Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Read online

  One of the most likeable things about him, said Blind Boys lead singer Clarence Fountain, was that he was the same with everyone, young, old, sighted, blind. “He was an all right cat, he had a good, solid mind, and he could just stop and read you a book. He’d ride with us all the time, and he’d read us westerns and things of that nature, and he could almost put you there, right back in the same time when the book was wrote and how things were going on—he had a good eye for reading, a good eye for everything. See, he liked the Blind Boys. We was all right with him. He didn’t mind taking you to the bathroom, doing things with blind people that a lot of people don’t like to do. Sam was all right when he was all right.”

  As far as Sam’s singing went, Clarence took the only slightly grudging view that he was improving all the time. “He learned how to sing because he had to come out of all these holes. We’d get on that stage, and we’d put something on him, and he knew he had to come out from under that—to be good you had to come out and beat the other man.” Sam had sufficient power, Fields conceded, to put a number across, but his greatest strength was his ability “to make up a song as he was singing along. He just put verses in, and it come out right. Hey, that was my boy. I loved him, because he was a lovable guy. We run across the same girls sometimes, ’cause I was just as good as he was in that day. He had good records going, we had good records going.” It could be, in its own way, a little bit like the Wild West out there, with showdowns every night and sometimes even violent confrontations. One night after the program, Johnny Fields recalled, they were all sitting in the restaurant on the ground floor of the town’s only colored hotel, “and this guy come in off the street and saw Sam and started a whole lot of talking about, ‘Hey, man, you think you more than everybody else. You mess with all our women, and we’re gonna fix you.’” At this point, R.B. Robinson and one of the other Soul Stirrers slipped out the back, “and they went upstairs and come back to the head of the steps. Each one had a gun in his hands and tell the guy, ‘Look up. Look up. Look up here.’ The guy looked up, and he cut out. But that type of thing, that type of jealousy—the group was his group, man, they got a little conflict and there was a lot of conflict!”

  The Gospelcade reached the West Coast just around the same time as Lloyd Price’s scheduled June 27 session at Universal Recorders in Hollywood. Art Rupe had been telling Lloyd about Sam for over a year, he kept saying that the two of them had a lot in common and ought to meet. “So I made a point of it,” Lloyd said, “and we started talking right there in the [Specialty] office, and I liked Sam right away, that big smile, ‘Hey, welcome, man’—but I hadn’t seen him perform.”

  Lloyd went out to the program in San Jose that weekend, and his eyes were opened. Unlike the Blind Boys, he had no reservations whatsoever about Sam’s talent; in fact, he was thunderstruck by the cool confidence and seemingly effortless charm with which he carried off his performance. “I had never seen nothing like it! I mean, I was the hottest thing in the country, I thought I was the only lightning on the road, and here was this handsome, good-looking young guy, he just stood there and sung, that’s all he did, and that’s all he had to do—and he rocked them, he just rocked them.”

  Lloyd, who himself had a well-deserved reputation as a “big playboy,” recognized immediately in Sam a kindred, if considerably quieter, spirit. He could certainly understand Sam’s appeal. He was personable, persuasive, “had that big, bright smile and laugh,” he conveyed gentlemanliness and “genuineness” with every fiber of his being.

  After the program, they talked some more, about show business, about Mr. Rupe, about the hazards of travel in the South, they talked about all kinds of things—“I told him about this girl in Fresno, she came to one of my dances, and I took her to breakfast, and we started meeting. I told Sam she was a nice girl, and when he got to Fresno he should meet her. And I told her she should meet Sam.” Her name was Dolores Mohawk, and she was his girlfriend, Lloyd explained, but she was his Fresno girlfriend, which didn’t require explanation for any other entertainer on the road.

  The Gospelcade played Fresno the following Sunday, July 5, and Sam didn’t have to look for Dolores when he got there: she was at the program, and she introduced herself to Sam.

  Dolores Mohawk was born Dolores Milligan in Lubbock, Texas. She was twenty-two, just a few months older than Sam, and, like him, raised in the Holiness church. She moved to Fresno with her family as a teenager and had a child by a Mexican boyfriend at seventeen. She left her child to be raised by an aunt and pursued a career as an entertainer, singing Dinah Washington material with the local Kirk Kirkland Quintet, obviously drawn to the life. Which was how she had come to meet Lloyd. “I didn’t know she was a singer. I didn’t even know she had a son—you got to understand that on the road you don’t ask those questions, and ladies never tell. They just meet you. I just knew she was a very serious person and wanted to perhaps get married or something like that, but at that time I was not interested. I was fresh out of Louisiana and flying high.”

  Sam obviously was interested. He was at least heavily smitten and asked Crain’s permission to stay with Dolores that night as the other Stirrers moved on to Bakersfield. Crain had his misgivings, and J.W. Alexander, who knew Dolores by reputation, felt strongly that the Stirrers’ manager should have acted on them, but the girl promised to get Sam to the Bakersfield program on time, and, as Crain told biographer Dan Wolff, “She was a pretty girl. If it was me, I’d sure want to go. [So] I put myself in his stead, and I relented.”

  That was how Sam fell in love. Two weeks was all it took. As Lloyd Price said, “I was kind of shocked on the one hand—but, on the other hand, Sam got a nice girl. She was a very, very nice girl. And I always respected Sam, so I figured she was absolutely in good hands.” The surprise to Lloyd was not so much that the two of them should have hit it off (he would have bet on that) but that Sam, whom he took to be a brother in the chase, should have been caught so easily by the snares of love.

  Barbara, meanwhile, had had her baby, a beautiful little girl, eight pounds at birth, whom she named Linda Marie, the middle name the same as her mother’s. She continued to live with her mother and stepfather for a while, sharing a room with her mother’s mother, Grandma Beck—but she grew tired of all their rules and strictures, most of all she grew tired of what she came to see as her mother Mamie’s hypocrisy. Here was a woman, blond-haired, blue-eyed, who had carried on all kinds of affairs, married four times, and passed for white much of her life—and she was trying to tell her what to do. So she went off with her boyfriend Clarence again once he got out of jail. He took care of her, he made very few demands of her, in the end he even married her just to give the baby legitimacy, though Barbara never took Clarence’s last name, and the baby kept the name “Campbell,” too. Clarence truly loved her, he proved it in every way, he even claimed the baby as his own, going around to the old neighborhood and showing her off, saying, “Look at my baby, ain’t she cute?” even though everybody knew she wasn’t his. Clarence educated her, he gave her the life she wanted, and he was no hypocrite, either. He and the people he did business with were principled, moral people who lived by their own code—everyone knew the code, but if you stepped outside it, look out, you were a dead man! She thought of him as her brother, her husband, her friend—but she could never think of him as her lover, and then he had to go back to jail, and the baby got sick with bronchial pneumonia and had to stay in the hospital for three weeks while Barbara worked two jobs just to try to support herself and her child in the world.

  She never heard from Sam during this time, but she never stopped thinking about him either, and sometimes she thought about the one time he had made oblique reference to getting married before she had even gotten pregnant, talking about it as if it were a theoretical “what if?” question that scarcely demanded—and certainly didn’t get—a response. Maybe that was why when she thought of his coming back, she imagined riding off with him on a white palomino, like that made-up
story of Sleeping Beauty and her prince. In her heart she knew she still loved him, but she no longer knew what that love was based on. She didn’t understand what had happened any more than she understood him—or herself.

  Dolores Mohawk kept her promise to Crain and made sure that Sam arrived in plenty of time for the rest of the California programs and for the July 10 recording session for which the group briefly broke its tour.

  The session was once again of a somewhat experimental nature, though it would be difficult to say what was the source, or even the point exactly, of that experimentation. The Stirrers for once did not come in well prepared, and their lack of fresh material was probably the principal reason for the truncated length of the session, which produced only four complete tracks, as opposed, for example, to the eleven at Sam’s first Soul Stirrers date. Other than lack of material, the most pronounced difference was the substitution of Hawaiian steel guitar for the piano and organ of the previous session, or the a cappella approach which the group still took in live performance. Its most interesting utilization came on the first, and only issued, number, “Come and Go to That Land,” where the soaring lines of the out-of-tune guitar played off in oddly dissonant harmonies with the floating freedom of Sam’s new, almost scatting style. The words “go,” “peace,” “find,” and even “joy” were all occasions for his syllable-lengthening yodel, with evidently spontaneous interpolations recurring effortlessly, and enchantingly, at the same point in each take. Art was drawn in enough by the sound to create a “composite take” in which the guitar was virtually silenced by an overdubbed bass and drums, and the gentle swing of Sam’s voice was undercut, and overpowered, by a speeded-up, more predictably accented beat.

  Otherwise Rupe was obviously not very taken either with the steel guitar player, who might as well have wandered in off the street, or with any of the other material. He must have been left, in fact, with something of a queasy feeling about a group he had always considered as meticulous in their preparation as he was himself, a group that he saw as “a basketball team [who] when they throw a note, someone will be there to respond to it. [It was] a beautiful thing the way they worked, even when they sang songs that weren’t interesting or didn’t sell, they had it really polished.” He had always been able to handle Crain, but now, as Sam seemed to be taking on more and more of the lead role, he found the group increasingly unpredictable, and he found it increasingly difficult to sell them in the contemporary market.

  Which was particularly frustrating because he knew the gospel sound was in the air. You couldn’t miss it: it was everywhere. Not just in the sales that Specialty was chalking up with the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, and the sales expectation he had for Alex Bradford, whom he had recorded for the first time just three weeks earlier, but on the r&b charts, where both Sonny Til and the Orioles’ “Crying in the Chapel” and Faye Adams’ “Shake a Hand,” two undisguisedly gospel-based numbers, established themselves in August and alternated at the number-one spot for fifteen weeks before eventually relinquishing it to the Drifters’ “Money Honey” sung in the purest of falsettos by their gospel-trained lead, Clyde McPhatter. As Billboard would comment in somewhat wonderstruck fashion in the aftermath of this gospel-driven success, “‘Shake a Hand,’ a common greeting among followers of spiritual and gospel music, is being uttered more so today by other facets of the entertainment industry largely because the religious field continues to gain recognition as a growing bonanza.” At the same time, the story went on, without bothering to point out that the expression “Shake a hand” had been popularized by a secular, not a religious, recording, spiritual record sales were actually suffering because “religious platters are not the fast moving items that r&b wax is.” How to resolve that discrepancy between substance and style was the dilemma not just of Art Rupe but of every independent label owner, and of the music industry at large, and more and more Rupe, in conjunction with J.W. Alexander, was wondering if crossover sales were not the only answer.

  In any case, he put out just one more release by the Soul Stirrers for the rest of the year, with both sides stemming from the February session and neither capturing the attention of either the spiritual or the crossover audience. The Stirrers and the Travelers remained on the road almost constantly, with Herald Attractions reporting a year-end gross of $100,000 for the Travelers (on a reported 173 dates) and $78,000 for the Stirrers versus an astounding return of $130,000 for the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi’s forty weeks on the road. Even the Five Blind Boys, though, as earthshaking as their presence could be, were unable, according to Durham, North Carolina, gospel DJ Jimmy “Early” Byrd, to create the effect that Sam now had on his audience. “He had a little aura about him. He was better, dressed sharper than the other guys and had bigger fan response. Sam was the only guy whose voice would sound like an instrument, he made it sweet like nobody had before, and he was so pretty, and so dynamic, that he would mesmerize the women, women would faint, actually fall out, when he would walk down the aisle.”

  Byrd knew whereof he spoke, because “I’m a pretty boy, too, we used to date the same broads. See, every quartet in every town, they have a book—like the athletes do. You know who the quartet Janes are, and we had a list. So Sam would come to my town, he’d say, ‘Man, I want some snow and some shoveling coal’—you know, ‘snow’ means a white girl, we’d sneak them in the back—and sometimes we’d get two at a time and have orgies, man. That’s how close we were.”

  THAT WAS WHY it came as such a shock to nearly everyone of his acquaintance when Sam married Dolores (“Dee Dee”) in October. Not even L.C., or anyone else in the Cook family, was prepared for it. “Yeah, we were surprised,” said L.C. “Sam had a school of girls. We didn’t think Sam was going to marry nobody, especially not that quick.” The elder Cooks, still in Cleveland with twelve-year-old David, did not choose to attend the wedding, which took place in Chicago on October 19 after Dolores and her little boy rode the train out from the Coast. Geography did not appear to be the operative factor, since none of the other Cooks attended the ceremony, either. It was, in the view of Reverend and Mrs. Cook, just as it had always been with Barbara: this woman who had set her snares for Sam was simply not good enough for their son.

  For Barbara, of course, it was the greatest shock of all. It hurt her deeply, altogether destroying whatever illusions she had been able to preserve. It undoubtedly hurt eighteen-year-old Marine Somerville in Cleveland, too, who had delivered her baby, Denise, on April 23, just two days before Linda was born. And it probably struck a chord with Evelyn Hicks, another of Sam’s Chicago girlfriends, who had had her daughter, Paula, a couple of weeks before that. But it was Barbara who had put her faith in Sam, it was Barbara who had believed him when he said he didn’t want to settle down or make a family life because he was trying to make a career for himself. It was Barbara who now had to rethink not just her life but her dreams.

  Sam, Dolores, and her son, Joey.

  Courtesy of Specialty Records

  Sam moved out of the old neighborhood for the first time with his new wife and family, into the basement apartment in Soul Stirrers baritone R.B. Robinson’s building at 6505 Langley. R.B.’s wife, Dora, with a five-year-old of her own, soon befriended Dee Dee. “Sam was a man about town and the women did like him,” she told writer Daniel Wolff. “I always tried to comfort her, if there was any comforting to be done.”

  Barbara brought the baby over one time at Sam’s request so that he could see her. She didn’t really know how to respond when Sam’s wife said how pretty Linda was, that she looked just like Sam, and that she, Dee Dee, wished she could have some children by Sam herself. “I said, ‘Well, you got a boy, you got a son—you know, that’s his stepfather. I guess I’ll let you have some more.’ And that was it. I had a long conversation with her, and I told her that I was gonna go on and live my life. And I would never interfere or interrupt her marriage—she never had to worry about me, is what I wanted to say. [Because] if I couldn’t be the one
, I certainly wasn’t going to be the second lady.” But what Sam thought neither Barbara nor anyone else had any idea. As in so many other matters, he simply maintained an inscrutably cheerful and impenetrable calm which, for all they knew, might merely have masked the simple fact that it was all as much a mystery to him as it was to them.

  JUNE CHEEKS’ ARRIVAL in late 1953 kicked the Soul Stirrers and Sam into high gear. Cheeks, the electrifying lead singer for the Sensational Nightingales out of Philadelphia by way of the Carolinas, represented an even more flamboyant version of Archie Brownlee’s vocal theatrics combined with the kind of physical routines that, according to gospel historian Tony Heilbut, got him thrown out of some churches. “I was the first,” he told Heilbut, “to run up aisles and shake folks’ hands. Man, I cut the fool so bad, old Archie started saying, ‘Don’t nobody ever give me any trouble but June Cheeks. . . . That’s the baddest nigger on the road.’” Born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, he joined the Gales in 1946 and would stop at nothing to wreck house, but according to Cheeks, there was no money to be made with the Gales, with the nadir occurring at a program in Miami when, after paying their hotel bill, “we wound up with fifty cents apiece. I just went and threw mine as far as it could go into the Atlantic.” The other Gales took a somewhat less charitable view of his departure. “He and his wife got a little bigheaded,” said guitarist JoJo Wallace. “Folks were telling him he was the Nightingales by himself.” So he left them after a program with the Dixie Hummingbirds in Jackson, Mississippi, “he left us there at the hotel and took the car with him!”