Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Read online

  The Stirrers, 1956: R.B. Robinson, Leroy Crume, Sam, J.J. Farley, S.R. Crain, Paul Foster.

  Courtesy of LeRoy Crume

  Wexler himself was perplexed by what exactly was going on. “They would just drop by the office and hang out. There was no question they were affiliated in some way. And, of course, Sam was so hip. I kept begging him to sing the ‘devil’s music,’ but he was a Soul Stirrer, and he just wasn’t ready.” As Ahmet recalled, Bill Cook put the price of their interest in Sam at helping him to get out of his Specialty contract, but “we were just waiting for things to develop.”

  Then in June something did develop. Whether as a result of Bill Cook’s promises of stardom or Atlantic’s eagerness to record him, Sam finally appeared won over, and with Bill Cook he worked out a plan to win over Art Rupe in turn. In clear, plain prose and touchingly elegant block letters, Sam wrote Art the kind of letter whose format he might have learned in a high school business course. “Dear Sir,” it read:

  I write this letter to ask your consideration in a matter that’s very important to me. A fellow I’ve been knowing for quite a while asked me if I would consider recording some popular ballads for one of the major recording companies if he could arrange it. I told him yes. So he arranged it for me. But it’s my understanding that I would have to get permission from you before I went through with the deal. I’m planning on doing the recordings under another name. And I would continue to record and sing with the group. I have my material ready and all I need is an okay from you. I wish you would give it your utmost consideration. Awaiting your immediate reply.

  Rupe, who was not unaware of all the plots and machinations swirling around Sam but remained ambivalent about the prospect of breaking up the Soul Stirrers (“I was in the middle of a tense situation”), did not fail to respond to the urgency of Sam’s tone. After consulting with Bumps, who was unabashed in his predictions of success and had no interest whatsoever in seeing Bill Cook reap any benefit from it, he wrote to Sam care of the Soul Stirrers on July 3 in somewhat cool and disingenuous terms:

  Dear Sam,

  I received your letter concerning your recording under a different name for a different company.

  We appreciate your honest intentions in this matter—even though we do have you signed to an exclusive recording contract.

  However, we must advise you that we are not interested in having you record for anyone other than us at the present time; and, we most certainly would be very happy to record you in the Pop field ourselves—and we feel that we can offer you considerably more success.

  Therefore, we suggest that you call us immediately so that we can discuss the matter further.

  With kindest personal regards, we are

  Yours very sincerely,

  SPECIALTY RECORDS

  Art Rupe

  P.S.: We sent you some song contracts which we’d appreciate having you sign and return to us.

  And there the matter rested for the time being.

  WITH THE EXCEPTION of their newest member, the Soul Stirrers did not seem to be taking this threat to their livelihood particularly seriously. To Crain, “A lot of things was going on that I didn’t know, and I’m glad I didn’t. The Soul Stirrers was all I was thinking about, because that was my creation.” To Foster, as fervent in his faith as he was in his singing, it was almost inconceivable that anyone would ever leave the gospel world, whatever the temptation. But to Leroy Crume, not yet twenty-three and on the road for the first time, everything that Sam said reverberated, and even if he was not necessarily convinced that everything Sam said would come true, he believed that Sam Cook was capable of looking into the future in a manner that none of the others either could or would.

  Tall, handsome, with a prominent gap between his two front teeth and a quiet, almost courtly manner that never failed to attract the ladies, Crume had practically grown up with Sam and L.C. on the teenage gospel circuit in Chicago. He and his brothers had had a group, the Crume Brothers, who had played all the same places that the QCs played but with nowhere near the same degree of success, and when Sam joined the Soul Stirrers five years earlier, Crume had joined R.H. Harris’ newly formed group, the Christland Singers. But not before his father asked Harris, “Are you going to take care of him?” And when Harris said that he would, “My daddy looked at me and said, ‘Boy you better mind him.’ Here I am, eighteeen years old, and I thought I was a man!”

  Crume had played with the Soul Stirrers, too, off and on, “they used to have me play an acoustic guitar, just set on a chair behind them when they would come around Chicago. But then when they decided that they wanted to get a [permanent] guitar player, they got this guy out of Philadelphia, Bob King, and I was hurt.”

  Bob King had gotten sick, though, in early 1956, and his rapidly worsening health created a crisis for the group. Following their February 2 session, he was in and out of hospital with a kidney condition that appeared to be irreversible, and his periods of remission became briefer and further between. Crain wanted to replace him with Arthur Crume, Leroy’s older brother, but Sam, who had always liked Leroy, was adamant that Leroy was the one, and, in fact, if that was what it was going to come down to, the choice was not so much between the Crume brothers as it was between himself and Crain.

  As L.C. understood it from Crain years later, “Sam told him like this. He said, ‘Okay, fine, we’ll get Arthur. But you just gonna have to get someone else to sing lead.’ Crain said, ‘What you mean, Sammy-o?’ Sam said, ‘If we get Arthur, I’ll just sing tenor, you can sing lead.’ Crain said, ‘Sam, you know I can’t sing no lead.’ Now Crain is the one who told me this, Sam never mentioned it to me. And Crain told me, ‘L.C., you know Sam wasn’t playing. And I wasn’t gonna have Sam quit the group about singing no tenor. So I said, “Sam, you’re right.”’ But, you know, Sam was right. Arthur may have been a better guitar player, but Leroy was better for Sam. Him and Sam communicated, they were on the same page.”

  That may well have been so, but Crume, who had little knowledge of the political intrigue surrounding his invitation, had misgivings of his own. He had a job at the five-and-dime, where he made $46 a week, every week, with his future guaranteed. He wasn’t married, but he had an infant son to take care of. Nor had he forgotten how good R.H. Harris had been to him or how bad he had felt when the Soul Stirrers passed him over the first time. So it was little wonder that when J.J. Farley, substituting one night for the Christland’s bass singer, sidled up to him onstage and said, “Hey, fucker, you want to make a change?” his first reaction was that the Soul Stirrers’ secretary-treasurer, a notorious “jokester,” was putting him on, his second that the decision was not his but that of the man who had given him his opportunity. So he went to Mr. Harris, but even after Harris told him he would be a fool to turn down a chance like this, Crume was still reluctant to give up the security that he had for the uncertainty of life on the road—until, finally, Sam came by and got in his face and told him that he was looking at a “career opportunity.” And even then he only agreed to go out on a short-term basis, getting a temporary leave of absence from his boss.

  One of the first shows that they did was in Philadelphia at the Met (more formally, the Metropolitan Opera House), an ornate hall on the corner of Broad and Poplar that seated fifty-five hundred and took up almost an entire city block. “It was an all-star show with all these heavyweight groups—I’d never been on a show like this, and I was shaking in my boots. And we was riding down the street, on our way to the auditorium, and Sam said, ‘Oh, look, there’s Bob.’ Just walking down the street, on his way to the concert—he had just gotten out of the hospital, and I was happier to see him than they were! He didn’t even have a guitar with him, he played mine the first half, and then he left and went back into the hospital, and I played the last half. We were in Florida the week after when we got the word that he had passed.

  “Sam came to me then, and he says, ‘You going to stay with me now, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘No, man, I c
an’t stay.’ Well, he got all excited, so to get him off my case, I told him, Yeah, I’d stay. And he kept talking about, ‘We going to have some fun,’ and all that kind of stuff. But I just wanted to get back home.

  “So when we got home, I went back on my job, and then the group got ready to leave and Sam came by my house, and they told him where I was. And when I came home that evening, oh, man, he got on my case. He said, ‘Man, you told me you was going to stay with the group,’ and I won’t say what he said, but he was using all kinds of four-letter words, he was really upset. Then he asked me, ‘How much money you making?’ and when I told him, he just laughed out loud. Now that made me mad, but that got him out of his mood, he just started cracking up about it, and he said, ‘I’ll tell you what. You come with the Soul Stirrers, and we’ll give you $125 a week and pay all of your expenses. We’ll pay your rent. We’ll buy you food. We’ll have your clothes cleaned.’ I said, ‘Sam, there’s not that much money in the world.’”

  TRAVELING WITH THE SOUL STIRRERS was different from anything Crume had ever experienced on any of the little weekend trips he had made with R.H. Harris and the Christland Singers. And traveling with Sam as his friend and advocate was different from anything that simply being a member of the group could ever have offered. It was only a matter of weeks before he was taken off salary and made a full-fledged participating partner in Stirrers business. But it was only a matter of days before he knew that he had embarked upon an adventure that would provide him with a kind of fellowship, and education, that he had never known before.

  “Every night after the show, Sam knew someplace to go. And I don’t mean just one or two nights of the week, I mean every night. No matter how big or small the town was, Sam could find them little after-hours joints, even way out in the country. He just knew so many people, and he remembered every one, even if he didn’t see them from one year to the next. You know, we met everybody at them little small hotels—r&b, blues, gospel—because we all had to stay there. Here we are, six guys in a Cadillac, with all of our clothes—I had a guitar and amplifier, and Sam was a camera bug, he had a little portable radio, too, and eventually Paul Foster and I got a little portable twelve-inch TV, because even if you could find a room with a TV or radio, that was a ‘deluxe,’ and that would cost you extra, probably three dollars, three and a quarter a night instead of the two dollars you paid for a regular room. And we got all that stuff in one car!

  “Sam used to run my legs off. I was so tired, being up all night, and then we got to go on to the next town. One particular time, I remember, it was in Raleigh, North Carolina, and we had two ladies—well, Sam knew the one he was with, and he introduced me to mine—and I said, ‘Sam, I want to go back to the hotel.’ Because I wanted to get intimate with my girl. But Sam says, ‘Oh, Crume, let’s go one more place. Just one more place.’ And we had already been to lots of places already. I said, ‘Look, Sam, let me tell you something . . . ’ Because he was driving, you know, so I couldn’t leave. I said, ‘This is the last time I’m gonna run with you. After tonight, don’t never ask me again.’ Well, he got right up in my face with that Sam Cook look on his face, and he said, ‘Crume, you just said that because you’re upset. You know you don’t mean it.’ He just laughed and said, ‘You know, man, we’re partners.’

  “It didn’t mean nothing to Sam, he never got tired, and when we would travel the next day, Sam and I would jump in the backseat to get some sleep. Man, I’d be laying there, and Sam’s sitting in the middle, and all of a sudden he’d punch me and say, ‘Crume, you awake?’ I’d say, ‘No. I’m not awake. Let me sleep.’ He said, ‘Well, let me just tell you this one thing, and then you can go back to sleep.’ And he’d say that one thing, but then he’d be talking for hours—about what we were going to do the next night, and who he knew where we were going, all kinds of things.

  “He’d call himself whispering, but he can’t whisper, and now I’m never going to get back to sleep. Because once he started talking, his story would never end. One time he woke me up to tell me, ‘You know, someday I’m going to be rich.’ He said, ‘One of these days I’m gonna be so rich I’m gonna buy me a white convertible Cadillac.’ I said, ‘Sam, did you wake me up to tell me that? Man, get outta my ear.’ He said, ‘I got a plan.’ I said, ‘Sam, I don’t want to hear nothing about what you have to say.’ ’Cause he went through money like water, he threw it away. I said, ‘Sam, you will never in your life accumulate anything. Because you can’t hold on to anything.’ But Sam was thinking way ahead, I was thinking of him, you know, doing this with the Soul Stirrers, but he was looking into the future, he was thinking way beyond the Soul Stirrers.”

  SAM SAW HIS WAY OUT, it slowly began to dawn on Crume, through those little pop songs he was writing all the time. None of the other Soul Stirrers paid any attention to them, they didn’t even seem to notice as Sam half hummed, half sang, making up what sounded for all the world like nonsense verses in the back of the speeding Cadillac. J.W. Alexander certainly knew about Sam’s ambitions and, as someone who had started out in pop music himself, even encouraged them. Alex, newly remarried, had temporarily moved to Houston and was doing some work for Don Robey, producing gospel sides on Reverend Cleophus Robinson for Robey’s Peacock label and working with Robey’s r&b stars Bobby “Blue” Bland and Little Junior Parker, whose “Next Time You See Me” he had just helped polish for a fee of $250.

  “Sam and I got ukeleles,” said J.W., “and we’d be singing pop songs. Then Sam began to write, and I got a book in New York on How to Write a Hit Song and Sell It—I forget who wrote the doggone thing. But I just told Sam to make it simple, to where little children could hum it. Housewives or truck drivers or what have you. You write that kind of melody, and lots of people will remember it. And make it danceable, that’s really the key.”

  Crume at first saw the songs primarily as vehicles that Sam would use to entertain the ladies. “We’d get in a room and rehearse, sometimes we’d have a roomful of people, he’d get on my guitar and I’d sing backup—all he knew were three changes, but we’d sing those songs to the girls, try them out and see if they were acceptable. And they accepted them mostly!”

  It didn’t take long, though, to realize that the songs were intended as more than just social diversion. Sam was working on them constantly, coming up with new ones all the time. The idea, he told Crume, who was as unaware of Bill Cook’s interest in Sam as the other Soul Stirrers were of the songs themselves, was to sell them to a top group like the Platters, who had just written crossover history with their number-one pop hit, “The Great Pretender,” and whom Sam had somehow gotten to meet in New York. “There’s money in songwriting,” he declared in the face of Crume’s skepticism that Sam even knew what money meant.

  “He used to make me so angry. He’d go out, and, you know, he’s going to buy for everybody. He didn’t want nobody to spend their money. I said, ‘Sam, let me spend my own money.’ ‘No, no, I got it.’ Everywhere we’d go, he’d do that. The next day he’d say, ‘Let me have ten dollars.’ I said, ‘I told you to let me pay for myself.’ ‘Hey, man, let me have ten dollars.’ I say, ‘All right, but it’s the last time —’ He says, ‘Crume, you know you lying, don’t you?’ And he was right. I always let him have the money!”

  It was an education for Crume in every respect. While he had scarcely led a sheltered life, and his father had brought him up on harsh tales of slavery and racial mistreatment, he had had little personal experience of the South since moving from Missouri to Chicago with his family at the age of nine, and the daily insults, the habit the others had all picked up of falling in almost instinctively with local laws and customs were things he simply was not used to. In Alabama they had a problem with the generator, and while they waited for the man to fix their car, they could hear the patrons of the diner next door cracking jokes about the niggers in the Cadillac that had broken down. The one thing they hated worse than niggers, they declared loudly, seemingly determined that the group would n
ot miss out on the joke, was niggers with Mexicans traveling with them.

  “And Paul Foster nudged me, and he said, ‘Crume, those people are talking about you.’ I said, ‘I hear ’em.’ Because at that time I had a process, and my hair was real brown, and I looked a little like a Mexican. One of our guys, R.B. Robinson, was born in Troy, Alabama, and he was deathly afraid, so he got out of the car and walked away, way down a dirt road. But I roused up, and one of them yelled, ‘That’s not a Mexican. He’s a nigger. That one’s a nigger, too.’ And boy, oh boy, we didn’t say anything. We just sat there, and they just talked about us like we were animals.”

  Another time, they were late for a show in Tyler, Texas, when the universal started to make noise, but the mechanic wouldn’t even look at it that evening, telling them they could suit themselves, but he was going home for supper and wouldn’t be back till seven the next morning. It was hot and sticky, they hadn’t had anything to eat all day, “and there wasn’t no hotel or motel where we could put down in this little town, but we were parked right across the street from a store that had watermelons stacked up on the porch. Man, I kept looking at those watermelons. I was going to get one and leave some money, but Sam said, ‘Crume, don’t do that. First thing they’re gonna say, even though you got money, they’ll say you’re stealing.’ So I didn’t, and we finally settled down, all six of us, and went to sleep in the car.” And when the mechanic finally put the car up on a lift the next morning, “all it was was a little bolt that was loose. He said, ‘You guys could have tightened this up yourself.’ Can you imagine, we missed the gig and suffered through all that because he couldn’t even take the time to look at it.”