Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke

by Peter Guralnick

  IT WAS DURING THE WAR that they first heard their parents talking openly about segregation, about what you could and couldn’t do both inside and outside the neighborhood. Their father was growing increasingly impatient with the lack of visible racial progress, and he was beginning to grow impatient with his own little ministry as well. More and more he was drawn to the traveling evangelism with which he had started out in Mississippi and which he had never entirely given up. “He was just kind of a freelance fellow,” Church of Christ (Holiness) bishop M.R. Conic told writer David Tenenbaum, and soon Charles Cook started traveling again in ever-widening circles, shifting his exclusive focus away from his little flock. He thought he could do better for himself and his family.

  The Cooks by now had moved around the corner to 724 East Thirty-sixth, and David, the baby of the family, who was born in 1941, would never forget his fifteen-year-old brother Sam getting in trouble with the neighbors, not long after they moved in, when the couple downstairs became involved in a noisy altercation. “We was all up there having fun, and [heard] this commotion on the floor below, so Sam goes out and leans over the bannister and calls out, ‘What’s all this noise out here?’ The guy shot upstairs—I mean, he was serious—but we all went back inside, and Sam said, ‘Well, that’s all right, he won’t make any more noise.’”

  With the war over, Willie went back to work at the chicken market, Mary settled into married life, and Charles enlisted in the air force at the age of nineteen. He was stationed in Columbus, Ohio, and despite his unwavering determination to quit singing altogether the moment he turned twenty-one, he joined a chorus that traveled widely with a service show called Operation Happiness.

  But that was the end of the Singing Children, and the extension of another phase of Sam’s singing career. Just as he and L.C. had gone from apartment to apartment in the Lenox Building, serenading the various tenants with one of the Ink Spots’ recent hits, they had begun in the last year or so to greet passengers alighting from the streetcar at Thirty-fifth and Cottage Grove, the end of the line, in similar fashion. Sam’s specialties continued for the most part to derive from the sweet-voiced falsetto crooning of Bill Kenny, the breathy lead tenor for the group that had dominated black secular quartet singing (and in the process enjoyed a remarkable string of number-one pop hits) for the last seven years. Among Sam’s favorites were Kenny’s original 1939 signature tune, “If I Didn’t Care,” the group’s almost equally influential “I Don’t Want to Set the World On Fire,” and their latest, one of 1946’s biggest hits, “To Each His Own.” As in the apartment building, Sam would sing, and L.C. would pass the hat. “People would stop because Sam had this voice. It seemed like he just drew people to him—he sang the hell out of ‘South of the Border.’ The girls would stop, and they would give me dimes, quarters, and dollars. Man, we was cleaning up.”

  Sam and L.C. harmonized with other kids from the neighborhood, too (“You know, everybody in the neighborhood could sing”). They sang at every available opportunity—Johnny Carter (later lead singer with the Flamingos and Dells), James “Dimples” Cochran of the future Spaniels, Herman Mitchell, Johnny Keyes, every one of them doing their best in any number of interchangeable combinations to mimic Ink Spots harmonies, “singing around [different] places,” as Sam would later recall, just to have fun.

  His mind was never far from music; one day, he told L.C., he would rival Nat “King” Cole, another Chicago minister’s son, whose first number-one pop hit, “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons,” was one of Sam’s recent favorites. But somehow he never seemed to contemplate the idea that he might have to leave the gospel field to do it. Nor did he allow the music to distract him from his main task of the moment, which was to finish high school. Reverend and Mrs. Cook were determined that each of their children would graduate from Wendell Phillips—and it seemed as if L.C. was the only one likely to provide them with a real challenge (“Everybody else liked school; I didn’t”). Sam saw education as a way to expand what he understood to be an otherwise narrow and parochial worldview. Reading took him places he couldn’t go—but places he expected one day to discover for himself. He was constantly drawing, caught up in his studies of architectural drafting at school but just as quick to sketch anything that caught his interest—he did portraits of his family and friends, sketches to entertain his little brother David. In the absence of inherited wealth, he placed his faith in his talent and his powers of observation, and despite an almost willful blindness to his own eccentricities, he was a keen student of human nature. Which was perhaps the key to his success with girls, as his brother L.C. saw it, and the key to his almost instant appeal to friend and stranger, young and old alike.

  His father had full faith in all his children, but perhaps most of all in his middle son. He was focused in a way that none of the others, for all of their obvious intelligence, ambition, and good character, appeared to be—and Reverend Cook had confidence that neither Sam’s mischievousness nor his imagination would distract him from his mission. It was Sam’s mark to sing, as his father was well aware. “He didn’t bother about playing ball, nothing like that. He would just gather himself on the steps of buildings and sing.”

  It was a gift of God, manifest from when he was a baby, and the only question in Charles Cook’s mind was not whether he would achieve his ambition but how.

  Then one day in the spring of 1947, two teenage brothers, Lee and Jake Richard, members of a fledgling gospel quartet that so far had failed to come up with a name for itself, ran across Sam singing “If I Didn’t Care” to a girl in the hallway of a building at Thirty-sixth and Rhodes. He was singing so pretty that Lee and his brother started harmonizing behind him, and it came out so good that they asked him who he was singing with. “I don’t sing with nobody,” Sam told them, and they brought him back to the apartment building where they lived on the third floor, at 466 East Thirty-fifth, just a block away, and where Mr. Copeland, the man who was training them, and the father of their fourteen-year-old baritone singer, Bubba, had the apartment at the back.

  “The Teen Age Highway Que Cees, Radio and Concert Artists”

  THE GROUP THAT SAM was about to join consisted of four boys between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. There were the three Richard brothers: Lee, who sang first lead; Charles (“Jake”), the oldest, who sang bass; and Curtis, whose tenor was the shakiest element in the mix. Creadell Copeland (“Bubba”), the baritone singer, was two years behind Sam at Wendell Phillips and sat next to him by alphabetical arrangement in gym class—“but I didn’t know he sang.” There had been a fifth boy, Junior Rand, whom they had tried to make into a second lead, but he moved away. And then there was a boy named Raymond Hoy who lived in the same building and was always hanging around. He couldn’t sing at all, so they named him MC and let him introduce them at their very infrequent church appearances. They had been singing together for more than two years now, brought together when the Copeland family moved into the same building as the Richards and the boys subsequently became friends. Mr. Copeland worked nights, and when they woke him up one too many times running in and out of the house, he responded with a suggestion that surprised them all. “Let’s make singers out of you guys,” he said, “’cause you’re making too much noise.” He had sung in a quartet himself, and he quickly tuned them up, gave them their voices, taught them to blend, and instructed them in some of the old-time songs, like “There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood” and “Old Ship of Zion.”

  They scarcely left the house for the first year, said Creadell Copeland. “Then my father took us up and down State Street, all the little storefront churches. We would just walk in right off the street, and sometimes there’d be more people in the quartet than in the audience. But we were getting experience.”

  The Highway QCs. Top, left to right: Gus Treadwell, Jake Richard, Marvin Jones. Bottom, left to right: Sam Cook, Creadell Copeland, Lee Richard.

  Cooke and ABKCO

  The experience was not all that sat
isfying, though. Lee by his own admission was not really strong enough to sing solo lead, and for all of Mr. Copeland’s coaching, they could never get the group to “sound together” like their models, the Soul Stirrers and the Famous Blue Jays. They were not even sure enough of themselves to give a name to their quartet. That was the group’s situation when Lee and Jake first met Sam Cook.

  Mr. Copeland started working with Sam right away. There was no question of the boy’s talent, his breadth of knowledge, or his aptitude for music, but Mr. Copeland worked hard with him on his breath control and raising his natural pitch so he wouldn’t get hoarse after singing four or five songs. The emphasis was on both precision and passion. Mr. Copeland had the whole group rehearsing their scales, some days for an hour or an hour and a half at a time. And he had Sam and Lee singing off each other, trading leads just like Harris and Medlock with the Soul Stirrers, learning to translate their emotions into the kind of controlled vocal intensity and seemingly adlibbed interpolations pioneered by Harris and standing as the mark of the new “gospel” quartet movement. Soon they were able to match the Stirrers almost note for note on much of their most familiar repertoire, and by the time they were ready to start going out again, they had acquired not only a new sound but, for the first time, an actual name, a name with an undeniable ring to it but one that none of them could fully explain.

  They were the Highway QCs. The “Highway” part was obvious enough. Mr. Copeland said, “What are we gonna name ourselves?” And someone said, “The Highways,” because they all went to the Highway Missionary Baptist Church, where the Richards’ father was assistant pastor. They kicked around different names to go with “Highway” for a little while, but Mr. Copeland said every one of those names was taken, and then out of the blue he just came up with “QCs.” Everyone thought that sounded all right, but they asked him what did it stand for? “Quiz Kids,” he said. “That ain’t no Quiz Kids,” said Jake, and Mr. Copeland conceded that maybe it wasn’t, but that was the name they stuck with, even though Creadell was a little embarrassed for his father.

  He was not at all embarrassed for the group, though. “After Sam joined, we started to make the rounds that we had previously made, but then each time naturally the crowd would get bigger because our reputation became better with the type of lead singer that we had. We started going up on Forty-third. We’d take a PA system with us, and people would let us sing in the barbershops, the barbershops and beauty shops—we’d sing in the window and put the speaker outside, and all the people would congregate and put money in a hat. That’s how we bought our first uniforms.”

  After that they started to move from the storefront churches into some of the larger ones. Some Sundays they would do two programs, one at three, one at seven o’clock in the evening. Then in the summer, when school was out, they began to travel further afield. Mr. Copeland had an old truck, and they’d take half the neighborhood with them—to churches in Joliet, Illinois; South Bend and Gary, Indiana; Detroit; and Muskegon, Michigan. They’d stay out sometimes for as many as three or four days, playing on programs that Mr. Copeland had set up and showing up at others just to “chop some heads.” Nobody got paid, Mr. Copeland supplied all the money for gas and travel, they were just young boys out having a good time, each and every one of whom loved to sing. But of them all, Cope’s son, Bubba, was convinced, Sam was probably the most dedicated. “That was just his character. There was never a time he didn’t want to sing.” He was, as the other boys might or might not have recognized, committed to a long-term goal that was not necessarily confined to the Highway QCs. And now he was on his way.

  IN THE SPRING of his senior year, Sam finally got his license. L.C. was already driving and had a duplicate key made so he could steal the car from Sam whenever he was using it. One day Sam busted him to Papa, “and Papa just said, ‘Give me that key,’ and I said, ‘Yes, sir, Papa,’ and handed him the key. And went right out and had another one made.”

  Either Sam or L.C. took their mother shopping on weekends. Every Saturday they would go to Hillsman’s downtown, where the quality of the food was better than in the neighborhood groceries, and it was cheaper, too. They got a chocolate milkshake and a hot dog as a reward, and their twelve-year-old sister, Agnes, resented it. “The boys didn’t have any [other] chores to do. They were really spoiled by my mother. What made it so hard on me, one of my sisters was seven years older than me, the other ten, so that meant they were out of the house, and all the work fell on me. I used to say, ‘I wish I was a boy, I wouldn’t have to do this.’”

  Agnes resented the way her older brothers felt like they had to protect her all the time, too. “My fondest memory of Sam is when my mom and dad would go out of town [on a revival] and they would take my little brother—so we would have the house to ourselves, because we never did want to go with them. We would just have a ball. But as far as boys were concerned, he would just let them know right away, ‘This is my sister. Respect her.’ As a matter of fact, all of my brothers were like that. Leave her alone! They made sure no one [ever] talked to me!”

  He couldn’t control who talked to her at a QCs’ program, though. Agnes was one of their most faithful fans. “You could always count on a church full of girls, and I was one.” She nearly always went with her girlfriend Reba Martin, along with other kids from the neighborhood, and she was enthralled by the way that Sam could captivate an audience by the sheer force of his personality. “He just drew everyone to him. And it made me feel great, because this was my big brother. He wore his hair straight back, and he had waves in it, the top was long and the bangs were close to his head. He was learning, and as he continued to sing, his performance got much better. All the boys had a role that they did outstandingly. They were unique, I think, because they were so young. And everywhere they went, they upset the house. The older groups wouldn’t even call them up, because they knew they would turn the house out. I mean, the QCs were the baddest thing out there.”

  Sam was unquestionably the key. As Creadell Copeland put it, “All we had to do was stand behind Sam. Our claim to fame was that Sam’s voice was so captivating we didn’t have to do anything else.”

  What made that voice so captivating to some extent defied analysis. For all the comparisons to R.H. Harris and the Soul Stirrers, there was something different in the young man’s approach, there was something about his manner, and the manner of his singing, that was altogether his own.

  He had clearly studied Harris. His diction, his phrasing, his gift for storytelling, the way in which he would make extemporaneous “runs” and then end up right on the beat with an emphatic enunciation of the word or phrase that would bring the whole verse into focus—these stylistic traits all echoed the older man’s. But where Harris was in the end a “hard” singer, who, for all of his precise articulation, the controlled drama of his delivery, and the soaring sweep of his falsetto flights, bore down relentlessly in his vocal attack, Sam, unlike many of the new breed of quartet singers, sang in a relaxed, almost deceptively simple fashion that reflected not just the breathy intimacy of Ink Spots lead Bill Kenny but the relaxed, almost lazy approach of Bing Crosby, or even Gene Autry, whose “South of the Border” was a staple of his secular repertoire. He was a crooner in a field which, however much the aim of each group was to cause every one of its female followers to fall out, had not put much stock to date in the subtleties of seduction.

  He was also, like Harris, a straightahead stand-up singer. Not for the QCs or the Soul Stirrers the acrobatic antics of some of their more flamboyant counterparts, running all over the stage, falling to their knees, tossing the microphone about like a football—maybe the strongest point of similarity between the Soul Stirrers and the Highway QCs was that, sex appeal aside, they were about pure singing, first, last, and always.

  Sam’s older sister Hattie was amazed that he never betrayed nervousness of any kind. To QCs baritone singer Creadell Copeland, what was even more surprising was how well Sam dealt with all the loca
l fame and adulation. There were always girls around clamoring for his attention, but Sam handled them with deference and respect. He never got carried away with his own image and appeared to be genuinely interested in other people. “He was the kind of person who even as a youth, he would always put his hands on you—he would be touching you all the time, and this was long before it became fashionable. He liked to get right in your face if he was talking to you; if he walked up to you, he didn’t stand away from you. He had a lot of strange habits that I scrutinized pretty good—because of his talent, and because of the fact that he was so successful in all of the things that he tried to do.”

  THE QCS MIGHT MAKE as much as $30 or $35 on a good night, generally less, but the money didn’t really matter. After a while they got to the point where they could draw people to a program on their own, but mostly they worked with three or four other young quartets. Their repertoire continued to grow as they took advantage of their newest member’s talent not just for delivering a broad range of material but for rearranging some of the old “way-back” numbers and telling familiar stories in new ways. They sang “When You Bow at the Cross in the Evening” and the Golden Gate Quartet’s “Our Father,” Lucie Campbell’s brand-new composition “Jesus Gave Me Water,” “Steal Away,” and “Nearer My God to Thee,” Sam’s mother’s favorite. When Mahalia Jackson’s “Move On Up a Little Higher” came out that winter, they adopted it as their theme song. Sam would turn out the church with it every time—unless Mahalia happened to be on the same program.