Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke

by Peter Guralnick

  Dan Taylor, the Jubilees’ twenty-two-year-old tenor singer, was very much taken with the quartet as a unit, but Sam stood out for him almost as much as he did for Cornelia Lee. “I was living on Porter Street, so they was living close around. I knew Marvin and Lee and Charles [Jake] and Gus, I mean I knowed all of them—but Sam was a brilliant fellow. Always fast—talked fast, moved around fast, he was a manic little rascal. But he was a nice dude, and a good singer, one of the clearest speakers in any lead or feature singer that I ever heard in my life. You know, there are a lot of singers that could sing as good as Sam, but they didn’t have the speech he had. He was always a noticeable fellow.”

  The Southern Jubilees started taking the newcomers around Memphis and then into Arkansas and Mississippi, both out of friendship and, as Dan Taylor acknowledged, for a specific practical reason. “They had a manager, and he had a car.” For the QCs it was a whole new world. None of them had been away from home before for any extended period of time, and they made the most of it in every imaginable way. Sam, of course, was the main attraction, but there was not a single one of the QCs, as Marvin pointed out proudly, who was not resourceful. “In those days you were always invited to dinner. And if one of the girls at a program took a liking to any guy in the group, it didn’t matter who it was—if she would say, ‘Why don’t you come over for dinner?’ our line was always, ‘Well, you know, I can’t leave the guys.’” They got a lot of free meals that way and didn’t sacrifice any romantic associations.

  The QCs found an even more prominent place for themselves on the Memphis gospel scene than they had been able to make at home. Perhaps it was their status as out-of-towners. None of the Memphis groups had yet begun to travel widely outside the mid-South, not even the highly influential Spirit of Memphis Quartet, who had just begun to make records themselves. With a number of local gospel unions, though, and a tight-knit church community, there was an extensive network of booking connections, fueled by a dawn-to-dusk radio station that became known as the “Mother Station of the Negroes,” and the QCs soon found themselves in the midst of a thriving youth-oriented market that offered considerably more opportunities for recognition and remuneration than 3838 South State. Other groups their age were just beginning to make their mark. The Gospel Writer Junior Girls, who had made their Chicago debut in June on a Women’s Day program sponsored by R.H. Harris’ wife Jeanette’s group, the Golden Harps, had recently begun broadcasting on WDIA as the Songbirds of the South, and Sam was taken with the singing of Cassietta Baker (later to become famous as Cassietta George in the Caravans), one of the group’s distinctive leads. He was greatly impressed by the Reverend Brewster, too, an extraordinary preacher and polymath whose Camp Meeting of the Air was regularly broadcast live from East Trigg Baptist Church and who presented the QCs at a number of programs at his church. Brewster had not only written many classic songs in the new gospel vein (“Surely God Is Able” was his latest), but he wrote and produced “sacred pageants” every year, often with uplifting racial themes. With his scholarly dignity, wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, and emphasis on elocution (“Anybody could be on the pulpit and beat on the Bible [but I was] taught . . . to stand up there and say my thing just like I was reading Caesar on Gaul, orations of the crown, and the Shakespearean plays that I loved so much”), he proved a natural model for Sam, to whom he taught another of his recent compositions, “How Far Am I From Canaan?,” expounding upon it both musically and textually to his eager young pupil. Tate even got them what Marvin took to be a real record audition at a recording studio in town. “The Soul Stirrers had just put out a number, and we were asked to sing that song in the studio. They said, ‘If you do it as good as the Soul Stirrers, we’ll record you.’ Well, as fate would have it, that day we was off track. You know you have [those kind of] days. We didn’t make it, and they would not record us.”

  As disappointing as that failure was, however, it was not their darkest moment in Memphis. Their cocky self-assurance, their prideful attitude, almost guaranteed a succession of falls. The next came when Sam and Lee and Jake took the car one night, leaving Marvin and Gus behind. “They had some girls,” said Marvin, “and they took them to the park, and when they got there, the girls were telling them, ‘This is a white park. We got no business in here. We’re going to get in trouble.’ Well, naturally, the guys are from Chicago, and they’re not used to this sort of thing, and they thought these girls were just trying to get out of doing what they was going in there to do. Anyway, after they got in the park and settled down, they discovered these lights on them—the police had driven up behind them and put the spotlights on them and told them to get out of the car. Well, everybody got out, and they lined them all up, but Sam was the only one who had his hands in his pockets. And as they went down the line to each person and asked them where they were from, when they got to Sam, the officer got angry because he had his hands in his pockets, and he slapped him and called him a nigger and said, ‘You are not in Chicago. We will hang you down here, and they’ll never find your body.’

  “I’ll never forget that. Because when they came home that night, they told us. That was a sad part in our lives. But I told them, ‘You didn’t have no business leaving me and Gus behind. That’s why you got messed up!’”

  It was another kind of misunderstanding, this one, as Marvin recalled it, over a song, along with a sudden, sharp break with the Spirit of Memphis Quartet, their original sponsor, that ultimately led to their departure from town. “I don’t remember the essentials of what occurred, but they literally ran us out.” One of the local groups, evidently, had an old syncopated “jubilee”-type number, “Pray,” that they had arranged along the lines of the Golden Gate Quartet, “and we heard it one time, and that was it. We took it.” Then, according to Marvin, the two Memphis groups entered into a concerted alliance, “they put out insinuations and innuendos about the police looking for the Highway QCs, which was not true.” It was all, Marvin said, on account of the way that “we were taking their programs from them.” But it created a climate in which it was no longer tenable for them to stay.

  It didn’t really matter. It was time to go. They had been away now for more than two months and accomplished all that they could. Everyone was a little bit homesick, and Tate, it seemed, was out of ideas.

  BACK HOME, SAM GOT A JOB at the Sears warehouse and rekindled his romance with Barbara Campbell. She was fourteen years old, still, in her own words, “green as a cabbage”—her grandmother had never told her anything about sex other than that if she lifted up her dress, she could have a baby—but everyone knew she was Sam Cook’s girl. At night Mildred would help her sneak out of the house, and when it got cold, Sam would show up looking so handsome with his broad-brimmed felt hat and belted black trench coat and turned-up shirt collar—he was her “shining knight,” and they would walk and talk and smooch till her lips hurt. On Saturdays she would go to the show—he knew exactly where she would be sitting—and they would sit and kiss in the dark all afternoon long.

  Barbara never doubted that he loved her, but for all her innocence, she was shrewd enough to recognize that she was not the only one. One time she caught him out in an affair with a girl who hadn’t missed anybody in the neighborhood, and when she told him that she knew what he had done, he was so embarrassed that he actually said, “Oh, I wasn’t up to that.” She was not about to let him off the hook. “Oh, Sam, how could you?” she said with her best impression of wounded teenage innocence. But she could understand it. It would be easy for any woman to fall for Sam, she realized, with his “beauty” and his “gift of gab”—and, anyway, she had another boyfriend of her own.

  For the QCs it was a time of some frustration. They were local heroes upon their return, bigger certainly than when they had left, and back to doing all their regular church programs in Chicago, Gary, Indianapolis, and Detroit. But somehow after the unanticipated adventure of their Memphis sojourn, the free and easy life they had led, it all seemed stale, d
ull, and unprofitable, in every sense of the word, to go back to living at home. Tate clearly had run out of money and luck, and if he remained as dedicated to them as ever, having named his tenth child Sammie Lee for the two lead singers of his group, they were not necessarily as dedicated to him.

  Then Itson showed up, “another unsavory type,” as Creadell would later describe him, but with money, influence, and power at his disposal. “Itson impressed us,” Marvin Jones recalled, “with the way he dressed, the car that he drove, and the things he could do. Itson came along with his slick-talking ass —” “Yeah, but he really loved the QCs,” declared Creadell with a laugh.

  Marshall L. Itson had a real-estate company with offices at 5005 South Indiana in the heart of Bronzeville’s business and entertainment district. He had a brand-new black fish-tail Cadillac, and he bought the group one of their own so they could ride around town in style. Sam would come and pick Creadell up at school. “I was in my senior year, and the police used to stop us going up and down South Parkway. ‘What are you youngsters doing in this car? Get out.’ We’d say, ‘We’re spiritual singers.’” But the police would make them get out every time before they would let them go on their way.

  Their new manager bought them brand-new uniforms, too, a double-breasted black suit for each of them and a pair of double-breasted blue ones. They would rehearse behind a one-way mirror at the back of his office, and Marvin and the others got a big kick out of the fact that they could see everybody who came through the door, but the customers couldn’t see them. “So they would come in, and we would be singing, and they would be looking around, trying to figure out where the music was coming from.”

  Itson used to love to hear them sing “When We Bow Our Knees at the Altar”—that was his favorite—and, in fact, when he got them their own Sunday-morning radio spot on WIND early in the new year, they adopted it as their theme song, coming in behind him as he solemnly intoned, “When we bow our knees at the altar” (“At the altar”) / “And the family have all gathered there” (“Gathered there”). Itson was crazy about them, and he was crazy about the entertainment life. He was their biggest fan.

  It seemed like they were finally beginning to get somewhere. To have their own program on the radio, just behind the Soul Stirrers—now, that was really something. And radio time, as Itson was constantly pointing out, wasn’t cheap. Only the most successful quartets could afford to spend $85 for what amounted to a quarter of an hour of advertising. Because that, as they well knew, was the whole point. Even when they were out of town, they maintained the program. Itson had them make transcriptions, big prerecorded sixteen-inch acetates that could be played in their absence to announce where they would be appearing the following weekend, in addition to presenting a regular program of their music.

  Itson had business cards made up for them, too, with all of their names listed and a different title assigned to each. Sam was President, naturally; Lee was Group Manager; Marvin was Secretary and Jake Assistant Secretary, while Creadell was appointed Treasurer and Gus named to the position of group Chaplain. “The Famous Radio Teen-Age Highway Q.C. Singers, Heard Each Sunday Morning 8:15 to 8:30,” it announced at the top, with Itson’s name above the title and all contact information included.

  For the first time they were beginning to feel like the full-fledged professionals that they had always wanted to be, a feeling that was only reinforced when Itson scheduled their first big headlining program at DuSable in what was billed as a showdown with their one real rival on the teen gospel circuit, the Teen Age Valley Wonders of Cincinnati, Ohio. The Valley Wonders “mocked” the Pilgrim Travelers as much as the QCs “mocked” the Soul Stirrers—they were a family group made up of two brothers, their sister and father, and the boy singing lead sounded just like Kylo Turner, the Travelers’ lead singer. They had done a number of programs with the QCs—both groups tore the show up so bad “they had to open up the doors,” said Marvin, “to let the women out of there”—but this time the QCs had a surprise in store for their rivals. The Valley Wonders’ big new number was a song the Travelers had just put out called “Something Within Me,” and the QCs were determined to take it from them. They rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed, and Itson took out a big ad in the March 25 issue of the Defender, the same size the Soul Stirrers used to announce their programs. It had their new picture prominently displayed in the upper-left corner and declared:

  THE TEEN AGE HIGHWAY QUE CEES

  RADIO AND CONCERT ARTISTS

  Presents

  THE NATION’S FAVORITES

  TEEN AGE

  VALLEY WONDERS

  of Cincinnati, O.

  and the one and only

  nationally known

  Phillip Temple Juniors

  OF TOLEDO

  It was a confrontation to which they looked forward as eagerly as their fans. But, unfortunately, by the time it took place, their lead singer was in jail.

  IT HAD TO DO WITH ANOTHER OF Sam’s girls, whose fifteen-year-old sister, a student at Doolittle, brought a “nasty book” that Sam had given to his girlfriend to school. One of the girl’s teachers intercepted the “obscene and indecent handwritten pamphlet,” and an arrest slip was made out on February 23, the day after Sam was picked up at his parents’ house at ten o’clock in the morning. On the arrest slip, which presumably followed a night in jail, he was listed as a nineteen-year-old colored laborer, five feet nine inches tall, 148 pounds, and the object of an obscene-literature investigation. Two weeks later, on March 9, he pleaded guilty before Judge John R. McSweeney in municipal court and, despite his father’s testimony as to his good character and decent upbringing and the QCs’ belief that Itson had somehow or other fixed it with the judge, got ninety days in Cook County House of Correction. It was, L.C. insisted, more like a reformatory than a prison. “I went out there once or twice. My dad wasn’t too upset, ’cause we didn’t really give it nothing. You know, we were good kids; we didn’t go to jail for killing nobody. It wasn’t such a big deal.”

  It was a big deal to the QCs, though, as even L.C. would concede. “My group, the Nobleaires, really whipped the QCs’ ass more than once while Sam was in jail. I mean, we always made the QCs work, but without Sam, we took the program without a fight.”

  There were other, more immediate repercussions. The big showdown with the Teen Age Valley Wonders took place as scheduled just two and a half weeks after Sam’s trial, but with their lead singer “incarcerated,” in Marvin’s rueful recitation, the QCs made a sorry showing, singing “jubilee-type songs instead of those gospel, ‘spiritual’ numbers where you [could] go out and excel and get a shout from the audience. The people knew the QCs was in the room—but Sam was surely missed.” He was certainly missed by S.R. Crain, the Soul Stirrers’ manager, who had come to the program to check out the two groups. He put his money on the QCs, “and I get there and—no Sam. Boy, that hurt me. Those little boys from Cincinnati whipped the QCs so bad I lost everything I had!”

  It was a difficult time, as everyone saw it, for both Sam and the QCs. The QCs did the best they could to keep Sam’s spirits up, and the authorities even let them rehearse at the jail. But it was, as someone remarked, a “lonely time” for Sam, and it seems doubtful that his mother’s and father’s prayers made him feel any better. The way he and everyone else figured it, he was the one who was never supposed to get caught; he saw himself, as he told his brother L.C. impishly, as “the all-American boy,” a guise he believed that provided the perfect cover in a society predisposed to cherish deference and charm. And yet here he was languishing in jail, unable to convince a red-faced old judge that he was anything more than some little nigger.

  His immediate experience when he got out in June was no less unsettling. Itson had booked the group on another tour with the Fairfield Four, and Sam caught up with them in Birmingham. But when he arrived, he made the same kind of mistake he had made in Memphis—he drank out of a water fountain marked “Whites Only”—with the same resu
lt. The police assaulted him, he told Marvin and Gus, they dismissed him once again as just another nigger, and his spirits were so cast down he could scarcely even bring himself to perform.

  But his spirits were not cast down for long. Itson continued to do everything he had promised he would, the QCs became more and more well known, and soon the time in jail seemed like no more than a temporary setback on the path that had been marked out for them from the start. In the view of Lou Rawls, now a member of the Holy Wonders (with L.C. soon to follow): “When they pull up in that Cadillac, whoa, who’s that? That’s the QCs, man, you know. The rest of us was driving cars that looked like they was going to fall apart. And they did! They could travel all over, and we was riding on rubber bands.”

  They even had a “rematch” with the Valley Wonders, and this time it came out the way it was supposed to have the first time around. “We murdered them!” recalled Marvin with open glee. “Sam walked on them that day, and that’s a fact.” The entire Cook family was there to witness the QCs’ triumph. “That boy was bad,” L.C. said of the Valley Wonders’ lead singer. “He just about fell out singing.” “Yeah, but we murdered them, didn’t we?” said Marvin with undiminished satisfaction.