. Sometimes they had [other] special places for us to eat. This was all new to me, but it wasn’t new to them. They had traveled this road before. I remember we went back to Clarksdale, we played all different places [with] the Blind Boys and the Pilgrim Travelers—but when they announce the Soul Stirrers, Sam would be standing at the back of the church, and they’d come down the aisle, and, man, people would just start in to shouting when they’d start singing their theme song. The house would almost come down then, just by them walking in. Them young girls, man. It was quite a scene when Sam would get to town.”

  IN AUGUST REVEREND AND MRS. COOK, Sam, Charles, L.C., and Sam and L.C.’s closest friend, Duck (Leroy Hoskins), all set out for Los Angeles to attend the National Interdenominational Singers Alliance, an umbrella organization virtually interchangeable with the National Quartet Convention. L.C. and Duck rode with the elder Cooks; Charles drove Stirrers’ utility singer R.B. Robinson and his family; Lou Rawls, whom L.C. had now joined in the Holy Wonders (sponsored by the Quartet Convention to attend the Alliance festivities), drove out with Farley, the Soul Stirrers’ bass singer, while Sam rode with Crain and the rest of the group. The convention took place at the famed St. Paul Baptist Church at Forty-ninth and Main, where Professor J. Earle Hines, widely credited with having brought gospel music to L.A., served as music director, and the morning service was broadcast by Joe Adams, the Mayor of Melody, over KOWL. It was Reverend and Mrs. Cook’s first trip to California, and they planned to combine it with the annual Church of Christ (Holiness) convention a few days later. Five thousand singers from all over the country were expected to attend, announced the Los Angeles Sentinel, and the Soul Stirrers and Pilgrim Travelers were featured, along with two of the founders of the National Quartet Convention, the Famous Blue Jays and R.H. Harris w
ith his Christland Singers, on the program that kicked off the festivities.

  It was the “nationally known” Soul Stirrers who were pictured with the news item in a recent publicity photograph that showed them grouped in three rising pairs around a mike. Sam is left front beside a bespectacled Paul Foster. His hair is longish and lightly processed, his mustache still not fully grown in, and he has the same half smile as all the other Stirrers save for Crain, whose immaculate center part is his most distinctive feature and whose broad lips are tightly pursed while still conveying a kindly expression. They are all wearing light-colored, lightly patterned suits with broad lapels, each with a white handkerchief and a striped tie with a boldly colored vertical pattern that appears almost to be licking at the stripes. They look like stars, and to nineteen-year-old Lou Rawls, who had “never been out of Chicago in my life, it was overwhelming. It was a church full of egos—I mean, this was the elite. I knew who they all were, I had seen them all in Chicago at one time or another, but to be in the same place with all of them at the same time. And Sam was the new kid on the block, he was something they’d [never] heard.”