Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon

by Des Barres, Pamela

  In his smooth and graceful way, Sam Cooke broke down musical and racial barriers all during his career. From the age of eighteen he was the premier gospel singer before crossing over to pop. His very first record, “You Send Me,” went straight to number one. He was a brilliant songwriter, producer, and arranger, and the first black singer to walk out onstage and refuse to perform unless the concert was integrated.

  Son of devout Holiness Baptist minister Reverend Charley Cook, Sam grew up with the church as the central focus in his life. Reverend Cook’s service in Bronzeville, Illinois, was the singing, stomping, clapping, shouting kind—praising the Savior with joyous music. Sam’s mother, Annie May, sang in the choir, and by the time he could stand up, little Sam was singing for Jesus. As a very young boy, he performed with his four siblings, Hattie, Mary, Charles, and L.C., as the Singing Children, actually making a bit of money to bring home to their folks. Sometimes Sam would even sneak into the local tavern and croon along with Billie Holiday on the jukebox, grabbing a few coins on his own, always offering his take to his mother. Charley Cook took pride in the fact that his wife didn’t have to work, and Annie May was a doting mama, instilling in Sam a disarming self-confidence at a tender age. At eleven, in 1942, Sam was dunked in a large tub of water at his father’s Christ Temple Church and baptized in the Lord. Soon afterward Reverend Cook became a sort of wandering preacher, traveling to various towns with his message, taking along the Singing Children to praise Jesus in song. At a gathering in Chicago one evening, as the Children waited to sing, they were treated to a rousing performance by the top gospel group, the Soul Stirrers, and watched in silent awe.

  Sam’s younger brother, L.C., says that Sam knew from a very early age that he was never going to work nine to five. “I said, ‘What are you gonna do then, if you ain’t gonna work, Sam?’ He said, ‘I’m gonna sing.’ And he had some Popsicle sticks—you know, them wooden sticks? He had about twenty of them and he lined them sticks up, stuck ‘em in the ground, and he said, ‘This is my audience, see? I’m gonna sing to these sticks.’ He said, ‘This prepare me for my future.’ I say, ‘Man, you got to be crazy,’ and he sat there and sang to them sticks. You talking about he was nine and I was seven, and he talking about he never gonna work. And he never did.”

  Sam glided through high school with barely a ripple. Most of his fellow students at Wendell Philips High don’t even remember his junior year “First Noel” solo at the Christmas program. His real life was going on outside of school. Sam had formed a gospel group, the Teenage Highway QCs, named after the local Highway Baptist Church (nobody seems to recall what “QC” stood for). With a lot of rehearsal and determination, the a cappella group became part of the quartet circuit, traveling around to perform at different churches. Sam’s older brother, Charles, went to see the QCs when he got out of the service and was stunned by the fire in Sam’s singing. “He had me in tears, almost.”

  Sam was about to graduate and was serious about not working nine to five. The QCs hired a “trainer,” the Soul Stirrers’ R. B. Robinson, to work with them on harmony and tempo, training the ambitious Sam on lead vocals.

  A clean-cut Christian image was obviously paramount in his chosen field, but even as Sam charmed his way through the church doors, there were already signs of the ladies’ man he was to become. Although he was involved with his childhood sweetheart, Barbara Campbell, Sam got in big trouble with a girl named Georgia when her little sister found some pornography after one of Sam’s nighttime visits. Georgia’s parents called the police on the preacher’s son and he spent ninety days in jail on a morals charge. There must have been some serious shame in the family, but Sam was forgiven his transgression, and now when he sang about the devil’s temptation, it rang a little more true. The talk was that this sweet-voiced kid, Sam Cook, was not to be missed, and the next time the QCs played, they got a manager.

  Louis Tate saw the group in Detroit and took the clean-cut teenagers on. It was the beginning of a two-year road trip round and round the country. Tate says the boys were very religious—no drinking, no cursing—but that the charismatic Sam couldn’t stay away from the women—and they couldn’t stay away from him.

  It may not have been nine to five, but the QCs were working hard for very little pay, sleeping on a lot of Christian couches along the way. Sam was even more determined and had started writing his own songs, but Tate was going broke and had to get back to his family. It was about this time that the Soul Stirrers lost their lead singer, R. H. Harris, and eighteen-year-old Sam Cook grabbed the much-coveted spot. Now he had to go out and show the Lord he was a Soul Stirrer.

  With only one rehearsal, Sam’s first performance with his new group took place at his old high school, and he was wringing his hands. After only one line of lyrics, a young girl stood up and shouted, “That’s my baby! Sing, baby!” and the house came down for the first of many, many times.

  Sam was wearing fancy suits in the gospel big leagues but still had to prove he could take the place of the much-beloved Harris. With his perfect pitch and willingness to learn from the Stirrers’ manager, S. R. Crain, in no time at all he did just that. After just a month on the road, the group went to Los Angeles, where Sam would cut his first record. On March 1, 1951, the Stirrers arrived at the studio, where Art Rupe, head of Specialty Records, was surprised to find that Harris had been replaced with a teenager. But as soon as Sam started singing “Jesus Gave Me Water” with that sheer, infectious joy of his, Crain says Sam “awed Art Rupe.” One of Sam’s own songs, “Until Jesus Calls Me Home,” was recorded that day, and the Stirrers were thrilled to have a writer in their midst. “We should sing,” Sam cries, “’til Jesus calls.”

  “Jesus Gave Me Water” was the biggest hit the Stirrers had ever had and made Sam a star in the gospel world. Especially with “Sister Flute.” There was one in every congregation—the lady so caught up in the Holy Spirit that she would scream and shout “Amen” until the whole place followed suit, moaning in rapture. The rest of the Stirrers, who were in their forties, were surprised to see girls in their teens, who usually hung back, crowding down front, shouting for Sam Cook. It worried some of the older folks, who believed gospel might get caught up in the blues, but young people heard the sweet hope in Sam’s voice and women thought he was absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. Sam Moore (of Sam and Dave) recalls that when the Stirrers came to his hometown of Miami, the Christian girls swooned. “I’ve seen women just pass out wanting to get him!”

  Unbeknownst to “Sister Flute,” in 1952 Barbara Campbell had Sam’s daughter, Linda, and though Sam stayed in touch and sent money, he wasn’t ready to get married. He was having a high old time on the road. In fact, while he was in Cleveland, Sam found out he was going to have another child with a lady named Maxine.

  Early in 1953 the Stirrers pitched one of their songs too high for Sam, and when he couldn’t reach the note, he cruised under it, bending the note into something magical. The next time he did it again, adding syllables, wo-wo-wo-ing until the girls were on their knees. Sam was able to infuse people with the Holy Spirit. “It’s a fire,” said Crain about Sam’s ability to shake someone’s soul. “A fire that burns.” One soul reaching out and touching another.

  By the third Soul Stirrers album, Sam was bending notes all over the place—and he had fallen in love. It was in Fresno, California, that singer Dolores Mohawk got a load of Sam shaking the spirit out of a whole room full of people, and she wanted a closer look. A much closer look. At the end of the tour, Sam spent two weeks with Dolores, and in October they got married, settling back in Bronzeville with her five-year-old son, Joey. Barbara Campbell was not amused. She had always assumed that someday Sam would be hers. Beautiful Dolores may have landed Sam, but due to his ten months a year on the road, she rarely saw her husband.

  Because the Stirrers’ label, Specialty Records, was having a lot of success in the burgeoning pop market, Art Rupe hired Robert “Bumps” Blackwell as an A&R trainee, inviting him to a gospel sh
ow at the Shrine Auditorium. After watching the hysterical response to Sam Cook, Bumps immediately thought the soulful singer could cross over into pop music. Sam balked at the idea, fearing he would lose his religious audience, and continued with the Stirrers on tour for another year. He had written three of the group’s most recent singles—including the biggest-selling “Touch the Hem of His Garment,” while riding in the backseat, after opening to a page in the Bible that told about a sick woman who is healed by touching Jesus’s hem. Sam had the storyteller’s uncanny ability to pull people into a miracle.

  By deciding to enter the pop-music field, Sam was taking a hard-core chance with his career, but that’s where the big money could be made. “Making a living was good enough,” he said about the musical shift, “but what’s wrong with doing better than that?” Still, he recorded his first pop single, “Lovable,” in New Orleans under the assumed name “Dale Cook.” It wasn’t a hit, and the fiction fooled nobody in the gospel world. Sam would have to make a choice.

  Dolores Cook was bored and lonely most of the time, and after her desperate suicide attempt, Sam tried to make the marriage work, but his heart wasn’t in it. Said Crain, “I think he was just tired of being married. Usually when he was with a woman awhile, he didn’t want her no more. Just seems that’s the way he acted. Not only her, every woman he had.” Sam and Dolores would soon divorce.

  Sam recorded one last album with the Soul Stirrers and the song he contributed signaled the change to come. Although “That’s Heaven to Me” is still very much a religious song, it states that you can find your God right here on earth.

  On June 1, 1957, Sam cut brother L.C.’s song “You Send Me,” a sweet tale of young love laced with his breezy wo-wo-wo’s, and when the single came out on the new Keen label a few months later, it was an instant Top Ten smash. Sam was soon selling more records in a day than the Soul Stirrers sold in a year. “You Send Me” eventually reached number one and stayed on the charts for six months, eventually spawning eight covers. (Teresa Brewer’s squeaky-clean, oh-so-white imitation of Sam’s wo-wo’s was pretty damn funny.)

  All of a sudden everybody wanted Sam Cooke (he added the “e” to his name for his new start). He signed with the prestigious William Morris Agency and got a slot on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” But when Sam was cut off in mid-song due to an overlong show, African Americans bombarded the station with complaints and he was rebooked. By that time, December 1958, Sam had a new record, “For Sentimental Reasons,” and the national exposure sent him over the top. It was about this time that Sam found out he had fathered another baby, in Washington, D.C. Then, in May 1959, he was arrested on paternity charges in Philadelphia. (He settled out of court for ten thousand dollars.) The man got around!

  Sam appeared on “American Bandstand” and “The Steve Allen Show,” and with one smash after another, both on the pop and R&B charts, he was selling out shows across the country. In the world of gospel Sam hadn’t come up against the race issue, but in his new, wider role, he had to deal with prejudice and the painful problems of segregation every day. Bumps Blackwell tells of an incident at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant when he and Sam waited an awfully long time to be served. As they waited for service somebody played “You Send Me” on the jukebox and all the waitresses started swooning over Sam Cooke. “Everybody in the place swooning!” Bumps recalls, but he and Sam never got to eat dinner. Even after receiving warnings from the KKK, Sam chose to go through with an appearance on one of Dick Clark’s specials, which happened to be the first integrated audience in Atlanta. A half hour before the show there was a bomb threat, but Sam was the epitome of silky-suave cool and there was no incident. He began to let his hair go natural and take pride in his race. His fans paid attention.

  Sam never forgot his first love, Barbara Campbell, and the two became engaged in the fall of 1958. They had known each other since they were kids, and understood each other. Sam said he wanted a home and a family, but he still couldn’t seem to settle down.

  Almost no singer/songwriter owned his own publishing in 1959, but Sam started heading in that direction. He wanted complete control over his career, which was in full bloom. An avid people-watcher, Sam often said that his astute songwriting gift came from observation. He churned out more hit singles, from “Everybody Likes to Cha Cha” to “Only Sixteen,” spending his days in the studio and nights out on the town.

  Sam had stayed in close touch with his first wife, Dolores, so her death in March 1959 was a severe blow. Still despondent over her breakup with Sam, Dolores had been drinking and crashed Sam’s gift—her new Oldsmobile convertible—into a cedar tree, fracturing her skull. When he attended the funeral in Fresno, Sam was mobbed. Her death hit him hard. He sang “Somewhere There’s a Girl” to Dolores.

  The white South was torn up with racial tension. Sam was touring with the explosive Jackie Wilson, and when they reached Little Rock, Arkansas, the polite but resolute Sam told the management of the venue that unless the seating was completely integrated, he wasn’t going on. Sam went on—in fact, he was the one who walked out onstage to inform the audience that the show would not be segregated that night. In an interview with columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, Sam said, “I have always detested people of any color, religion, or nationality who have lacked courage to stand up and be counted.”

  Sam finally married Barbara Campbell in Chicago in October 1959, with his father presiding over the ceremony. The press called it “a whirlwind courtship” even though the couple had an eight-year-old daughter. Said his friend Aretha Franklin, “He wore a lot of women down when he got married. He wore me down. Ooooh, I loved him, I just loved him. That man could mess up a whole roomful of women.” He continued to mess up women. Wedding vows didn’t seem to slow Sam down.

  In January 1960 Sam signed with RCA and recorded “Chain Gang,” the first of a long string of hits with the company, but he had bigger ideas. Having already formed his own publishing company, Kags Music, Sam started his own record company, SAR (taken from the initials for his name, Sam, and those of his partners, J. W. Alexander and Roy Crain), becoming the first African American artist to own his own label.

  SAR was producing hits, but Sam’s first concern was still his own career, and he was bringing houses down all over America. Crain recalled a night at the Town Hill club in Brooklyn. “They throwed them panties,” he said. “Sam would catch them and just keep right on singing.”

  Sam was making it big. Soon after an hour-long national television special, “Sam Cooke Phenomenon,” he and Barbara moved to the West Coast and bought a house in the Hollywood Hills with a pool and a marble bar inlaid with silver dollars. They had another daughter, Tracey Samie, and finally Vincent—the son they had been hoping for—was born.

  The next few hit singles Sam recorded were about twisting the night away and swinging at parties, but one of the B sides, the passionate ballad “Bring It on Home to Me,” in which Sam trades “yeahs” with his friend Lou Rawls, defined what was about to be called “soul music.” People rightly started calling Sam “Mr. Soul.”

  Sam enjoyed spreading his money around, buying jewelry and furs for his wife, new cars for his friends. He was on a major roll, planning his first tour of Europe, when the false rumors started that he was about to die of an incurable disease. Sam made sure to show up at clubs and parties in Los Angeles, proving he was hale and hearty, but the rumors that he was dying—and leaving his eyes to Ray Charles—gave him an eerie feeling. Sam’s easygoing manner seemed to undergo a change. He started to drink a lot more and became even more restless than before. Perhaps the thoughts of death prompted Sam to go back to the safe arms of gospel. He performed at a gospel show on New Year’s Eve 1962, working his throaty sex appeal into the spirit. Sam’s agent, Jerry Brandt, recalls the night with glee. “Sam is taking off … . Right next to me, almost, this woman stands up, gives a big shake, and goes out! Lands on the floor, stretcher comes, puts her on it, take her out. I say to my wife, ‘I think she just came.’ Sh
e thinks it’s God in her soul, but this chick just had an orgasm that popped!” A few days later Sam recorded a live album at the Harlem Square Club in Miami, and Mr. Soul’s sexy, steamy nonchalance had the audience dancing and singing in the aisles. It’s without a doubt one of my top ten favorite records. Oooh, I wish I could have been there.

  Since Sam had a seemingly insatiable appetite for women, Barbara and he had “an understanding” about his many flings. The Los Angeles Times recently reported that Sam often slept with prostitutes to avoid paternity suits. “I didn’t accept what he did, but I supported him,” Barbara told the Times. No matter how unconventional the marriage seemed to be, Sam and Barbara Cooke had been through a lot together. Sam loved his wife and said he would never leave her.

  Sam was at his SAR offices, working with Mel Carter on his upcoming LP, when he got the news that his eighteen-month-old son had fallen into the swimming pool. Sam raced to the scene to find that the ambulance had already arrived. He desperately tried to revive Vincent with mouth-to-mouth, but his baby son was already gone. At the funeral Sam broke down at Vincent’s casket and had to be helped away. Friends say he was never the same again.

  Sam drank through his grief, brooding, blaming himself, blaming Barbara. True to his word, he didn’t leave his wife, but their relationship crumbled. He forced himself to work. He got a new manager, the formidable businessman Allen Klein, signed a lucrative new deal with RCA in which he was guaranteed artistic control, and went on the road.