Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke

by Peter Guralnick

  Charles saw them during this time when he was on leave, and he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “They was singing down on Thirty-first and Cottage, and Sam said, ‘I want you to come hear us.’ I walked in, and it was just so amazing; Sam was singing ‘Swing Down, Chariot, Let Me Ride,’ and there was something that went through me. I said, ‘Man, this boy can sing!’”

  Even so, change was inevitable. Cope just wasn’t carrying himself right, and Jake and Lee’s little brother, Curtis, was becoming increasingly undependable, failing to appear at rehearsals and showing less and less interest in the quartet’s fortunes. Not only that: Bubba would soon be going back to school, and that would be the end of touring for a while.

  That was how Marvin and Gus came into the quartet.

  Marvin Jones and Gus Treadwell had first encountered the QCs at their Mother’s Day program. They were both singing with the Gay Singers, an outgrowth of the widespread popularity of the piano-playing Gay Sisters (Evelyn, Mildred, and seventeen-year-old Geraldine), who had sponsored the all-star musicale at Holiness Community Temple in May. Marvin, a small, feisty youth of fifteen, sang lead baritone with the group; Gus, more stolid both in appearance and temperament, sang tenor; and the two Farmer sisters, Doris and Shirley, filled out the group.

  Marvin had been singing all of his life. “At five I used to sing this song, ‘Pennies From Heaven,’ on the stage of the Avenue Theater on Thirty-first and Indiana—I had this little umbrella, and at the end of my song, I would open my umbrella up and the people would be throwing pennies onstage.” His uncle, Eugene Smith, was the new manager and dramatic baritone voice with the Roberta Martin Singers, whose classic “gospel blues” composition, “I Know the Lord Will Make a Way, Oh Yes, He Will,” had been particularly influential in the new movement. Marvin idolized his uncle. “I wanted to be just like him.” And, he was pleased to be able to say, “God gave me the gift to do so.”

  Marvin and Gus had been partners from childhood on. They were like “two peas in a pod,” with their talent for singing and their passion for gospel music. But neither of them had ever encountered the QCs before, even though Marvin had been baptized by the Reverend Richard at Highway Missionary Baptist and Gus’ father had known Reverend Cook down South.

  From the moment that Marvin heard the QCs sing their first notes, “I vowed that I would not die before I got in that quartet. I had to get in that quartet! Now, they didn’t need me. I was a baritone singer, and they had a baritone singer already. They were actually looking for a tenor singer, ’cause Curtis Richard just wasn’t acting right—so they wanted Gus. But I just started showing up at their rehearsals, and I would grab Sam in the hallway and hit a song. ’Cause I knew if I had that song, Sam would hit it, too, and then Gus would join in, and the next thing you knew, we were singing.”

  Marvin was convinced that, if it came down to a choice between him and Bubba, he would prevail. “The difference between Bubba’s voice and mine was obvious. Bubba had a very light baritone, which did not give the Highway QCs the depth that they wanted, because with a deeper baritone, you sound more like men, more like adults. That’s what they were looking for.”

  That may very well have been so, but in the end, it was Creadell’s school situation that gave Marvin the break he was looking for. “It went on for maybe two or three months, and then Bubba couldn’t make the program one day, for whatever reason, and we were standing on the corner, talking about the program, and Cope was telling the guys to get their white shirts and things and get them on ’cause they had to go make this church. Anyway, I said, ‘You want me to go, too?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, you can go, too.’ That’s how I got in the group. I had stopped going to school, and Bubba was still in school. From that point on, I wasn’t worried about Bubba. He was worried about me.”

  As Lee Richard saw it: “That’s when we became dangerous—with Gus and little Marvin.” When they had Bubba, too, they could field two baritone singers and two strong leads, just like the Soul Stirrers. And even without Creadell, in L.C.’s view, “they had a more stable background.” They just sounded more like a real professional group.

  Marvin never looked back. As far as he was concerned, the QCs, not the Stirrers, were the number-one group in the city (“We never wanted to be like them; we wanted to be where they were”). And Sam was the number-one attraction. “He was one of the most outgoing individuals that you could ever meet. And everybody liked him. There was no conceitment at all. But he wasn’t the kind of guy that you could trick. He always knew how to work it. Even when we was kids, he knew whether we should do it this way or that, spend this or hold on to that—he just always had that kind of talent.

  “We went to bed singing, and we got up singing. We couldn’t live without it. We’d get done rehearsing at Cope’s at Four-sixty-six East Thirty-fifth, across from Doolittle, and then we’d go over to my girlfriend Helen’s and eat and rehearse all over again. We were doing what we loved to do, and we did it everywhere, and everybody knew us.”

  ONE OF THE PEOPLE who got to know them was Louis Tate. Tate was thirty-three and working in a Gary, Indiana, steel mill, with a wife and nine children to support. He had had an early encounter with the gospel business when as a teenager he did some local promotion for the Big Four, a Birmingham quartet, in the area around Covington, Louisiana, where he grew up, and he had been very much involved in the Gary gospel scene from the time of his arrival in that city some fifteen years earlier. He was unprepared, though, for the reaction he felt the first time he heard the Highway QCs. “I just sat there, and I was spellbound,” he told writer David Tenenbaum, “’cause I didn’t know no kids could sing like that.”

  As Marvin Jones remembered it, “He approached us at a church program, and he indicated that he had the resources that were necessary for the Highway QCs to make it and he wanted to be our manager. And at that time we were looking for a manager, because Cope—well, Cope drank quite a bit, and a lot of the programs, he didn’t go with us, because he was just always in his own world. So we moved on with Tate.”

  Tate, they soon found out, did not have all the resources that he claimed. His money, as Marvin Jones put it, turned out to be “very limited,” but whatever money he had, Marvin and the others quickly realized, he was more than ready to spend on them. “He was very sincere. I mean, this guy sacrificed his family, he practically forsaked his family and quit his job for the Highway QCs.”

  He went to their parents for permission to manage the group and even obtained Reverend Cook’s help in purchasing a ’37 Olds to take the group out on the road. Soon they were traveling all over, not just the Midwest but Texas and Louisiana and throughout the South, struggling to make the gigs in their raggedy old car, which according to Marvin broke down “every twenty miles. And Tate would get out in his white shirt and tie and get up under the car and fix it. I remember we was on our way one Saturday to this southern Indiana town for a program and had a guarantee of so much money—the car broke down, and we couldn’t get it fixed till Monday, and we missed the program. We set in that car and sulked for two days, eating oranges and apples and bread and you name it. We went down to Tallulah, Louisiana, where Lee Richard had a grandmother. It was the first time this Chicago boy had seen cotton. We did quite a bit of stuff with the Five Blind Boys out of Jackson, Mississippi, with Archie Brownlee; they were the one group that ever ‘turned out’ on the Highway QCs, but next time we paid them back!”

  Tate, as Lee Richard said, put the QCs on the map—literally. “He may not have had a lot of education, but he had a lot of know-how. And he loved us.” And Sam took to the road as if he were born to it, which in a way he was. His father was, as Church of Christ (Holiness) Bishop Conic had said, “a kind of wanderer,” and just around this time he rededicated himself wholeheartedly to his wandering, giving up his pastorship at the Chicago Heights church for a life committed to the freelance saving of souls. It was a clear choice, according to L.C. The church was “too much of a burden, family-wi
se. It didn’t pay enough. And it was too confining.”

  Sam was no more inclined to confinement. He loved the gospel road. “He’d eat it, sleep it, walked it, talked it. Singing was his life,” Tate said. “He’d wake up at twelve [midnight], one o’clock, two o’clock, and say [of an idea that had just come to him], ‘Tate-y! Listen at this! How this go?’” And after Tate had listened and was struggling to get back to sleep, Sam would not be satisfied until he had awakened the rest of the group and rehearsed them in his new approach. It was a great adventure, an experience for which he was voracious in every respect. There were more women than he could ever have dreamt of—but he still couldn’t get enough. Tate didn’t try too hard to monitor his young protégé, but when he thought “he’d did his thing long enough,” he might interject a mild homily on the value of pacing yourself, with little hope of actually influencing Sam. As his fellow QCs by now well knew, for all of his easygoing manner and the breezy assurance of his singing, Sam always had his eye on the prize.

  None of them really took it amiss. Sam was of a different order from the rest of them, and different rules applied, whether it came to girls or popular recognition (not infrequently one and the same thing). In the observation of Creadell Copeland, still an integral member of the group whenever he was able to make the program: “We all got individual pictures to sell, and we’d try to sell them during the break. I’d sell one on occasion. Gus—I don’t think Gus ever sold any. But Sam would sell all of his. He was the handsome boy, and he was the best singer, and he conducted himself that way. But he never got carried away [with himself]. And we didn’t have no people we were ashamed of.”

  Sam never failed to apply himself to his craft, either. He was, as Tate quickly recognized, the group’s principal source of material; he had a genuine gift for making old songs new. And he studied music. He learned to control his voice better; he was quick to suggest new harmonies and new approaches that the group might try; he found different ways to project his personality in a more professional manner. To L.C., still struggling to achieve a similar degree of success in the same field: “The QCs were the best group I ever heard in my life. As a matter of fact, the QCs had a better sound than the Stirrers. They were more versatile—they could [even] sing pop. The Stirrers couldn’t sing no pop. The QCs were so popular, man, look here, those cats could go into a church, and that church be full of kids. Sam brought those kids to church. See, Sam revolutionized everything by bringing the kids. That’s when the Soul Stirrers noticed them.”

  THE QUARTET UNION OF INDIANA, of which Tate was president, presented its first state program of 1949 on Friday night, May 20, at the Antioch Baptist Church in Indianapolis, where the Pilgrim Travelers had played the month before. It featured the QCs, the Harmony Kings of South Bend, “and all groups of the local union of Indianapolis. Fail to hear this great program, and you will miss the great treat of the new season.”

  The notice ran accompanied by the QCs’ new picture, all six of them (including Bubba), baby-faced and hopeful, looking as if they couldn’t wait to grow into their new uniforms.

  Through Tate and his Quartet Union connections (the union served as a local branch of the organization that R.H. Harris had founded a year and a half earlier), the QCs were working at least once a month in Gary. Twenty-year-old Roscoe Robinson, who was singing with a local group, Joiner’s Five Trumpets, first met the QCs at one of those programs and was immediately won over. “The first time I heard Sam, he was shouting with the pretty voice. He was killing with that pretty voice—but he was controlling it. And all the young girls—they just couldn’t stand it, they were going crazy. So I come up to him and started talking to him and he said, ‘Well, man, I like your singing.’ I said, ‘I just can’t sing like you!’ He said, ‘Man, you ought to come over to Chicago sometime.’ And from then on I started coming over, and I rehearsed with them and stayed at Sam’s house. His mama would cook for everyone!”

  The QCs’ following just grew and grew. In every city, they had a group of young ladies who showed up wherever they appeared. In Chicago, Marvin’s girlfriend Helen (“Sookie”) was at every program, and so was her aunt Gloria—“we used to call her ‘Queen.’ She was going with Lee, Sam was going with Barbara [Campbell],” and Gus was going with Agnes’ girlfriend Reba.

  In almost every respect, things couldn’t have been better. The only cloud on the horizon was Tate’s inability, no matter how great his efforts, to get them a record deal. The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, still known more commonly as the Jackson Harmoneers and featuring the forceful delivery and bloodcurdling screams of twenty-three-year-old Archie Brownlee, R.H. Harris’ most extroverted disciple, were making records for the Coleman label in Newark. So were the Happyland Singers of Alabama (soon to be rechristened the Five Blind Boys of Alabama), four of them graduates of the Talladega Institute for the Deaf and Blind and all in their teens to early twenties. But no matter what he did, Tate couldn’t seem to make the right connections. All the record companies would tell him, he explained to the group, was that the QCs were too young, or that they were afraid the boys’ voices might change. They all had their excuses, he told his impatient young charges, even as the evidence existed right in front of their eyes to contradict what Tate was saying. Other young quartets were getting contracts: why not them?

  They had internal problems as well, not so much stemming from their lead singer’s stardom as from lack of leadership on Tate’s part. “We were young,” Marvin recognized. “We were talented. But we were dumb. We didn’t have any professional sense. We didn’t realize that what you have to do is to utilize all of the resources that you have to make your group better. Which meant that if I could lead on certain things, I should lead on that song. If Jake should lead, let him lead. Because that made the group better. But the rivalry between Lee and Jake, the rivalry between the two brothers—that’s where the [problem] was. Because Lee knew that Jake could outsing him, and he never given him any opportunity. And Lee was the kind that was—oh, Lee was bodacious, he’d punch you out in a minute.” But Tate was never willing, or able, to intervene.

  That was the summer, the summer of 1949, that they went to Memphis. They barely made it, as Tate’s car gave out by the time they reached the city limits. The original idea had been to do a program, or a series of programs, sponsored by the Spirit of Memphis Quartet and then move on, but when they found themselves temporarily without transportation, they made the decision, for the time being at least, simply to try to live off the land.

  To sustain themselves they went on the radio at the invitation of the Reverend Gatemouth Moore, a flamboyant thirty-five-year-old recent arrival in Memphis himself. Moore, a noted blues singer and composer of the blues standard “Did You Ever Love a Woman,” had experienced a public conversion onstage at the Club DeLisa in Chicago earlier in the year in the middle of a song. He had arrived in Memphis on July 31 for a revival at the Church of God in Christ’s seven-thousand-seat home church, Mason Temple, sponsored by the Reverend W. Herbert Brewster, the great gospel composer, preacher (at his own highly influential East Trigg Baptist Church in South Memphis), and early civil rights leader. Moore was billed as the man who “turned his back on a million dollars” and sang and preached on an all-star bill that included the Spirit of Memphis, Queen C. Anderson, the soloist at East Trigg who had originated Reverend Brewster’s composition “Move On Up a Little Higher,” and the Brewster Ensemble Singers, among others.

  Off of the success of that revival, Gate, a familiar figure on Beale Street, where he had gotten his start in the thirties and was seen, in the words of the Memphis World, as “the Memphis boy who skyrocketed to world fame,” was offered a job at the city’s (and the nation’s) first—and so far only—all-Negro-staffed radio station. WDIA had gradually introduced its new approach to programming from the previous November, and Gatemouth Moore’s arrival pretty much completed the process. He called his noontime show Jesus Is the Light of the World and not only played records but
dispensed counsel and sold advertising (“I’m the first that brought them national accounts”). He had been on the air for barely a month when the QCs arrived in town. “I’m the one that took care of them,” he boasted. “Somebody else brought them down, but I was the only religious disc jockey, and I put them on my radio program and advertised them, advertised their appearances, so they could get a chance.”

  “That’s when Memphis fell in love with us,” Marvin’s memory concurs, “when we did that show on WDIA. B.B. King was on the air then, too, sang that Pepticon jingle. And Gatemouth wanted to manage us, [but] we wasn’t interested.”

  He did help them find living quarters at Mrs. Annie Brown’s rooming house, across the street from LeMoyne Gardens, the black public housing project in South Memphis, where he lived. Mrs. Brown furnished them with free room and board, recalled Essie Wade, who had just moved into the Edith Street rooming house with her new husband, Spirit of Memphis “organizer”-manager and sometime singer Brother Theo Wade. “People just helped them. They didn’t have any money, so Mrs. Brown just let them stay there. She fed her family, and she would feed all of them—I don’t remember how many there were, but there were quite a few!”

  They got help from the Southern Jubilees, too, a local quartet whose members were a little older than the QCs and who presented them at a program at New Allen AME on Third Street, where a fifteen-year-old named Cornelia Lee, who was going with the Jubilees’ bass singer, was so affected by Sam’s performance, by the way he scrunched up his little face and, she thought, sang right at her, that she stuck her finger in her nose. “I never figured why I did it except that I seen somebody else do it and Sam was messing with me.” But then Sam went and told her grandmother when he and the other QCs came by after the program, and her grandma scolded her, and she jumped all over Sam as soon as her grandma left the room. The QCs used to come over to her grandmother’s house all the time—“they were just little old boys” trying to show off, as Sam would tell her girlfriends and her all about Chicago and act like he was so proud of his “big-city” ways.