Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Read online

  For the most part, though, race rarely intruded directly, because for the most part they rarely left their own segregated world. Everyone knew about the White Citizens Council attack on Nat “King” Cole on the stage of the Birmingham Municipal Auditorium in April, but the attitude of many in the black community was that he should have known better than to have sung for an all-white audience in Alabama. “He was born there,” was the sardonic refrain of one column in the Amsterdam News. “He should know how those old peckerwoods are.” On a more serious note, J.W. Alexander was reported by the Los Angeles Sentinel to have “electrified audiences everywhere” on the Pilgrim Travelers’ big March tour, “when he fervently ask[ed] that prayers be offered for both Miss Autherine Lucy, embattled University of Alabama coed [whose court-ordered admission in February 1956 provoked a student riot that led to her suspension, and then expulsion, by university trustees before she was even able to enroll], and the [black] citizens of Montgomery, Alabama,” whose boycott of the segregated city bus system had started the previous December. But even J.W. conceded that the quartets’ role in the civil rights struggle was a limited one—and would probably have to remain so if they wanted to retain the harmless anonymity that allowed them to operate just beneath the redneck radar. The fact that they were gospel singers was the one thing that made it all right for them to be driving around in their brand-new Fleetwood Cadillac. If they’d been Bobby “Blue” Bland or Junior Parker, with their flashy looks, flaunting sexuality, and aggressive new musical styles, J.W. knew they would have encountered far more frequent challenges, and far more open hostility, to their very ability to go about their business. The Pilgrim Travelers did sing for the Movement one time in Montgomery after the police canceled their show at the City Auditorium in a generalized reprisal against any kind of gathering that might sustain the spirit of the boycott. They sang at a local church, donating the proceeds to the boycott fund, but the police came into the church and put a stop to that, too.

  It was three weeks out, five days at home, regular as clockwork, a business, Crume learned, with Crain in charge and J.J. Farley not just the practical joker but the “disciplinarian” and chaplain in the group, who levied fines and started off each rehearsal with a prayer. If you were late for rehearsal, it could cost you $10, and you had to change your wardrobe within ten minutes of getting offstage because you never met your fans with your stage uniform on or you faced another fine. Due to Sam’s habitual dilatoriness, Crain would always be telling them that the program started an hour earlier than it actually did, just as he had ever since Sam joined the group, but Crume took exception to being treated like that. “I’d tell him, ‘Hey, man, we’re grown men.’” Even though he could understand why Crain might have thought he had to do it, since Sam was always running late and might even miss a show once in a while.

  “Sam liked to act like he knew everything, and I would bug the heck out of him sometimes. Sam used to say, ‘I don’t agree with your ass all the time, Crume, but at least I know you’re telling me the truth.’ You know, you could needle him because he would get so serious, and then when you’d say something to him, he’d think, you know, you were serious, too. Sometimes I’d tease him about something or other when he’d be driving, and he’d start to turning around, because he always liked to look at you when he was talking. And R.B. Robinson would say, ‘Crume, why don’t you leave him alone?’ Because Sam would be going all over the road. I wouldn’t laugh till R.B. said, ‘Leave him alone,’ but then I’d smile, and Sam would say, ‘You fucker, Crume, I’m gonna get you for that.’”

  But mostly it was Sam who led the way, even for these men who had been in the business in some cases since before he was born; it was Sam, Crume realized, whose charm, vision, insistence on personal and professional growth, and, above all, natural ease set the tone for the group, and for Crume’s own experience with the group. “He made me grow up. Sam was a reader because he always wanted to learn. He was always stressing [the need] for more knowledge, even with his singing. When I came into the group, I liked to read comic books—Superman, Dick Tracy, Captain Marvel. And Sam was always in the backseat with a magazine or some kind of book. And he said, ‘Crume, damnit, you’re with the Soul Stirrers now, you got to read something educational, you got to put those damn comic books away.’ So I did. But when I’d get in the hotel, I’d curl up on the bed, man, and get my comic books out until there was a knock on the door, and then I’d hide them under my pillow until he’d leave!

  “But that’s the way Sam was. He was an educational-type guy. He was the kind of guy who if you didn’t know something and Sam thought he could help you with it, he was johnny-on-the-spot! He wasn’t a moody person, but he could fly off the handle real quick, and if he thought he was right, he’d argue you down. That’s just the way he was, kind of headstrong. He would listen to you, he would listen to anybody, but after he listened to you, if he thought he was right, he’d say, ‘Hey, I’m gonna do it my way.’ But if he thought about it and [decided] he was wrong, he’d come back to you and say, ‘Damn, man, I was wrong. Hell, I was wronger than shit.’ And, you know, most of the members in the group was like that. I think Sam instilled that in us. He didn’t show his [emotions] very long. You wouldn’t see him in any extended bad moods. R.B. Robinson, our baritone singer, used to say Sam was ‘The Great Pretender.’ Just like the song.”

  CRUME NEVER REALLY got to know Dolores. In fact, he was no more able to understand why Sam had gotten married than anyone else. But maybe that was what R.B. meant when he called Sam “The Great Pretender”: from Crume’s point of view, Sam was almost flawless in his portrayal of this “happy-go-lucky, free-spirit type of guy,” but maybe he just never chose to fully reveal himself to any of them.

  If that was the case, it would have been hard to say who Sam did reveal himself to. In many respects it seemed as if even without all of his reading and all of his restless exploration of worlds that were otherwise foreclosed to him, he would have had every reason to feel displaced. The church that had been the center of his childhood was long gone, and his parents, after two years in Cleveland, were once again traveling the evangelical trail. His brother Charles was in jail. The hollow shell of his marriage and his wife’s consequent isolation and depression were evident to everyone around him, and his daughter by his childhood sweetheart was growing up without a real father, just as his other children elsewhere saw him only when his travels happened to bring him to their town.

  The rest of the Soul Stirrers, for all of their own “happy-go-lucky” ways, owned property and had settled families of their own, while Sam had just moved out of R.B. Robinson’s basement apartment for a flat around the corner from Crain’s spacious new home on Woodlawn Avenue. And, while there was no question, even within the group, that he was the principal drawing card and “star,” he had to share his income equally with all of the others, even his songwriting royalties, which, while they belonged to him by contract and by law, according to a long-established Soul Stirrer principle were treated as just another by-product of the group’s shared labor.

  There was a distinct feeling of dissatisfaction on every front. He had joined Clay Evans’ Fellowship Baptist Church the previous fall both because he knew Clay from his days as a spiritual singer and because all the other Stirrers except Paul belonged. It appeared to his brother L.C., though, to be more of a social obligation than a source of spiritual solace. In fact, while few in the gospel world doubted his sincerity, many might have questioned the depth of his faith, and clearly it was not salvation that was on his mind so much as the disparity between what he had and what he wanted—and his own inability, for all of the strength of his rational impulse, to define exactly what that was. His wit, his charm, his instinctive kindness and shining intellectual gifts were qualities lost on no one, and he was well aware of his capacity to draw upon vast reservoirs of trust and love, but it was his own ability to give love back that weighed on him, it was his own ability to bestow the kind of unqualif
ied love that some gave to a woman, some gave to God, that was of increasing concern to him as he continued to ponder the future course of his life.

  FOR THE TIME BEING it was the road that would have to serve as his only refuge and the strangers that he met along the road as his closest friends. To Bobby Womack, the twelve-year-old middle child of the Womack Brothers, a family group consisting of five siblings managed by their father, Friendly, and largely confined to the Cleveland area by their father’s job in the steel mills, “Sam brought a whole new element to gospel. He started bringing young people into the church to the point where it was like a rock ’n’ roll show, chicks pulling up their dresses, and he’s going out in the crowd and rubbing some girl’s leg while he’s singing, and she jump straight up in the air!

  “And the preachers all hated it. I mean, the preacher’s sitting up there, [preacher] has a limousine, he’s got all the mothers and he’s hitting on their daughters, and he’s saying, ‘It’s disgusting. Who do [this gospel singer] think he is?’ But I’m saying, ‘Damn, this is great. That cat right there is cold. Yeah, that’s what I want to do.’ I didn’t think Sam was putting on no show. He was just enjoying himself.”

  He always got them with his new song, “Wonderful,” which the Stirrers had recorded at their February session, just before Crume joined the group. Composed by Chicago gospel pioneers Virginia Davis and Theodore Frye and well known from a raw 1952 treatment by Sister Jessie Mae Renfro accompanied by the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, “Wonderful” was transformed in Sam’s velvety version into a love song whose divine subject, while unmistakably referenced, could understandably be mistaken by the girls to whom Sam directed his seductive reading. “Whoa-oa-o, He’s so wonderful,” Sam crooned, returning again and again to the vocal mannerism that had become his signature and evoking again and again sighs, screams, and ululations of their own from his new teenage fans and their mothers. From the perspective of seventeen-year-old Mavis Staples, whose family gospel group, the Staple Singers, had just signed with the Vee Jay label, “He had an air about him, you know, just a little slick young man. I loved to see him because he was so handsome. And I loved to hear him laugh. That was all the talk with the ladies, how good-looking this man was. And when the time came for the Soul Stirrers to sing, the people would just go wild.” The new song became his calling card, and Dorothy Love, whose group, the Gospel Harmonettes, always gave the Stirrers stiff competition, took to calling him “Mr. Wonderful” in joking recognition of the effect that it had predominantly on his female audience.

  There was a humid air of sexual excitement almost everywhere that he appeared. Whatever form of sublimation had previously served as its disguise was gone now, replaced by the kind of naked avidity that might have been more threatening had Sam not been, as Dorothy Love suggested, “so good-looking and charming,” so undeniably boyish in his appeal. Perhaps that was what allowed him to skitter back from the edge of outright vulgarity, to get away with things that would have simply seemed coarse in the presentations of others. What he couldn’t get away from were the feelings that he aroused, the kind of pansexual hysteria that future r&b star Sam Moore witnessed as a member of a gospel quartet called the Mellonaires in Miami and, like Bobby Womack, compared to a rock ’n’ roll show. “This man was so smooth, so good, and such class,” Moore told writer Daniel Wolff, “I’ve seen women just pass out trying to get to him.” Even the gospel promoter in Miami, “an open gay” in a field in which homosexuality, while not uncommon, was mostly hidden, was so inflamed by Sam’s “pretty-boy” appeal, according to Moore, that he was affected in exactly the same way as the women. “I know,” Moore said of the promoter’s reaction, while stipulating that he was certainly not aware of any reciprocity of feeling on Sam’s part, “[he] loved himself some Sam Cook.”

  It was not just the preachers who disapproved of the erotic atmosphere, either. Some of the other singers tut-tutted about Sammy getting the “big head.” “I think it was mainly that the young ladies was just crazy about him,” said Five Blind Boys bass singer Johnny Fields, “because I’ve never known Sam to willfully do something to somebody that would cause a conflict. But they drew their own impression.” Even his sisters looked somewhat askance at Sam’s new “jitterbug” image, while his brother L.C. took it as his model. Sam had started wearing his hair in a high pompadour that was processed to the bone, “and we didn’t like it at all,” said his older sister Hattie, “and we told him. He had too good hair to be having any process on it. We thought it was terrible.”

  Sam, on the other hand, couldn’t tear his gaze away from the exploding crossover success of some of the new r&b rages. Thirteen-year-old Frankie Lymon, whose “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” had just gone to number six on the pop charts. Former Drifters and Dominoes lead singer Clyde McPhatter, out of the army now and on his own, whose ethereal gospel-laced falsetto was just crashing the pop charts with “Treasure of Love.” Eighteen-year-old Little Willie John, whom Sam had known as a pre-teen with his family gospel group in Detroit, was now knocking out audiences all over the country with his seductive “Fever.” Ray Charles had just had his third number-one r&b hit with a gospel sound no less pronounced than the Soul Stirrers’. Fats Domino was pulling in up to $2,500 a night playing to audiences of predominantly white teens. The Platters were well on their way to their second number-one pop hit of the year with the Ink Spots’ 1939 standard, “My Prayer,” propelled by Tony Williams’ spectacular lead tenor. And Bumps’ new protégé, Little Richard, had sold nearly two million records in just eight months and was in the midst of his third straight hit in a row (his second number one r&b) with a sound straight out of Alex Bradford and the Clara Ward Singers’ Marion Williams.

  He ran into them everywhere he went, at the diners and hotels in the “colored” section of town to which they were all consigned, driving their Cadillacs, flashing their wads, surrounded by all the emblems and appurtenances of success. These were his colleagues, these were his peers, young men his own age or younger, on their way to the kind of success he had dreamt about since he was a child. He was not the sort to be jealous, but he knew he could compete with them in everything but material reward—and there was no question in his mind that he was equally deserving of that.

  “RETURNED BY POPULAR DEMAND,” announced the nearly one-quarter-page advertisement for the Soul Stirrers’ July 22, 1956, program in Atlanta, just three months since their last. “This concert will bring two stylists of lead singing together for the first time,” declared the Atlanta Daily World. “Years ago the Christland Singers [led by an unnamed R.H. Harris] were the Soul Stirrers. Then the group reorganized. From the revitalized group came Sam Cook, who sings the lead in ‘It’s Wonderful,’ ‘Nearer My God to Thee [sic],’ and other hits.” In separate squibs two and five days later, the paper cited Sam as “the inimitable lead singer” of the “No. 1 [group] in the nation’s gospel song popularity polls” and pointed out that the Christland Singers had “originated the lead singer technique used so effectively” by Sam. The program, put on by veteran gospel promoter Herman Nash, would mark the two groups’ “first battle of song.”

  For Crume, “all that father against son business” was just to build up the box office. “People still fall for it, they always come out if they think there’s bad blood between two groups, in sports or anything else. But R.H. Harris was strong. And Sam was strong. I remember Crain was worried, because he was always afraid of R.H. Harris. He said, ‘That’s the singingest man in the business.’ But I checked with Sam. I said, ‘Do you feel all right?’ He said, ‘Hey, man, don’t worry.’ And I didn’t.”

  It was just exciting to be back in Atlanta, where Nash and his promotion partner, B.B. Beamon, a former Pullman car porter who had started putting on rhythm and blues shows in the late forties, had most of the popular black entertainment business, both gospel and secular, to themselves. The last time the Stirrers had come to town, in April, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, and a new group called the Flames (w
hose uncredited lead singer, James Brown, was rapidly becoming known for crawling the floor and crying out the one essential word of their hit song, “Please Please Please,” over and over again) had all recently appeared under B.B. Beamon’s auspices at the Magnolia Ballroom on the West Side, while Little Willie John played the Magnolia just three days before their City Auditorium appearance this time. With the Royal Peacock, the brand-new Auburn Avenue Casino, Henry Wynn’s Stairway to the Stars, and all the little after-hours joints and nightspots that dotted “Sweet Auburn,” the temptation was to be on the go every night of the week, and it was Crain’s understandable intention to make sure that his “inimitable lead singer” did not do just that on their brief sojourns in town. As a result, Crain always booked the group into Herman Nash and B.B. Beamon’s hotel, the Savoy, where someone could keep an eye on Sam, and where his clear instructions were: “Check in. I don’t want you guys to go out on the street. Just send out for anything you want.”