Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Read online

  Sam should also be concentrating on a better and stronger follow-up record, with stronger material. I am also looking and filing away what I feel Sam can do. I would like to know Sam’s availability, and will be back in New Orleans (tentatively) around the 1st of February.

  The release date has not been set on the record—but it will be soon—within three or four weeks.

  Musically yours

  There is no record of Bill Cook’s reaction, but J.W. by now had lost almost all faith in both Art and the record company. “Dear Mr. Rupe,” he wrote from Detroit, on January 22, in a pained lapse into formal expression, “I really hate to make myself a nuisance but things have been going very poor for my group.” They had not worked more than 30 percent of their usual schedule, and “it definitely is not because [lead singer Kylo] Turner isn’t with us.” What they needed, said Alex, was a new release to promote their personal appearances, since in this business “everything is tied together [and] if you miss on one, you’ll hit on the other. [In any case] the group would certainly appreciate your consideration and suggestions on how to better our situation very much.”

  He may have regretted asking the question, because on January 24 Art wrote to him care of Newark gospel promoter Ronnie Williams and unloaded feelings that must have been festering for some time. “Here are the facts of life as they exist and you might as well face up to it,” Rupe declared with little regard for the social niceties.

  (1) You are not acceptable as the lead singer and should forget about singing lead—particularly on records.

  (2) Turner is most definitely missed and many promoters refused to even book you without Turner. As a matter of fact some promoters who have played you without Turner refuse to have you back because they feel they were gypped and you don’t draw without him.

  The solution, Art concluded, was obvious: “Either get Turner back and make some good records or do it the hard way with a new lead singer like the Stirrers did with Sam Cook when he first joined them. We have released more records on you, Alex, than on any artist and frankly we do not have anything on the shelf at the moment good enough to do you any good. Hoping that you appreciate the honesty of this letter, I am, Yours very sincerely . . . ”

  “It was very kind of you to take time out to answer my letter,” Alex replied with even more strained politeness, rebutting Art’s points one by one and suggesting that if Herald Attractions would release him from his booking contract, he could perhaps do better on his own. He pointed out, too, as he had in his last letter, that “I have a very good [young] lead singer and some very good material.

  But if you feel that the group is no longer any service to you, please let me know. . . . Please remember Art that my loyalty and personal feeling for you is definitely the reason that I didn’t always operate on the best business principles with you. The fellows would like to know. Please let me know by return mail.

  What hurt even more was the knowledge that Bumps, who could have been an effective ally and whose own agenda Alex had always helped to advance, whatever his personal reservations, had stabbed him in the back and was even now trying to lure Turner into signing a solo contract. (“Sam Cook’s release in the other field will be going out soon,” Bumps wrote to Kylo on January 4. “I am interested in recording you—POP or otherwise—depending on material.”) But Bumps, he had long ago concluded, was a lost cause; Bumps looked out only for himself—and even in that regard, Alex felt, he had a limited perspective.

  Ironically, Art had no more faith in his number-one employee, who, he was increasingly coming to believe, was not so much malevolent as “just dumb and naive.” He had checked up on Bumps’ credentials in September and discovered no record of degree credits at either of the schools he had claimed to attend. He had stated emphatically in his notes for Bumps’ new contract of five months earlier that Bumps would “personal manage only those I approve—will drop all others [including Little Richard],” and that his 5 percent management fee on Art’s preapproved list would be split fifty-fifty between the two of them. But this was just to protect himself from Bumps’ overreaching. For all of his doubts about Bumps, they continued to share a similar vision of the future, and Bumps, despite his transparent scheming, remained surprisingly malleable to the stringent demands of a boss he continued to call “Pappy.”

  In fact, if Art mistrusted anyone, it was Sam Cook, who was clearly playing both ends against the middle with Bumps, Bill Cook, Crain, and, for all Art knew, even poor old Alex. He had observed Cook closely from the beginning, and he had never had the feeling for him that he had had for Crain or Alex or even Alex Bradford, whose inventive attempts to take advantage of his employer amused Art as much as they annoyed him. Other artists like Brother Joe May might blow up over one vexed issue or another, but Art, a nonbeliever, had always been able to palliate them with bromides about their all being “creatures of the Creator [with no] barrier of me being the boss or of us being of different shades of skin.” Or reassure Brother Joe that since “you know that we are in your corner, and we know that you are in ours,” they should both be patient and “wait for the success and rewards that God intended for both of us.” Even Alex, who prided himself on his business acumen, always folded when enough patient pressure was applied. But Sam gave away very little of what he was thinking, he was “an intense guy, and he gave the impression of being a little bit cocky, very sure of himself. Prove it! You gotta show him.” When you talked to him, “he didn’t give an appearance of being nervous . . . he’d really listen and look like he was taking in impressions with his pores as well as with his eyes and ears.” He was, Art felt, a genuine “enigma. He had two sides, his talent and his character.” And given how little of himself Sam ever revealed in his dealings with more experienced colleagues and mentors, the Specialty Records boss had genuine misgivings about the latter. But “his talent was unique and unusual,” and as a businessman with confidence in his own unique and unusual qualities, Art felt he had little choice but to forge ahead.

  The Soul Stirrers had misgivings of their own. Crain was concerned about the group’s dwindling record sales, and by now he was well aware of Sam’s pop session, so when Sam started lobbying for an Imperial LeBaron, the new luxury model with the decorative spare on the back, he was understandably reluctant to jump right on his lead singer’s request. “It was the first year they put it out,” Crume said. “It was different than any car on the street, and Sam fell in love with that car, he wanted it in eggshell-white.”

  The other Soul Stirrers were no more sanguine about Sam than Crain at this point. They had all seen him hanging around with Bill Cook, and Tony Williams of the Platters appeared to be offering him plenty of advice. But they all tiptoed around the subject until R.B. Robinson brought it up in a group meeting. “Now, Sam,” he said, “if you’re going to stay with us, we can do it. But if you’re not going to be here, man, you know those are big-time car notes —” But Sam just said, “Hey, man, I ain’t going nowhere. Where am I going?” So they got the car, and many nights Sam got to keep it, and he would come by Crume’s house, “and he would say, ‘Hey, man, let’s go for a ride.’ Just to show off. He’d say, ‘I’ll tell you what. Today you be the chauffeur, man, and tomorrow I’ll drive for you.’ And we’d drive down State Street, wouldn’t talk to anybody, just wanted to be seen.”

  Even Crume was beginning to feel uncertain about Sam, though. The way Sam was talking, it was difficult for anyone to tell what exactly he was going to do next. Looking at a magazine with Paul Foster, he pointed to a picture of Harry Belafonte, whose calypso-flavored “Banana Boat Song (Day-O)” was currently in the Top 10, and said, “I want to be just like [him].” To Morgan Babb, leader of the Radio Four gospel quartet, he declared, “I just want to make some money.” But to others, like Oakland piano and organ player Faidest Wagoner, he seemed to indicate unfeigned ambivalence. It was almost as if he were trying to conduct an external argument with himself. And when he went to his father for advice, Reverend Cook
offered the same reassuring encouragement he had always offered his children: “Whatever you strive to be, be the best at it.” Which was, really, no answer at all.

  “Lovable” (backed with “Forever”) was officially released on January 31, with a black male chorus overdubbed clumsily on both sides. It got a lukewarm reception in the trades (the material was weak, Billboard wrote in its March 9 issue, though new Specialty artist Dale Cook made a “personable debut [with] the church touches he injects into his style”) and sold no better than recent Soul Stirrers’ releases, but there was no question that it made a declaration from which it was going to be difficult to retreat. Everyone knew it was Sam, and the diverse reaction within the gospel community merely indicated the inevitability of the choice he was going to have to make. To Clarence Fountain of the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, it was just “a little penny-ante” kind of a record but “a big let-down in the gospel field.” To fifteen-year-old Aretha Franklin, who had worshipped Sam ever since she had first heard him sing with the Soul Stirrers at her father’s New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit and was now out on the gospel road herself as “the World’s Youngest National Gospel Singer,” it didn’t come in any way as a shock; in fact, it took its place immediately among her girlfriends’ and her all-time favorites. And Gatemouth Moore, who had put the QCs on the radio in Memphis in 1949, introduced the song on his gospel program on WEDR in Birmingham. But this would not by any means have been the typical reaction within the gospel world.

  Quartet singers and fans up and down the gospel highway tried desperately to dissuade Sam from pursuing this new path. And not just gospel singers. When the Soul Stirrers came to Atlanta on March 24, 1957, pioneering white DJ and r&b station owner Zenas Sears (it was Sears who had set up the recording session in Atlanta for Ray Charles’ breakthrough hit, “I Got a Woman”) did everything he could to “talk Sam out of it. Preston York [Sears’ “valued friend and advisor” and lead singer for the Reliable Jubilee Four] and I spent four hours, all afternoon, trying to persuade him. ‘You can go on forever doing what you’re doing, you can go on forever. Now you’re gonna switch, you’re shooting dice, you may not make it.’” Sam seemed to listen politely, Sam was always polite, “the nicest guy in the world,” but Zenas was not at all sure that what he said had registered. Nor in retrospect was he convinced it should have.

  “There was a whispering campaign going on,” J.W. Alexander observed. “He was ostracized, and he was hurt. One night in Tuscaloosa I said to him, ‘Hold your goddamn head up and go out there and sing.’ I said, ‘They’ll accept you. If anybody says anything, you sing.’”

  Next to what Sam himself was going through, it was worst for the Soul Stirrers, who, seemingly in a collective state of denial, tried to reassure the public of something about which they could no longer help but have the gravest doubts themselves. One time, Crume remembered, they were at a radio station to promote their show, and the announcer asked Sam on the air, “Are you going to do ‘Lovable’ tonight?” Crain and the other Stirrers were beside themselves, they were certain the effect on the program would be devastating, but their audience was as enthusiastic as ever that night. Another time, a promoter said, “Sam, you really, really goofed. Everybody knows it’s you.” But Sam just said it was his brother, without even batting an eye. At one of the regular stops on their tour, they were riding down the street listening to the radio, when the DJ played “Lovable” and announced, “That was Dale Sam Cook.” Shaken, Crume turned to Sam and said, “Sam, man, everybody knows,” and that night at the program, the MC introduced “Dale Sam Cook and the Soul Stirrers.” There were “real tears” in the eyes of their fans, Crume said, “grown men and women.” And yet Crume still could not believe that Sam was actually going to leave. “I saw no reason for it. We were drawing good crowds, making good money, we really had that magnetic touch. And I just didn’t think it could get any better.”

  Sam continued to have doubts of his own. He indicated to Bumps that he was ready to abandon the whole experiment, but Bumps put him off, saying, “If this [record] doesn’t make it, just give me one more chance, and if that doesn’t make it, we’ll go whole hog for the gospel field.” They shook on it, but to Bumps, Sam’s state of mind remained “dubious,” and Art’s state of mind was, if anything, even worse. To Bumps, practically at war now with his employer on a variety of financial and artistic issues, Art was little more than a “frightened businessman, any opposition whatsoever and he would pull in. So when he received various knocks from the gospel disc jockeys, he stopped the push, [and ‘Lovable’] died on the vine.”

  Art, unquestionably cautious, and certainly a businessman, would have described the situation differently. He was dissatisfied not just with the sales but with the quality of the product, and after analyzing the record, “I decided Sam would sell better if instead of a funky band accompaniment [and overdubbed chorus] we used a male quartet similar to his successful Soul Stirrer records.” He felt that “the contrapuntal effect of Sam’s delicate tenor against the strong male backing would be unique in the pop field.” Nor was he going to permit Sam and Bumps to go back to New Orleans. If he sanctioned another pop session at all—and he was still not certain of his feelings on the subject—they would record in Los Angeles, and under his direct supervision. Bumps kept talking to him abut Sam being another Morton Downey. “I said, ‘Morton Downey has been gone a long time.’ I had no idea [if] he would make it in the secular field.”

  The Stirrers returned to the studio in Chicago on April 19. Originally scheduled for February 21, the session had had to be postponed when the drummer Crain hired to join Chicago gospel keyboard stalwarts Evelyn Gay and Willie Webb turned out to be a union member and threatened to report to the union that his two fellow musicians were not. This time Crain was not taking any chances and got Sam’s brother L.C. to keep time (“No, I never did play no drums; Sam just asked me, ‘Keep the beat for me, bro’”).

  It was, all in all, a highly successful outing, with the achievement of six solid masters in three hours, including two fine leads by Paul Foster and three originals by Sam. Paul’s numbers may very well have served as a kind of safeguard against a possibility that no one was willing to openly admit, but Sam’s compositions were marked by so much sincerity, and were of so uniformly high a standard, that it would have been hard at the time to concede that such a possibility could even exist. “That’s Heaven to Me” proved that gospel could actually be pop as Sam sang feelingly of “A little flower that blooms in May / A lovely sunset at the end of the day / Someone helping a stranger along the way / That’s heaven to me” in so pure a tenor, and with so romantic a tone, that no one—and everyone—could doubt his intent. “Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)?” was, obviously, more overtly religious, a variation on the traditional gospel theme, but once again sung with such passion, originality, and intimacy of tone (“A fella said, ‘I want you to tell me, If you were there, kindly tell me / I wonder did He really hang there / And never say a mumbling word’”) as to turn all concepts of the limitations of the form on their head. And “Mean Old World,” which according to Crain had become the Stirrers’ new “theme song,” while very much a traditional blues and gospel plaint, was presented here with so improbable a sense of cheerful uplift as to defy categorization, a classic example in other words of exactly the kind of song that Art and Bumps were looking for, one that, with a change of a word or two, could take its place instantly on the pop charts.

  On April 20 Crain wrote to Art, “Hope you like [the] songs. I will be ready to record again in August. We are working on something now.”

  Barely one week later Sam wrote to Bumps, saluting him either jokingly or inadvertently as “Hi Bumbs,” and including a tape. “Enclosed you’ll find the songs I was telling you about,” he began. “The only music I used was the guitar and I’m playing that. I hope you get a rough idea of what the songs are like.”

  The songs that he had demoed were “I’ll Come Running Back to You
,” the Bill Cook composition that he had recorded both in New York and New Orleans the previous year; a new approach to “Summertime,” the George Gershwin standard; and four originals, “You Were Made For Me,” “I Need You Now,” and “I Don’t Want to Cry” (all three of which he had recorded at Cosimo’s studio in New Orleans), plus “You Send Me,” a song he had been trying to get L.C. to record for Vee Jay with his group the Magnificents. Of the six, “I’ll Come Running Back to You” and “I Don’t Want to Cry” (both of which he had recorded at the Nola Studio in New York as well as in New Orleans), were the two “I definitely want to do,” and all were accompanied by a guitar that merely hinted at a melody, sometimes failing to do even that, with Sam’s voice carrying the entire burden of communication. It is almost as if one were listening to Sam playing his ukelele in the car with Crume, with the guitar tuned to an open chord and Sam sliding into very imperfect barred sixths to sketch in those “ice cream chords.”

  “I’m going to New York on Saturday May 4,” Sam concluded the body of his letter. “If by then you’ve decided on the songs you want me to do, I could get in touch with this fellow ‘Obie Masingill’ [Bill Cook’s arranger] and go over the songs with him. Anyway I’ll call you Friday morning.”

  Bumps’ reply is not recorded, but its import was clear. There was no way he wanted to see Bill Cook back in the picture, even through the agency of O. B. Masingill. “I hit the ceiling, and I ran to Art, and I said, ‘All right, let’s go all [out].’” And then he must have informed Sam, whether by phone or by letter, that yes, there was going to be a session but that it was going to take place in L.A.