Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke

by Peter Guralnick

  I have tried to portray a little bit of that world, the world of Dorothy Love Coates and the Gospel Harmonettes and Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington and Zora Neale Hurston, a community whose closeness was reinforced, as Baldwin underscores, not simply by a cultural legacy but by a cruel and systematic exclusion that led nearly all African-Americans to find refuge in the same neighborhoods, the same schools, the same eating establishments and hotel accommodations. That is one of the reasons that Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and James Baldwin, Louis Armstrong, Martin Luther King Jr., Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, and Fidel Castro all play greater or lesser roles in this story. My aim, my hope, is to suggest some of the richness and diversity of this proudly self-contained society, some of the sense of self-delight and self-discovery that Sam Cooke’s own life and work continue to embody, even set against a bitter backdrop of prejudice and discrimination. At the heart of the story is a man who, while creating some of the most memorable pop songs of a generation, in addition to a universally recognized civil rights anthem, was himself as complex, uncategorizable, and sometimes unreadable as his work was transparent. Exploring this hidden side of Sam Cooke was as much of a challenge, and as rewarding in its own way, as seeking out some of the vanished touchstones of a world all but lost to mainstream history.

  “There is one terrible thing,” said the filmmaker Jean Renoir, speaking ironically of the imperative of art in The Rules of the Game, “and that is that everyone has his reasons.” But that, of course, is the one glorious thing, too. It is the human comedy (the human drama) that continues to fascinate both in life and in art. The Sam Cooke that I discovered was a constant surprise, as charismatic, as charming and adroit as the man that I had imagined but no more without flaws than anyone you might happen to meet. People sometimes ask: don’t the flaws bother you? But I had no interest in whitewashing either Sam Cooke or his surroundings. In the words of Lithofayne Pridgon, a friend of Sam’s who was later celebrated for her relationship with Jimi Hendrix, I wasn’t looking for any “wonderful white picket fence” or picture-postcard view. I don’t think real life, or real art, stems from that. I wanted to be true to a world that celebrated life in all its variegated glory, to a community that never failed to acknowledge that without sin there is no salvation, that if we deny human nature we deny the only truth to which we have access.

  What was most extraordinary about Sam Cooke was his capacity for learning, his capacity for imagination and intellectual growth. With his friend J.W. Alexander he started his own record label and publishing company, probably the first such enterprise fully controlled by a black artist. Toward the end of his life he set out to develop young African-American talent in South Central L.A. with what was intended to be a series of rehearsal studios, the first of which he dubbed Soul Station #1. His success was predicated on what his brother L.C. called “second sight,” which might be another way of describing his ability to read people and situations with both an empathetic instinct and an analytic cast of mind. He absorbed every lesson that was put in front of him, but his pride in where he came from would not permit him to be defined in anyone’s terms but his own.

  “I don’t even know why I do what I do,” Sam said to the young singer Bobby Womack. “When I do it, it just comes.” And that’s the way his music still sounds: as fresh, as elegant, as full of mirth, sadness, and surprise as when it first emerged, translating somehow across the ages in ways that have little to do with calculation or fashion and everything to do with spontaneity of feeling, with a kind of purity of soul. That’s the Sam Cooke I’ve sought to describe: that rare individual whose horizons kept expanding right up till the day he died. He was always moving on to the next thing. He was always looking forward to the next chapter. And he was always looking to take anyone with him who was ready to go.

  Prologue: “The QCs Are in the House”

  There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. . . . I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church. . . . Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt . . . when the church and I were one.

  — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

  SIX NEATLY GROOMED, well-dressed young men, sixteen, seventeen years old, the oldest might have been eighteen, slipped quietly into the back of the church.

  There they stand, poised, looking out over the heads of the congregation, with only the teenage five- or six-member gospel quartet onstage (with two lead singers, a modern gospel “quartet” rarely limits itself to four) aware of their presence.

  The Sunday program that is under way is the same one taking place at any number of Chicago’s nearly one thousand black churches large and small, from humble storefronts to cathedral-like edifices; the music that swells the air is the same music you might hear at any one of the hundreds of thousands of Negro churches across the country. But Chicago is the hub of the brand-new gospel movement sweeping the nation. Mahalia Jackson, whose Christmas 1947 release, “Move On Up a Little Higher,” has for the first time won her national recognition and established her indisputably as the “Queen of Gospel,” calls Chicago her home and may be seen every Sunday at Greater Harvest or Greater Salem Baptist Church or the First Church of the Deliverance or St. Luke Baptist, where for a time she coached the choir. She may, in fact, be in the house on this particular Sunday afternoon.

  The most influential gospel quartet in the country, the Soul Stirrers, so called not just for the effect they have on their audience but for the emotion they reach down for in themselves, have been permanent residents of the South Side for most of the past decade. Robert Anderson, Sallie Martin, Thomas A. Dorsey (father of the new, more emotive gospel style and composer of such classics as “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “The Lord Will Make a Way Somehow”), the Roberta Martin Singers, and a host of others, including dozens of eager young teenage quartets whose dreams of stardom center not on the secular stage but on the church, have all flourished in Chicago, their numbers fed by the stream of black migrants from the South that has poured in steadily since the twenties and in ever-increasing numbers in the three years since the end of the war. Indeed, the Soul Stirrers’ lead singer, R.H. Harris, whose characteristic delivery, a falsetto “yodel” of unrelenting drama and intensity, has been said to have moved more souls than the weight of scores of uninspired Sunday sermons, is so prominent a figure that he was elected “Mayor of Bronzeville,” an honorific proclamation of self-identity, by Chicago’s South Side in 1945.

  With or without material reward, with or without popular renown, this is a music that seeks at once to embrace and rise above earthly experience. It is the music that has provided hope and succor in the face of what has seemed at times a cruel and hopeless burden, “good news in bad times,” as it has been characterized, “a new song,” in W. E. B. DuBois’ vivid evocation, “America’s one gift to beauty [and] slavery’s one redemption, distilled from the dross of its dung.”

  The six boys who have taken their place at the back of the church know nothing of this—or perhaps they do, perhaps they know it all—but they would never attempt to articulate it, they would be embarrassed to hear it described in such abstract, intellectual, and highfalutin terms. The “fire and excitement” is what they feel; it’s what they set out to draw from their audience whenever they take the stage, teasing the congregation with practiced, easeful moves, teasing something out of themselves by digging deeper, and then deeper still, until they, too, are transported by what one-time boy preacher James Baldwin described as “a freedom . . . close to love.”

  Three are preachers’ boys themselves; two of these are brothers whose father assistant-pastors the Highway Missionary Baptist Church in a storefront on Thirty-third Street. Little Marvin Jones, the baritone singer with the lopsided grin, has the kind of pugnacious t
enacity that would be necessary to persuade a quartet to take on a second baritone voice when the father of the first, Charles Copeland, founded and continues to coach the group. Marvin’s own uncle, Eugene Smith, is manager and co-lead singer of the highly influential Roberta Martin Singers. Jake Richard, the older of the two brothers, has matinee-idol good looks and cuts a broad swath through the growing company of teenage girls who follow the group from church to church. They are all polite, clean-cut, fresh-faced, dressed in matching gray suits and carefully knotted ties, with patterned handkerchiefs peeking out from their breast pockets. It is no wonder that they are everybody’s darlings, young and old, “Mahalia’s boys,” recognized and frequently called upon to sing a number whenever they show up at one of her programs. But there is one boy in particular who stands out, one boy who, without saying a word, clearly exerts authority—by his calm, by his bearing, by the quiet self-assurance that emanates from his person. He seems at the same time to offer an invitation to anyone within range of his warm, inviting smile, he clearly possesses the kind of easy grace that cannot be practiced or assumed. This is Sam Cook, the other preacher’s son, boyish, slender, his pomaded hair rising in carefully gathered waves.

  It is at his signal that the six boys leave their place at the back of the church, march briskly up the aisle, and take their seats, arms defiantly crossed, in the very front row. Throughout the building the cry goes up, “The QCs are in the house, the QCs are in the house.” The hapless group onstage—perhaps it is the Crume Brothers or the Holy Wonders or the Teenage Kings of Harmony (And Their Queen)—know that they will have to call the unwanted arrivals up for a song, but they are not even given the chance. The six boys in the front row take advantage of the momentary lull and, at the prompting of their leader, hit a number while still sitting down.

  It is all over the instant they take the stage. The group’s harmonies are like the Soul Stirrers’ in many respects, and they sing much of the older group’s repertoire. But the warmth and magnetism that the principal lead singer brings to the songs, the disarmingly seductive tone that he establishes from the start, is something altogether different from anything that has been heard in quartet singing to date. He caresses the songs with a voice that is at once smooth, insistent, and utterly beguiling, despite its occasional adolescent tendency to break. The six voices blend and separate, creating intricate harmonies that set off the lead and fill the church with music, in classic quartet fashion, without benefit or need of any instrumental accompaniment. But it is clear that all eyes are focused on the lead singer, even in between songs as he stands poised for a moment biting his lower lip, then leans his head back, closes his eyes, and launches into the familiar melody of “There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood,” “The Lord’s Prayer,” or “He Knows How Much We Can Bear.” Somehow the atmosphere is transformed, and the sensuality in the air is almost palpable. As one young girl who saw him a few years later would recall, “He was just singing from his heart, not trying to get you to shout all over the place. He was there to sing and give you the word of God, and you just knew it, you felt it. You didn’t have to scream and carry on”—you just kind of melted. “Sam was like a magnet,” Lou Rawls, one of the Teenage Kings of Harmony, could reflect with perhaps greater appreciativeness in later years. “Wherever he went, whether or not he was singing, the minute he walked into a room, you knew he was there. You always wanted to be around him, just for the fall-out.”

  The Singing Children

  Let me tell you a story on Sam. Sam was always ambitious. He always knew exactly what he wanted to do. When we was very little boys, we were playing, and he had these popsicle sticks—you know them little wooden sticks? He had about twenty of them, and he lined them sticks up, stuck ’em in the ground, and said, “This is my audience, see? I’m gonna sing to these sticks.” He said, “This prepare me for my future.” Another time he said, “Hey, C., you know what?” I said, “What?” He said, “I figured out my life, man.” He said, “I’m never gonna have a nine-to-five job.” I said, “What you mean, Sam?” He said, “Man, I figured out the whole system.” He said, “It’s designed, if you work, to keep you working, all you do is live from payday to payday—at the end of the week you broke again.” He said, “The system is designed like that.” And I’m listening. I’m seven and he’s nine, and he’s talking about “the system”! I said, “What are you gonna do, then, if you ain’t gonna work, Sam?” He said, “I’m gonna sing, and I’m going to make me a lot of money.” And that’s just what he did.

  — L.C. Cooke, on his brother’s early ambitions

  SAM COOK WAS A GOLDEN CHILD around whom a family mythology was constructed, long before he achieved fame or added the e to his last name.

  There are all the stories about Sam as a child: how he was endowed with second sight; how he sang to the sticks; how he convinced his neighborhood “gang” to tear the slats off backyard fences, then sold them to their previous owners for firewood; how he was marked with a gift from earliest childhood on and never wavered from its fulfillment.

  He was the adored middle child of a Church of Christ (Holiness) minister with untrammeled ambitions for his children.

  Movies were strictly forbidden. So were sports, considered gambling because the outcome inevitably determined a winner and a loser. Church took up all day Sunday, with preparations starting on Saturday night.

  They were respectable, upwardly mobile, proud members of a proudly striving community, but they didn’t shrink from a fight. Their daddy told them to stand up for themselves and their principles, no matter what the situation was. Respect your elders, respect authority—but if you were in the right, don’t back down for anyone, not the police, not the white man, not anyone. One time neighborhood bullies tried to block Sam’s way to school, and he told them he didn’t care if he had to fight them every day, he was going to school. He lived in a world in which he was told hard work would be rewarded, but he could see evidence to the contrary all around him. Their father told them that their true reward would come in heaven, but Sam was unwilling to wait. He was unwilling to live in a world of superstition and fear, and even his father’s strictures and homilies were subject to the same rational skepticism, the same unwavering gaze with which he seemed to have been born. He was determined to live his life by his own lights and no one else’s.

  HE WAS BORN JANUARY 22, 1931, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the fifth of the Reverend Charles Cook and his wife Annie Mae’s eight children (the oldest, Willie, was Annie Mae’s first cousin, whom they took in at three upon his mother’s death). Charles and Annie Mae met at a Church of Christ (Holiness) convention at which he was preaching, and they started going to church together. He was a young widower of twenty-three with a child that was being raised by his late wife’s family. Born to sharecroppers in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1897, he had been baptized into the Holiness church at the age of eight, and when the church split in two a couple of years later (its founders, Charles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason, differed over the importance of speaking in tongues as certain confirmation of “spirit baptism,” with Mason declaring this surrender to a force that overcomes recognizable human speech to be a sure sign of grace), the Cooks remained with the Jackson-based Reverend Jones, while Reverend Mason’s followers became the better-known, more populous (and more prosperous) Memphis-based Church of God in Christ.

  All Nations Pentecostal Church, 3716 Langley Avenue, Chicago, Easter Sunday, 1941. Russell Lee, Farm Security Administration Archives, Library of Congress

  Just fourteen when she met Charles, Annie Mae was fair-skinned, round-faced, with hair she could sit on. She was sixteen when they married in November of 1923. She had grown up in Mound Bayou, a self-sufficient all-black township founded in 1887 and known as “the negro capital of Mississippi.” The granddaughter of a businessman reputed, according to family legend, to be “the second-wealthiest man in Mound Bayou,” she was raised by an aunt after her mother died in childbirth. She was working as a cook wh
en she met her future husband and by her husband’s account won him over with her culinary skills, inviting him home from church one day and producing a four-course meal in the forty-five minutes between services.

  They had three children (Mary, Charles Jr., and Hattie), spaced eighteen months to two years apart, before Sam was born in January of 1931, with his brother L.C. (“it don’t stand for nothing”) following twenty-three months later.

  The Reverend Charles Cook and his wife, Annie Mae.

  Courtesy of ABKCO

  Right: L.C. and Agnes Cook, ages five and two. Courtesy of Agnes Cook-Hoskins