Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Read online

  Things might have gone on like this indefinitely. The QCs occasionally felt a twinge of conscience (“We really misused Tate,” said Marvin, voicing a regret they all came to share in later years. “We walked away and left him stranded without even an explanation”), and they all continued to feel the economic pinch (“We really excelled under Itson, but one of the problems, unfortunately, was that we [still] didn’t have any money in our pockets”). But there was little doubt in any of their minds that they were headed for surefire success. Itson still had the connections, he evidently had the wherewithal, and, as they were well aware, he was fully prepared to use it. There was, in fact, no telling where it all might have ended if Itson hadn’t disappeared just around Christmastime.

  The trouble he got into had to do with apartment rentals. There had been a spate of stories in the Defender all through the fall about unscrupulous landlords swindling people through the “rent racket”—which depended on a combination of an acute housing shortage and an abundance of naïveté on the part of renters and included every form of fraud and chicanery, from taking deposits for nonexistent apartments to renting the same apartment to multiple tenants to failing to provide promised amenities and services. M. L. Itson’s most egregious crime, it was revealed sometime later, involved a case of outright kidnapping, whereby he had not only taken possession of the assets and property of a wealthy elderly widow, he had imprisoned the widow herself in the basement apartment of his own home. But the QCs knew nothing of this at the time. They only knew that on December 4, without a word of warning, he simply disappeared.

  It came as a tremendous shock. They had always suspected he was a little “shady.” They knew he was a “slickster” who was not above taking advantage of a situation or bending the rules in his favor. But to discover one day that his office was closed up and he was irrevocably gone. . . . Rumors flew all through the neighborhood; it turned out that there were something like forty “rent racket” warrants hanging over him at the time of his disappearance, and there began to be speculation about the fate of the widow whose property he was administering (and who was not actually found for well over a month, “sleeping on a filthy cot” in Itson’s basement, her personal needs and hygiene unattended to). Whatever their doubts about Itson, though, none of them had ever expected anything like this. And none of them had expected, with Christmas rapidly approaching, to find themselves in limbo once again.

  For all of the QCs it was a bitter disappointment, but for Sam in particular, who at this point could almost taste stardom, it was almost unbearable. To his brother Charles, a player by now who made his living from shooting pool and rolling dice, it was more a matter of “making money and owning Cadillacs. They was little teenagers.” Lee Richard, Sam’s co-lead, saw it pretty much the same way. “We hadn’t made any money. Christmas was coming, and Sam wanted an outfit. Sam [always] wanted to be sharp.” But to L.C., there was something else involved. It was not just the economics but the status and the opportunity that making records afforded a gospel quartet. Sam had always envisioned something more.

  Whatever the case, something happened at this point that no one could have foreseen. Sam was asked to join the Soul Stirrers as R.H. Harris’ replacement.

  HARRIS HAD QUIT THE SOUL STIRRERS some two months earlier after what appears to have been a period of considerable turmoil. He had been the heart and soul of the group from the moment he first joined, in 1937, eleven years after the group’s original founding in Trinity, Texas, by fifteen-year-old S. Roy Crain, and six years after its reformation by Crain in Houston. With his falsetto yodel, his passionate conviction, his revolutionary approach to quartet voicings (it was Harris who had introduced the concept of two contrasting vocal leads to the classic quartet formation, thereby extending membership from the conventional four to five and sometimes even six), his singing represented, as cultural historian Tony Heilbut has written, “art almost immune to criticism.” But he was also, from the time that he first joined the group, a volatile element within it, a virtuoso performer whose own opinion of himself was scarcely less than that of the most extravagant of his admirers and who, without any of the need that less accomplished individuals might be understood to feel, often shaded history to exclude or diminish the contributions of others. Still, he remained almost universally revered within the gospel community, and it would have been virtually impossible for anyone with any knowledge of that community to imagine the Soul Stirrers without their principal lead voice, particularly at this moment in their history.

  The Soul Stirrers in 1950 stood at a commercial crossroads. Newly signed to the Specialty label in Hollywood through the good offices of Pilgrim Travelers manager and tenor singer J.W. Alexander, the group had put out three releases on the label by the fall of 1950, with the first, an intense two-part version of the 1905 Charles Tindley gospel classic, “By and By,” selling twenty-six thousand copies, and the second, the equally uncompromising “I’m Still Living On Mother’s Prayer,” up to eighteen thousand on their latest royalty statement. These were good, if not great, sales figures (the Travelers by comparison had sold over 270,000 copies of all their Specialty releases in the first three quarters of 1950), but Specialty owner Art Rupe cautioned patience, pointing out that their old label, Aladdin, had sold no more than five or six thousand apiece of the last few Soul Stirrers releases and that “as you get more records out on the SPECIALTY label, you will build your name up again to where it once was.”

  Specialty had just set up its own booking agency, Herald Attractions, and with the promise of better-paying dates and the addition, in late 1949, of a new second lead, Paul Foster, as hard-driving as anyone other than Archie Brownlee (and capable of stirring Harris on to even greater heights), the Soul Stirrers appeared to be facing the prospect—or at least the possibility—of a second golden age. That was why Harris’ departure was as much of a shock to his own group as it was to the general public.

  There were three principal theories for that departure. The first was the one propounded by Harris himself, who was generally recognized as being among the most “conscientious” and strictly religious of the spiritual singers. As J.W. Alexander, who would almost certainly have characterized himself as a more worldly man, said, “Harris really believed in what he was doing; he didn’t like to joke about it.” Or as Harris himself said to Tony Heilbut, “The moral aspects of the thing just fell into the water. The singers . . . felt they could do anything they wanted.”

  Others viewed the matter somewhat differently. Some opined that with a paternity suit hanging over him in Cleveland, Harris was in no position to be self-righteous about the moral pitfalls of the road and that Cleveland was too important a market to be shut out of.

  A third opinion took heed of both of the others and, without necessarily negating either, suggested that, as in almost everything else, politics was at the bottom of it all. Harris, as the acknowledged star of the Soul Stirrers and the single element anyone might view as indispensable, was “pulling a power play” in the eyes of more than one of his contemporaries, quite simply angling for a bigger piece of the pie for himself.

  Harris certainly knew as well as anyone that gospel was at the dawn of a new, and considerably more affluent, age. On October 8 gospel music had come to Carnegie Hall for the first time in the person of Mahalia Jackson and the Ward Singers—but with offers having been tendered to the Soul Stirrers and the Pilgrim Travelers as well. An article was just about to come out in the December 1950 issue of Ebony, the Afro-American version of Life magazine, which would characterize the Soul Stirrers as “the top gospel group in the country” in a text that celebrated gospel music culturally and historically as not only “the greatest contribution of the Negro to the rich musical lore of the U.S.” but also a commercial format in which “gospel singers are earning more today than many crooners or blues singers.” In such a climate it would not have been difficult for Rebert Harris to imagine that he was holding a winning hand in seeking merely to be rewar
ded in a manner commensurate with his talents.

  Whatever the explanation, and however exactly it was done (Harris always remembered announcing it at a program at DuSable in the fall, though, he was quick to point out, he had told the other members of the group a year earlier, “but they didn’t believe me”), Harris’ resignation, once proffered, was immediately accepted. And S.R. Crain, the no-nonsense founder and business manager of the Soul Stirrers, wasted no time finding a replacement. After trying out Paul Foster as first lead singer for no more than two months, Crain determined that for all of the passion of his singing and for all of his brilliance in the second lead’s role as instigator and foil, Foster lacked both the temperament and imagination to keep the Soul Stirrers on the path that Harris had first set for them. That was when he got in touch with Sam.

  It no longer mattered at this point whether he and the other Soul Stirrers had ever actually been jealous of the QCs, as the brash young quartet always believed. The idea that Crain might have planted R.B. Robinson in their midst as a hedge against the day when Harris’ ego would inevitably overcome his talent had never even occurred to them. What Crain was first and foremost, though, the QCs all recognized, was a good businessman. And, not surprisingly, he came to their lead singer now, unbeknownst to the rest of them, with a straightforward business proposition.

  It was certainly a logical avenue to pursue. Sam knew all of the Soul Stirrers’ songs, not just from R.B. Robinson’s coaching but because of his own unqualified love for the music. And the timing was certainly right, with Itson on the lam and the QCs in turmoil. Crain invited Sam to his apartment at 542 East Forty-fifth Street almost surreptitiously in the dead of night. They ran through a few numbers, and then Crain asked him to sing W. H. Brewster’s “How Far Am I From Canaan?,” a number the Soul Stirrers were thinking about recording that Crain was unaware Sam had learned in Memphis from the Reverend Brewster himself. Crain started the song, the other Soul Stirrers fell in behind, and then Sam took it, “he did it precisely and better,” in Crain’s recollection, “and with his own style!” In Crain’s further recollection, there was a second audition that same evening, with Reverend Leroy Taylor, a longtime member of the Norfolk Singers who had sung on and off with the Soul Stirrers for the last couple of years, but if there was, it was a perfunctory affair. There was no longer any question about it: Sam Cook was Crain’s boy.

  The next day Sam came back to the house in the Stirrers’ new Packard with five suits Crain had just bought him for their upcoming tour. L.C.’s reaction was one of unrestrained admiration. “I said, ‘Man, you’re looking good. I wish I could go with you.’”

  The reaction from the QCs and their fans was nowhere near as benign. Even Sam’s fifteen-year-old sister, Agnes, felt more than a little betrayed. “Oh, I was hurt, because the QCs were my group—I really related to them. We were all about the same age, we went to the same school, we grew up together. I felt that he was deserting them, and I really didn’t like it.”

  The QCs liked it even less. They saw R.B. as a turncoat, someone they had trusted as a friend but who, they now felt, was nothing but a backstabber. More than that, they were disappointed and puzzled by Sam. They could understand the profit motive—even Agnes could concede that—but they felt almost as betrayed by the secretive manner in which Sam had come to his decision as by the decision itself. They simply couldn’t fathom how someone as articulate as Sam Cook, someone as sure of himself and his actions, almost to the point of arrogance, could fail to even inform them that he was leaving. Instead, he came to them one at a time under cover of confidentiality and discussed the possibility of his departure as if it were no more than a theoretical proposition.

  To Marvin he posed the question outright. “We had a program at 3140 South Indiana, Reverend Childs’ church. We were sitting in the car talking, and he said, ‘Hey, Marvin, if you had a chance to go to the Soul Stirrers, what would you do?’ Well, I didn’t know it was a loaded question, so I said, ‘Man, if I had a chance to go with the Soul Stirrers, I’d leave in the morning.’ And that’s exactly what he did. And we were very, very close, we was [practically] in the same skin.”

  He approached Lee and Jake Richard in much the same way. Lee always remembered how Sam showed up in a brand-new pair of cowhide shoes and a new pair of pants that Lee later presumed the Soul Stirrers had bought for him. “He said, ‘I got something I got to ask you on. I want y’all’s opinion.’ He said, ‘What y’all think of me singing with the Soul Stirrers?’” But he never came right out and said he was going to do it.

  Creadell, like the rest of them, knew that Harris had left the Soul Stirrers, and he had even heard that Sam was rehearsing with them, “but I didn’t give much credence to that, because the Highway QCs were the center of Sam’s life—we were a group, and none of us ever thought beyond the group. Then Jake came and told me. That’s about all I can remember—I don’t remember Sam ever coming to the group and saying anything. But I know we were all just devastated.”

  Reverend Cook alone saw no ambiguity in the situation. Sam came to him for advice, “and I told him, ‘Anytime you can make a step higher, you go higher. Don’t worry about the other fellow. You hold up for other folks, and they’ll take advantage of you.’ The only way that he could prove [himself] was to get with somebody that was going somewhere. And the Soul Stirrers were, boy, they were—no matter that they tried to snub him, wouldn’t let him sing [when he was with the QCs].” To Reverend Cook it was a simple matter of economics. It was a question of making a living. Sam wasn’t singing to save souls. There was only one way to save souls, and spiritual singing was not it. Spiritual singing, like every other earthly pursuit, was only a means to an end.

  Soul Stirring

  The Soul Stirrers were very well named. They tried to get [that] feeling, emphasized and built themselves up on soul-stirring—slower singing, very melismatic. That’s why Sam was the way he was. Sam was shaped in large measure by the Soul Stirrers during their rehearsals. He reacted to them as they pushed him, like a good rhythm section inspires an instrumentalist . . .

  — Art Rupe

  SAM COOK HAD EVERY REASON to be nervous, but he didn’t overtly betray it. He remained silent, watchful, polite, while label owner Art Rupe and Soul Stirrers manager Roy Crain debated his presence in the small rehearsal studio at Specialty Records, at 8508 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, a day or two before the Soul Stirrers’ scheduled March 1 recording session.

  Rupe, a balding, bespectacled, tautly controlled and ambitious man with a passion for organization and an unwavering belief in his own carefully worked-out plans and principles, was furious. Despite the fact that the Soul Stirrers had been out on the Coast for the past two and one-half weeks for a series of programs with the Pilgrim Travelers, the thirty-two-year-old Rupe had heard not one word from Crain about changes in the group’s lineup. Where was Harris? he demanded of Crain again and again. It was Harris who had signed the contract; it was Harris who was the draw. Surely Crain could understand that. The group’s record sales on the Aladdin label were at a standstill when they first came to him a little more than a year ago, but he had signed them because of his belief in their lead singer. Who was this kid Crain had brought into the studio? Crain was crazy to have permitted Harris to leave. Maybe they should just postpone the session until Crain could get him to return.

  Sam and Lou Rawls, ca. 1952.

  Courtesy of Barbara Cooke and ABKCO

  Crain, a stolid-looking, full-faced, dark-complexioned man of thirty-nine with an abundance of “mother wit” and a pragmatic streak that led him never to challenge authority in a situation in which he did not hold the upper hand, explained patiently that it wasn’t a matter of his letting Harris go, that he had, in fact, argued against it, but Harris had plans of his own—and, besides, this kid could sing. And if Art didn’t want to believe him, he should ask Alexander, who had been out with them off and on for the last three months.

  Thirty-five-year-old J.W. (James
Woodie) Alexander, variously known as J.W., Jim, Jimmy, Alex, Alec, or Elec, depending on race, gender, occasion, or regional accent, was not as reluctant as Crain to interpose himself in the argument. A tall, soft-spoken, elegantly dressed man with a polished bearing, a deceptively deferential manner of speech, a pealing, high-pitched laugh, and a shock of prematurely gray hair, Alexander had in effect served as advisor and scout for Rupe ever since bringing his group, the Pilgrim Travelers, to the label on the eve of the Musicians Union strike that began on January 1, 1948. Like every other label owner, Rupe frantically stockpiled all the sides he could in the weeks preceding the announced strike, but a cappella quartet singing, he quickly realized, could be a way of getting around the recording ban altogether, since singers were subject to neither union membership nor rules. For the full year that the strike continued, Rupe added to his gospel catalogue and discovered to his surprise that gospel music sold—perhaps not in numbers that could match a big r&b hit, but with a steadier buildup and a longer life span—to an audience whose loyalty ensured that they would not only buy the latest record release but continue to purchase a favorite quartet’s back catalogue for years to come.

  Alexander had proved himself to the young record company owner again and again, first with the label’s two biggest-selling gospel numbers up till that time, “Jesus Met the Woman at the Well” and “Mother Bowed,” both of which had sold over 120,000 copies, then by steering such gospel stars as the Soul Stirrers, Brother Joe May, and the Gospel Harmonettes in Specialty’s direction. Alex never directly challenged his label “boss,” but he always got his point across. And Rupe always listened.

  Alexander’s message on this occasion was very simple. He had been out with the Soul Stirrers since early December, he had witnessed the kid’s very first performance in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, an inauspicious debut by some standards but a program that proved not only the kid’s talent but his mettle. He had faith, he told Rupe, in the unique qualities of communication that this boy had exhibited from the time that Alexander had first spotted him two years earlier at the Young Men’s Christian Club in Chicago, Illinois.