Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Read online

  Naturally that didn’t sit too well with Sam. They were free agents, Sam declared with some spirit to Crume, his designated “running buddy.” “He told me, ‘There’s another hotel, the Forrest Arms, not too far from here. Let’s go down there, ’cause we got to have our freedom!’” The Forrest Arms, Sam explained to Crume, was “where all the action was,” all the show-business people stayed there—and, indeed, it lived up to its reputation.

  The program itself may well have been something of an anticlimax. Crume simply didn’t want to see Sam or his mentor, Harris, embarrassed, and he would have thought that Sam, for all of his bold proclamations, would have felt some misgivings, but he never saw him waver. Both groups acquitted themselves well, but, Paul Foster said afterward, “all them tricks that Harris was making, Sam made every bit of ’em, that’s what tricked it all.” The way Paul saw it, Harris was lacking an effective second lead to set him off. “He didn’t have nobody to top him out. Me and Sam was stronger than he was, and that was too bad. The booking agent, Nash, said, ‘Y’all shouldn’t have done the old man like that.’ I said, ‘Pops ought to stay in his place.’ And Harris was standing right there, and he said, ‘Boy . . . ’” Then the next night, they went on to do it all over again in Birmingham.

  Barely one month later they returned to Atlanta top-billed over both sets of Blind Boys, June Cheeks’ Sensational Nightingales, the Swanee Quintet, Edna Gallmon Cook and her Singing Son, and even Mahalia Jackson’s near-rival in popularity, Clara Ward, in an event “celebrating Herman Nash’s six years of Gospel Promoting.” Because they were scheduled to be in New York the following day, Nash flew them in, while R.B. Robinson, who was afraid to fly, skipped the program and drove straight from Chicago to New York. For Crume it was an eye-opening experience. They had never played this big a show in Atlanta before, and the crowd was so huge they opened up the small auditorium as well as the big one and there still wasn’t room for everyone to get in. Crume had been needling Sam since the beginning of the summer that the only reason he was getting all the attention was that he was always introduced last. “I said, ‘That’s why people have been clapping their hands. Really, they’re yelling for me.’ Sam said, ‘Man, you must be crazy!’ I said, ‘No, you let me go last, and I’ll show you that that hand is for me.’”

  Crume had provoked Sam to the point that they started switching off, and each night he would goad him against all dictates of reason to argue over who had gotten the bigger hand. “This particular night, in Atlanta, they had five beautiful girls to introduce us and escort us all the way from the back up to the stage, and Sam and I were bickering about who was going [to go] in last. I said, ‘Hey, it’s my turn.’ So Sam was ahead of me, ahead of Sam was Paul, then J.J. Farley, then Crain leading the way. And when they introduced the Soul Stirrers, we started walking down the aisle, real slow like, with these beautiful ladies escorting us, and the people just went crazy [over Sam], yelling and screaming, you know, and rubbing him on the sleeve just to touch him. And Sam just couldn’t resist. He looked back at me, and I’m throwing my head up in the air, pretending I didn’t even see him, but when we got onstage and stood there for our little ovation, Sam was punching me, saying, ‘Now did you see that, fucker, all them people touching me?’ And I said, ‘I didn’t see a thing, man. All I know, they was screaming at me!’”

  They went straight from there into the Apollo Theater, on 125th Street in the heart of Harlem, the mecca of black entertainment, which had had its grand reopening two weeks earlier, “after a month of renovation and preparation,” with Clyde McPhatter and Buddy Johnson headlining. The presentation of a full gospel program had been introduced on the Apollo stage some eight months earlier for a Christmas 1955 show, when gospel singer, DJ, and promoter Thermon Ruth had persuaded theater owner Frank Schiffman that not only was there an audience for the music but that audience would come to the Apollo to hear it. Ruth, something of a pioneer in the fields of both gospel and pop (his gospel group, the Selah Jubilee Singers, had first recorded in 1931, when he was seventeen years old, and his pop group, the Larks, was one of the first gospel-based crossover acts, in 1951), had recently returned to New York from a two-year stay in North Carolina and immediately reestablished himself with the city’s first-ever daily gospel program, The Old Ship of Zion, on WOV from six to seven every morning. Once he convinced Schiffman, he had to convince the groups that “you could sing spirituals anywhere,” in other words that this was the best way to “reach all kinds of people. [And] that this would be the first time they would ever be presented in a great way. Beautiful stage, great lighting and acoustics. Above all [that] Mr. Schiffman guaranteed the money [and that] they were going to get it regardless of whether the show was a flop or not,” a promise they knew well from bitter experience not every gospel promoter could afford to keep.

  J.W. Alexander for one hadn’t needed any convincing. He seized on the opportunity for the Pilgrim Travelers to be among the first quartets to appear on the Apollo stage, joining the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, Brother Joe May, the Sensational Nightingales, the Harmonizing Four, the Caravans, and Alex Bradford in what could have been billed as a World Series of Gospel. The Soul Stirrers, certainly, were courted for the weeklong booking, but S.R. Crain held out when he was offered no more than $1,000 for the entire group. And he continued to hold out when Thermon Ruth booked Clara Ward, the Dixie Hummingbirds, and the Davis Sisters for his second Gospel Caravan at the end of March. Ruth, and the Apollo, upped their offer to $1,800, but Crain just told them, “When you got some money to spend, you come back and talk to me.”

  Later that spring, Crume was present when the offer for the next Apollo bill was raised to $2,000. “Crain said, ‘Two thousand dollars for a whole week, an entire week, four shows a day?’ He said, ‘Let me show you something, mister.’ Crain brought out three contracts. One for Newark. One for New York. One for Philadelphia. He said, ‘Do you see what I get for one show? We only sing for about fifteen or twenty minutes?’ And each of them was a thousand or twelve hundred dollars. He says, ‘I only have to be onstage for twenty minutes. And you mean to tell me you want me to sing a whole week for two thousand dollars? Mister, get out of my face with that.’ And he walked away. I went up to Crain and said, ‘You know we don’t get that kind of money every night.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but he don’t know that.’”

  It was frustrating to Crume, because both he and Sam wanted so badly to go into the Apollo. “I told Crain, ‘Think of the prestige.’ He said, ‘Wait a minute, Crume. Let me tell you something.’ He said, ‘You can’t go across the street and buy a hamburger and say, “I’m going to pay with prestige.” You can’t do that.’ He says, ‘I promise you, we will go into the Apollo, but when we do, we gonna get paid.’”

  They opened on August 31, at the top of a bill that included both Clara Ward and the Caravans but that clearly had been pared down to accommodate the financial needs of its headliners. Sam was so excited he lost his voice. “He wasn’t used to four shows a day. He didn’t know how to pace himself,” Crume observed. “He was singing hard, just like it was a one-nighter. But with a one-nighter, you got all day to rest. At the Apollo you only got a few minutes.” He was enthralled, too, by all there was to do in New York, all the sights, all the glitter, all the girls. Fats Domino and Frankie Lymon were headlining Alan Freed’s “Second Anniversary Rock and Roll” show at the Brooklyn Paramount, which in nine days grossed $220,000, while Fats got national exposure with an appearance on Steve Allen’s Sunday night television show.

  Bobby Robinson, the proprietor since 1946 of Bobby’s Happy House record shop, just one block down from the Apollo and described by its owner as “the first black [-owned business] on the street from the Hudson to the East River,” saw in Sam a quality he had never seen before. “He never got excited and carried away like some of the guys,” said Robinson, who had already started two labels of his own and had long served as an impromptu consultant to Atlantic Records’ Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexle
r on their frequent forays into Harlem, “but he kept the audience with his little gimmicks, which made him attractive as an artist and as a person.” It made him attractive as a potential gold mine, too, admitted Robinson, who at this point joined the growing throng trying to persuade Sam to sing pop. “He said, ‘What if I fail?’ I said, ‘Sam, you can’t fail.’” But Robinson could find no assurances to persuade Sam to set aside his concerns, and they merely continued to bat the subject back and forth. Apollo owner Frank Schiffman’s son Bobby, too, urged Sam to give some thought to crossing over. He told him, “If the rules are more important to you than the money, then stay there. If the money is more important, come this way.” But he got no more indication that Sam was taking the matter seriously than Bobby Robinson had.

  Meanwhile, unbeknownst to any of them, including Crume, Crain, or any of the other Soul Stirrers, Sam had already had his first pop session. Bill Cook had shepherded him into the Nola Recording Studio on Broadway, between Fifty-first and Fifty-second Street, in an experiment that Art Rupe had agreed to underwrite. Rupe seemed to have accepted that the Newark DJ was Sam’s de facto manager for a career that was, for the moment anyway, purely theoretical, and Cook for his part was pressing his case even harder with Sam following the departure of his meal ticket, Roy Hamilton, in May. Hamilton, just twenty-seven and at the top of the pop marketplace, had been forced into premature retirement by a case of “tubercular pneumonia” that doctors told him would prevent him from ever singing again. Bill Cook, in fact, was booked into the Apollo the week after the Soul Stirrers closed in what was announced as the start of a new career as a comedian and singer from which, the Amsterdam News reported, he intended to dedicate “a ten per cent commission to his retired client.” With his new client, and an accomplished rehearsal pianist, possibly Hamilton’s arranger, O.B. Masingill, Cook cut demos on half a dozen of the “little songs” that Sam had been fooling around with on the road as well as a number that he had himself written for Sam, “I’ll Come Running Back to You.” It’s not hard to see why, as Crume said, the girls all went for them. These were beautifully romantic sentiments (“I Don’t Want to Cry,” “The Love I Lost,” “The Time Has Come to Say Goodbye”) set off by Sam’s gorgeous delivery. There is no pace to the songs; they are steady, stately, and almost uniformly regretful, sung with absolute confidence at the top of the singer’s range with his characteristic yodel trailing uncharacteristic clouds of winsomely bittersweet resignation and remorse. The one song that didn’t get on tape was a pop translation of “Wonderful,” the number with which Sam had by now come to be identified, but it was hardly surprising, given the misgivings that Sam so evidently felt, that he and Bill Cook could not come up with a suitable transposition. Cook dutifully sent off the tapes to Bumps Blackwell and Art Rupe, advising them that this was, of course, in the nature of an experiment and that he was certain they would do better next time.

  Art Rupe remained almost as ambiguous as Sam, not about the matter of turning gospel into pop, a process to which he was by now irrevocably committed, but about the harm that Sam’s departure would inevitably do to the Soul Stirrers, not to mention the uncertainty of Sam’s secular success. For Bumps, though, this was the validation of the moment for which he had been waiting ever since first seeing Sam on the stage of the Shrine Auditorium one year earlier. He had known from that moment that Sam could be “as big as the Platters,” and his own education in rhythm and blues and gospel music over the past year had only confirmed that point.

  “Gospel songs intrigued me,” Bumps told Sepia magazine sometime later. “I began to recognize entertainment and cultural value in them beyond their religious interpretations.” More important, as he was more than willing to admit in other, less formal settings than a press interview, the music had caused him to abandon his own prejudices, his own inclination to “look down my nose at these untrained, undisciplined people.” Instead, he came to recognize that “people didn’t give a damn what I thought I knew and the technicalities behind the knowledge that I had,” that all of his formal training was worth very little in the face of “this abandonment, this honesty, this truth,” the raw, unadulterated outpouring of feeling that emanated from the gospel and rhythm and blues music that he was now recording.

  With Sam he never gave up pointing out that singing had nothing to do with whether you were religious or not. “A shoemaker doesn’t leave religion to make shoes. He attends church on Sunday.” So, too, did plumbers, doctors, even people who pursued “decadent professions”—they all had their own covenants with God. So why shouldn’t a singer, too? He told Sam, “You don’t leave religion to sing.” An artist was someone “born and endowed with talent. Character is something you acquire. If you’re a singer and that’s your living, what’s wrong with that?” There was no inherent taint to any kind of music, so long as you were not singing degrading material—and he knew Sam would never do that.

  He pointed out, too, the success he had had with Little Richard in the past year, the material rewards that both he and Richard had achieved, the bookings and movie offers that were pouring in. And while Sam was playing the Apollo, clearing maybe $400 or $500 for the week, Richard was headlining the twelfth annual Cavalcade of Jazz at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, where he drew fifteen thousand people, then heading straight into an appearance at L.A.’s plush new Savoy Ballroom and the filming of Alan Freed’s Don’t Knock the Rock, the follow-up to the rock ’n’ roll disc jockey’s Rock Around the Clock.

  Bumps knew Sam could do the same, or better. He was as certain of it as he had been of anything in his life, and any lingering doubts he might have had on the subject had been altogether dispelled by his experience at the first Soul Stirrers session for which he had had direct responsibility back in February. That was when he finally became convinced that Sam Cook possessed a spark and a talent unparalleled in his musical experience. They were on their way to the studio, and Sam was not prepared—you could call it anything you wanted to, Bumps said, but Sam simply had not come up with the material the group was counting on from him.

  “So S.R. Crain was a little upset, but in his little religious way he was sort of nice about it, and he was saying, ‘Sam, the folks are waiting for you to sing them a song, and if you don’t get yourself together before we get to the studio, what are we going to do?’ So Sam said, ‘Well, hand me the Bible.’ And they handed Sam the Bible, and he was thumbing through it, skipping over it and skimming through it, and he said, ‘I got one. Here it is right here.’” At which point Sam put the song together right in front of Bumps’ eyes.

  “He said, ‘Okay, strike the chords.’ So the guitar started playing these two little chords, and Sam started singing, quoting right from the Scripture, where Jesus was coming into the marketplace and he met the woman at the well, singing ‘There was a woman’—and those chords were coming—‘in the Bible days.’ And [then]: ‘Whoa-oh-oh, She touched the hem of his garment and was made whole.’” The song was “Touch the Hem of His Garment,” one of Sam’s most eloquent compositions, and Bumps recognized on the spot, “it was right then that I said, ‘Well, I have heard everything.’ I said, ‘Now this is really, really, really too much.’ That song went together so quick you wouldn’t believe it!”

  From that point on, Sam recalled, with the sense of someone who is merely being persuaded to do something that he already knows he secretly wants to do, Bumps never missed an opportunity to remind him that “I had the voice, the confidence, and the equipment to work as a single and that I ought to give it a try. He was constantly prodding me to make the change whenever he got the chance.” Without even being aware of it, Bumps was playing on a lesson that Sam had absorbed from childhood on. “Making a living was good enough, but what’s wrong with doing better?”

  J.W., too, was more convinced than ever that there was no other way to go. His own experience this past year only bore out this conviction. It had been a terrible year for the Pilgrim Travelers. Total record sales had dropped to a lo
w of 66,000, with just $1,350 in royalty income (compared to 157,000 sales and $3,000 in income five years earlier). In addition to which, J.W.’s lead singer, Kylo Turner, the center of a stable lineup for the past ten years, had left him. And Art Rupe, who he felt had always regarded him more as a trusted colleague than as just another act on the roster, seemed to have grown deaf to his suggestions and entreaties in the face of a market that continued to shrink even as new markets (prompted by the kind of exposure offered by the Apollo’s Gospel Caravan and Mahalia Jackson’s and Clara Ward’s increasing international celebrity) should have been opening up. Even the Soul Stirrers’ sales failed to reflect the wave of teenage hysteria that greeted Sam’s nightly appearances, and neither “Wonderful” nor “Touch the Hem of His Garment” managed to sell twenty thousand copies before the year was out.

  Herald Attractions bookings for both groups had fallen off, too, as longtime agency head Lil Cumber was forced out in June and the new girl, who was rumored to be a girlfriend of Bumps, appeared incapable of taking well-meant suggestions and in general seemed not up to the job. Alex tried to be loyal (“I have never said you made a mistake in letting Lil Cumber go,” he wrote Art some months later, “even though I hear it daily from promoters”), but the treatment that he got in return, he felt, indicated something of the seismic shift that had taken place. In September he wrote to Art from Atlanta, pleading for more support from the company but also informing Rupe as his publisher that “the new number I was telling you about by Ray Charles [“Lonely Avenue”] is really a take off of [the Travelers’] ‘I Got a New Home.’ I’d certainly like for you [to] give a listen and see about collecting royalties for us.” When he heard nothing back from Rupe, he wrote to him again at the end of the month, pointing out that the two tunes were not just similar but the same and that people, as a result “are believing it [‘Lonely Avenue’] is us and I feel we should get something out of it.” But Art failed to follow up, and J.W. simply took it as one more indication of the extent to which gospel music was being swallowed up by pop.