Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Read online

  The last two songs of the session, “Be With Me Jesus” and “I’m So Glad (Trouble Don’t Last Always),” were equally well performed but more conventional in approach, with the first, an original by Sam, building on Paul’s preaching exhortations, and the second, a sixteen-bar spiritual also known as “When Death Comes Creeping In Your Room” or “Run, Sinner, Run,” distinguished from its innumerable predecessors primarily by the confident curlicues of Sam’s voice. In fact, what is most remarkable about the entire session is the manner in which Sam takes charge. Even on “Be With Me Jesus,” on which Paul’s robust tenor takes the nominal lead, it is Sam’s voice that deliberately breaks the logjam of emotion that Paul establishes, it is Sam’s unmistakably idiosyncratic, lightly swinging, and graceful style that resolves the tension and takes the song to new and higher ground.

  “Dear Art,” Crain wrote the Specialty label owner a day or two after the session from his new Woodlawn Avenue home in Chicago, “Please release ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ [sic] and ‘Be With Me, Jesus’ right away.” And in a follow-up letter a week later, he added, “I trust that I made a good session. The songs go over big with the audiences wherever we appear. . . . Which one do you think is best? ‘Nearer to Thee’ is a house reaker [sic], SMILE. I set them up with ‘I’m So Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always.’” And he concluded by recommending that “Be With Me Jesus” and “One More River to Cross” should come out “just after the other two sides.”

  As indeed they did. Perhaps sensing a hit, Art followed Crain’s instructions to a T, giving up on their current single, “Any Day Now,” which had failed to sell in any great numbers, and releasing “Nearer to Thee” within two months of the session. It took off immediately, selling almost twenty-five thousand copies in its first three months on the market and forty-three thousand by the end of the year. As per Crain’s suggestion, the label owner followed up with “One More River” in June, while “Nearer to Thee” was still cresting, and it sold twenty-two thousand over the next six months. So the Soul Stirrers found themselves commercially resurrected, surpassing the Pilgrim Travelers for the first time (the Travelers sold a paltry fifty-three thousand records overall for the year), despite the controversy that J.W. deliberately ignited with the use of a saxophone on one of the Travelers’ new releases. But whether their fortunes were waxing or waning, for all of Art’s unambiguous intentions to keep on recording gospel music, neither group could miss the vast gulf that separated success in the gospel world and success in the uncharted land of rhythm and blues.

  “WE COULD SEE how it was affecting us,” said the Pilgrim Travelers’ Jesse Whitaker. “Say there was a club down the street, church up here. You go by the club, you can’t find a parking space. Go up to the church, and you can. We could see it.” It didn’t tempt Whitaker to make a change any more than it tempted Clarence Fountain of the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, because, as Fountain said, “You don’t turn your back on God.” A promise had been made, and it was not one to be easily broken. But neither man failed to recognize the temptations set out along the way, and both acknowledged how natural it was to feel envy for the rewards that others were reaping, for the “big dollar” and “the swimming pool in the backyard” that were held out as enticements merely for singing different words to your song.

  Sam seemed more and more sure of himself and his ground. “He ruled Crain,” Clarence Fountain observed of the power shift that had taken place within the group. Sam was now the unquestioned star, and where the older man might once have instructed, or even reprimanded, his young protégé, he now seemed content to follow wherever Sam chose to go. Which for the most part was fine because, as virtually all of his peers were prepared to admit, Sam’s instincts were good, his character almost unfailingly cheerful, and, whatever circumstances he found himself in, he rarely surrendered his winsome appeal. But as Clarence Fountain pointed out, he didn’t take a backseat to anybody, either. “He always thought highly of himself. He had confidence that he could do as good as anybody.” And Jesse Whitaker certainly recognized, from having been on the road with him for nearly five years now, that he wasn’t all sweetness and light. “He had a temper. Oh, he’d let you know. When somebody would do something to him, or somebody didn’t do something right, you go to the café and [the meal] wasn’t fixed right, boy, he’d get on them.”

  To L.C., on the other hand, out of the army now and with little else to occupy him as he cast about for a musical career of his own, the picture was unclouded, the transformation in his brother’s fortunes complete. “Everybody loved him. Sam said to me, ‘I don’t have to turn out the church [the way Archie Brownlee does], because I am going to sing pretty to them, and my personality and everything are going to get me over.’ And he was right! I would go out on the road with him a lot of times with the Stirrers, and the Blind Boys would be turning out the house. Crain would go get Sam then. ‘Come on, Sammy-o, it’s time for you to walk down the aisle.’ See, Crain was a very shrewd man. And Sam would say, ‘L.C., walk with me,’ and we would walk down that aisle, and the people just forget all about Archie, the Blind Boys would be over—because all the attention goes to Sam. Well, that was Crain’s strategy. And as we walk down the aisle, everybody who touch Sam would be giving him money, people would just put twenty-dollar bills in his hand, and he would pass them right back to me. I said, ‘Don’t go down that aisle too fast now, Sam, wait for me!’ I mean, he could mess up a whole program just by walking in.”

  To J.W. Alexander, observing it all with something more than dispassionate curiosity, “The young girls would scream, the old women would scream. In the churches.” What, J.W. naturally asked himself, if Sam were singing about love?

  BARBARA SCARCELY SAW SAM anymore, her other boyfriend (and husband of convenience) Clarence Mayfield was in jail, and she had taken up with Fred Dennis, a childhood friend of all the Cooks who had grown up in the Lenox Building and whose aunt Edna was Annie Mae Cook’s best friend. Fred, known as “Diddy” (for “Diddy Wah Diddy”) was a “prominent man about town” who owned a pool hall between Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh, sold reefer and cocaine, and had various other business interests on the side. She ran into him one day in a club, and he recognized her right away. “Hey, you’re Sam Cook’s chick,” he said, and she said she had been Sam’s chick, but Sam was married now, and one thing led to another—they had some drinks, they got high, and he told her he was married, that he had two sons and a baby by another girl but that he was separated from his wife and didn’t have a girlfriend now. As she got to know him better, Barbara could see he had money—and he was crazy about her little girl, plus he was living the fast life, to which she was more and more drawn. She knew if she played her cards right, she could go places with Diddy, with the right man, she knew she could really “soar.” So she told him he could support her, but she was going to work for her money so she wouldn’t be obligated to him. Diddy picked up on it right away, he asked her if she could cook and clean. And so she cleaned house for him and cooked him steaks until he asked her to move in, and before long she had dyed her hair blond and was wearing it in a ponytail, just like a movie star. She may not have had Sam, but she was in the life.

  Charles, too, had gotten more and more caught up in the life (“None of us,” L.C. noted with sweeping disregard for civics class-defined virtue, “was following the law strictly”)—but not with the same degree of impunity as Diddy, whom he continued to know as much from his various side ventures as from the pool hall. Charles had found his own way to pay for his dapper look, his slick wardrobe, and his jitterbug life, and with his truculent manner it was perhaps not surprising that he came to the attention of the law and was sentenced to two years in the pen for dealing marijuana.

  Sam, meanwhile, was still ducking and dodging, as Jesse Whitaker saw it. “He was kind of sneaky, had to be careful, with all these girls coming up pregnant.” It was, as Crain said, the price of fame. Once, earlier, J.W. had upbraided Stirrers’ baritone singer R.B. Robinson f
or not protecting Sam better from the snares of his female admirers, but R.B. just chuckled and said, “Well, let him get his head bumped.” But if he did on occasion experience a bump or two, the bumps were scarcely felt, and, as Barbara and the mothers of his other children might have pointed out, they didn’t change his life any, just theirs—and their children’s.

  And yet, like so many other “sudden success” stories of his own and other generations, he returned almost compulsively to the old neighborhood. He sought out old friends and associates, kept track seemingly of everyone he had ever known, and, for the brief moment that he bestowed the focus of his attention on them, made them feel, his brother L.C. observed wonderingly, as if they were the most important person in the world. It was as if he had the sense that he was going somewhere they could never go and, whether out of guilt or obligation, simply didn’t want to leave any of them behind.

  He ran into Lee Richard one time when he was home, and Lee told him some of the QCs had gotten back together—himself, his brother Jake, Bubba, too—and they had found this new lead, Johnnie Taylor, who had been singing pop music with the Five Echoes at the Squeeze Club. Johnnie was an arrogant little fellow who strutted around like a banty rooster, but there was no question he had talent, he had been rehearsing with them for a little while—and he sounded exactly like Sam.

  Sam knew Johnnie from the neighborhood; Johnnie had been raised by an aunt and spent a lot of time around the Cooks when he was growing up. And even though Sam remained uncertain whether the bad feelings surrounding his departure from the group four years earlier had entirely dissipated, he started coming around to the QCs’ rehearsals on the pretext of checking out their new lead singer.

  Johnnie was a feisty little man with a long, lantern-jawed face, full mustache, and high pompadour, and—there was no doubt about it—he really did sound like Sam. Far from being cowed in his idol’s presence, though, his entire reaction seemed to be that he was going to kick Sam’s ass. Which Sam appreciated—Johnnie’s bristling pugnacity was probably nearly as much of a motivating factor for his recurring visits as his fondness for the other QCs, and he encouraged them to the point that when Bubba informed him they had gotten a recording contract with Vee Jay but had no original material, “he said, ‘Okay, when you going to rehearse, Bub?’ And he gave us a song, ‘Somewhere to Lay My Head,’ and was teaching Johnnie runs, you know, he just stayed there with us for about four hours.”

  They recorded the song in May, around the same time that June Cheeks, reunited now with the Sensational Nightingales, recorded his version of the song. The Gales’ version came out first and, not surprisingly, offered a more driving, apocalyptic sound, but when the QCs’ record was released in August—slower, more plaintive, with Johnnie Taylor’s voice virtually indistinguishable from Sam’s—Sam, according to Bubba, did everything in his power to promote their record, with the exception, said Lee Richard, of really going to bat for them with Crain to get them on a Stirrers program. When the record became a hit, Sam told Lee, “I sure in the hell wish I hadn’t given you all that knowledge!” But Lee was sure he was joking, and Sam never asked for any credit or money for the song, either.

  That was the summer that twenty-seven-year-old guitarist Bob King joined the group. Bob King was a Philadelphian who had grown up with both Sensational Nightingales guitarist JoJo Wallace and Howard Carroll, one of the founders of the Gales and currently guitarist with the Dixie Hummingbirds, whose wife was King’s wife’s sister. All three had played together as teenagers, at house parties as well as churches, and all three shared a bluesy style which in Bob King’s case was fueled by a particular enthusiasm for the music of North Carolina bluesman Blind Boy Fuller. King had been playing with the Southern Tones, whose hit number was the recent inspiration for Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman,” but the Tones had curtailed their travel, and when Howard Carroll told his brother-in-law that the Stirrers were looking for a guitarist, Bob jumped at the chance.

  Clarence Fountain of the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, whose guitarist, George Scott, had always been an integral part of their sound, took credit for the addition. “We made them get a guitar,” said Fountain. “We kicked them so bad they had to get music [accompaniment]. We was in Passaic, New Jersey, one night making so much noise onstage, they said, ‘We got to get us one of those noisemakers, too.’”

  Whether or not this account paints a picture that the Stirrers themselves would have recognized, there was no question they had felt pressured for some time to “modernize.” Their experiments in the studio with drums, keyboards, and steel guitar were transparent attempts to escape the stigma of being just another one of those “old-timey” a cappella groups, and while the very distinctive vocal subtleties of their style clearly did not require overpowering instrumental accompaniment, the straightforward approach of a guitarist like Bob King, with his bluesy little flourishes, could only add to the excitement of their sound. “I was so proud of him,” said JoJo Wallace, who first saw King with the Stirrers at a program in Mobile, Alabama. “He stayed harmoniously with the Soul Stirrers’ style. That really impressed me a lot, because I knew he could do it once he got a break.”

  King was with them that summer on their extended tour of the West, with the Travelers, Brother Joe May, and Dorothy Love and the Original Gospel Harmonettes. He was certainly present when Art recorded the program at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Friday evening, July 22, 1955. It was billed as gospel DJ Brother Clarence Welch’s First Annual Summer Festival of Gospel Music and, despite the disruption of a bus and streetcar strike, drew almost a full house to the sixty-five-hundred-seat auditorium, whose cavernous stage had once served as the home court for the University of Southern California basketball team.

  ART HAD HIS NEW A&R MAN, Robert “Bumps” Blackwell, at the Shrine to record the event. Bumps, a light-skinned thirty-seven-year-old Seattle native with a dapper look and a bad eye, was an indifferent musician but a tireless hustler who seven years earlier had recruited fourteen-year-old Quincy Jones and seventeen-year-old Ray Charles to his Seattle big band. He booked four or five shows a night sometimes for his various aggregations and was able, according to one of his trumpet players, Floyd Standifer, to “talk his way into anything” and not infrequently talk his way out. “He had an inventive mind,” said Standifer, as well as a barbershop, a butcher shop, a jewelry business, a booking agency, and, he told Art Rupe when he showed up at the Specialty door earlier in the year, both a working knowledge of Yiddish and an advanced degree in music.

  Bumps had settled in Los Angeles in 1953 after several brief earlier visits. “When I got there,” he told Melody Maker correspondent Michael Watts, “the sun was shining, everything was happening, and I met musicians. I went home, and it took me two weeks to sell out and liquidate.” He supported himself working club dates and hustling various music-related jobs, which included cutting some sides on a singer named Sonny Knight for the Messner brothers’ Aladdin Records, one of Specialty’s principal L.A.-based r&b rivals, who put out “But Officer” in the summer of 1953. Nothing much came of the record, but Bumps continued to cut demos on Knight, and it was one of those demos that served as his ticket of introduction to Art, who wasn’t crazy about the singer but was impressed by the arrangement. Bumps went to work for Specialty on February 1, 1955, in his own mind as the label’s newly designated head of production, in Art’s as a “trainee a&r assistant” whom Rupe would school to do things the right way.

  It took Art a while to warm to his new employee, who was by turns almost perversely peculiar, ingratiatingly sycophantic, and disturbingly transparent in his need to convey the impression that he already knew it all. But he was full of energy and eager to learn, and in the first six months of his employment, he recorded music of considerable diversity, from the driving zydeco accordion blues of Clifton Chenier to the romantic doo-wop-based balladry of twenty-two-year-old Jesse Belvin, a handsome young trendmaker who had already written “Earth Angel,” “Dream Girl,” a
nd a host of other r&b hits (some under his own name, many of which he simply sold outright) for a tight nucleus of talented young L.A. musicians who had no doubt that Jesse was going to be the first in their ranks to achieve mass crossover acceptance.

  It was very much of an education for an outsider who liked to consider himself sui generis (his family in North Carolina, he claimed, had its own family crest, and neither white people nor black people knew quite what to make of him) and who placed great emphasis on his “sophisticated” musical thinking and “conservatory” training. All of a sudden he was being thrown into situations in which that thinking and training were of little value. Art had him recording strictly untrained musicians but discovering, to his surprise, a wealth of emotional profundity that he had never previously recognized. Some, like Sonny Knight, might see him as a pure bullshit artist, but Bumps had a more exalted opinion of himself, and he saw his mission now as “organizing the ignorance and bringing the science to it,” an undertaking which he embraced with typical flair.