Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke

by Peter Guralnick

  He was a strange fit for the Soul Stirrers, who prided themselves on their ability to get the crowd to listen without gimmicks and who already had their own strong second lead in Paul Foster. JoJo Wallace felt that he “disfigured their ministry with too big of a forceful sound.” But to Pilgrim Travelers’ bass singer Jesse Whitaker, Cheeks provided a lesson that Sam Cook still needed. “June really got Sam going. He sung hard and moved with it, you know, with gestures and stuff. When he joined, he sat down and talked to Sam about what he should do and how he should do it. A lot of times he’d [even] show him. Julius Cheeks was a strong singer, man.”

  “I was the one,” Cheeks told Tony Heilbut, “[who] caused Sam Cook to sing hard. I gave him his first shout. We was working in the San Francisco Auditorium. Sam used to stand real pretty on stage. I pushed him, and he fell off the stage. People thought he was happy. I said, ‘Move, man,’ and the two of us fell into the audience. We were doing ‘How Far Am I From Canaan?,’ and things just came together.”

  There is a photograph from this period that conveys some of the spirit of that moment. In it the Soul Stirrers are all immaculate in matching white suits, dark ties and handkerchiefs, and sharp two-tone saddle shoes. In this photograph it is Cheeks who has leapt off the stage, and the look on the other Soul Stirrers’ faces matches the expressions of the audience, as amusement, appreciation, attentiveness, encouragement, and pure curiosity vie with each other for primacy. Sam and Paul seem to be exhorting June to go ahead on, and Sam in particular seems engaged in a way that leaves any pose of cool reserve long since abandoned—he was no longer, as nine-year-old Bobby Womack, whose family group sometimes shared a bill with the Stirrers in their hometown of Cleveland, observed, just a “pretty boy that everybody could dump house on.” Cheeks, said J.W. Alexander, just wouldn’t quit. “The group [the Soul Stirrers] would sit down, and he wouldn’t go sit.” Dumping house meant everything to June, J.W. said—it was the same goal Sam had set for himself from childhood on, but now he was learning a different way to accomplish it.

  They went into the studio together in March of 1954 for the Stirrers’ annual recording session. Three of the completed numbers, with Oakland gospel stalwart Faidest Wagoner accompanying the group on piano, are essentially Sam Cook solos, sung in that lyrical style that had by now become his trademark, but with an elaboration of that style that you can attribute either to growing maturity or, possibly, deeper commitment. The first, “Jesus, I’ll Never Forget,” is a lightly swinging up-tempo number with lots of “oh-oh-oh”s and “no-no-no”s for Sam to practice his ascending and descending yodels, and a confident, practiced touch that leaves no question of his vocal mastery. The second, “He’ll Make a Way,” by Cleveland gospel singer Clinton Levert, an accomplished songwriter and performer whom Sam had met and grown close to in the course of his travels, has Sam singing at the top of his range, with the Soul Stirrers backgrounding him all the way through. His falsetto here is an effortless extension of his natural delivery, carried off with a smoothness that the raw, untrained vocalist of his first Soul Stirrers sessions could never have achieved but with a poignancy, too, that R.H. Harris’ more unrelenting attack could not suggest. He employs his intricate melisma on words such as “please,” “weakness,” and, of course, “I,” which is characteristically elongated to “I-I-I-I”—but it is his patience and deliberation that are most noticeable throughout the five takes, the manner with which he has established a style so much his own that he can issue an understated and highly effective scream at the end without for a moment suggesting either imitation or lack of inspiration.

  It is the song with which he begins and ends the session, though, the piano player Faidest Wagoner’s “Any Day Now,” that under any other circumstances would have had to be considered the highlight of the session. It was, said Wagoner, based on “The Bells of Saint Mary’s,” the title song of the 1945 Bing Crosby movie, and it is written with a devotional purity that climaxes in a vision of transcendent joy. Wagoner played with the Stirrers whenever they came to Oakland—she played with every major gospel group that came to town because she served as an assistant to the promoter, James Wilks, and her father, Reverend McKinley McCardell, was one of the founders of the Oakland Church of God in Christ. She had come to know the Stirrers well, even going on the road with them occasionally with her group, the Angelairs, and what she loved most about Sam was his ability to make a song’s meaning absolutely clear. He was a crowd-pleaser, there was no question about it, “all the women went wild. You know, he was always smiling, had that lovable smile on his face. [But] he was a different man from most of the singers, he had such a talent that he could just sit up and create something, make a poem out of something, and the way he did the songs was different. They had words, they had meanings—you could understand what he was talking about.”

  “Any Day Now” is a masterful performance by any standard. But perhaps more significantly, it achieves a profundity that none of Sam’s previous recorded performances had approached, with a somber piano arpeggio to announce its serious and stately intent, a beautifully articulated, carefully developed vocal by Sam that starts with the lowest and ends with the highest notes in his range, and a deeper meaning, which he seems to communicate with restrained but undeniably passionate fervor. When at the conclusion of the song he declares, “Any day now, I’m going home,” his voice trails off in an almost wistfully ascendant falsetto that conveys all the heartbreak, all the hope, and all the fragility of faith.

  It is, all in all, an astonishing performance, and the capstone of a remarkable session that, despite producing only four finished songs, suggests a level of discipline and control, a subordination of style to content that Sam had never before been fully capable of. But if you are looking for any sign of June Cheeks in these three songs, you will have to look elsewhere. In fact, the only overt evidence of Cheeks, at least to the untrained ear, comes with “All Right Now,” the fourth number of the day, the kind of incantatory extemporization that was commonplace for Cheeks but not for the Stirrers, at least not up until now.

  Sam plays the role of setup man here, offering a perfectly modulated Bible lesson in the second verse before June Cheeks roars in and takes the song away. Here you have all the power of live performance, with June unleashing his full-throated scream and chuffing like a preacher, his expelled breath rasping both to punctuate the sermon and raise it to higher, more ecstatic ground. It goes on for at least three takes, two of which are well over three minutes, with each yielding the same ecstatic conclusion and Art merely suggesting that the other Stirrers sound their t’s a little more clearly in the background. “Right,” he says, carefully enunciating and biting off the ending exaggeratedly to illustrate his point. “This is ‘All Right Now,’” he pronounces, only to be met with the immediate rejoinder—by whom and in what spirit it is impossible to tell—“You don’t sing it and say ‘All right.”

  With or without the t’s, it is clear that Rupe was excited about the performance, and subsequent to the session, he edited down the best take by almost a minute, presumably for single release. But fate intervened in the person of Don Robey, the light-skinned Houston nightclub owner and reputed numbers boss who owned Peacock Records, the label for which the Sensational Nightingales, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, and R.H. Harris’ Christland Singers all recorded. “Dear Mr. Rupp [sic],” he began his letter of March 25, “I had occasion to talk with Mr. Crain and Mr. Farley of the Soul Stirrers a few days ago regarding the services of [Julius] Cheeks,” the upshot of the talk being Robey’s reminder to his Specialty counterpart that Mr. Cheeks was “under exclusive contract to Peacock Records, Inc., and monies have been spent on the artist [whose] services . . . are extraordinary.” He felt sure, nonetheless, that a happy medium could be struck, for as Robey declared philosophically, “one man’s loss is another man’s gain.”

  And yet, for whatever reason, that middle ground was never found. It may simply have been that Art resented the fact that
Robey was looking for financial compensation when, as he noted on Robey’s letter, at the time Harris went to Robey, following his departure from the Soul Stirrers, “we said nothing about it.” Or it could have been, as Jesse Whitaker of the Pilgrim Travelers surmised, that Paul Foster saw his position threatened by June Cheeks’ more extroverted approach and the Soul Stirrers elected to go the tried-and-true route rather than gamble on Cheeks’ more volatile personality. The association in any case was soon sundered, the track remained unissued for nearly twenty years, and Cheeks returned to the Sensational Nightingales before long, leaving Sam with the lessons he had learned and a close personal connection that would survive, and thrive, on many fierce musical battles still to come.

  Art finally issued “He’s My Friend Until the End,” the Alex Bradford song in which J.W. Alexander had shown such belief a full year earlier, around the time of the new session. It almost immediately rewarded that faith, with sales of over twenty-five thousand for the first half of 1954, by far the Stirrers’ best showing since Sam’s debut single three years earlier. Around the same time, J.W. Alexander put Herman Hill and Associates, a public relations firm, on retainer at $75 a month and shortly thereafter issued a press release saying that the Travelers had had their new Cadillac outfitted with “a white piano installed in the trunk and a midget record player in the glove compartment.” To J.W. it was just a way of stirring up excitement, even if the piano didn’t exist: “I had searched around to see if it was possible [to install the piano], I felt I could use it with my songwriting, but they couldn’t do it at the time. However, I did want it done and, all through the South especially, people would come to see the eggshell-white Cadillac with the piano in it.”

  The Pilgrim Travelers had their virtual miniature piano, the Soul Stirrers had Sam. “We were doing very well,” J.W. said. “We were a good drawing card [on the road], and we would get a new Cadillac every year.” But at the same time, record sales were coming harder and harder (only “I’ve Got a New Home,” a Whitaker composition with a catchy, almost pop feel, came close to matching previous Travelers’ bestsellers), and, in J.W.’s view, they were all going to have to work just a little bit harder, and perhaps come up with new and more up-to-date methods, if they were to sustain their success in the long term.

  For Art Rupe the new year was only providing further proof of his recent revelation. His faith in the dramatic, swooping style of Alex Bradford had paid off as “Too Close,” Bradford’s initial single for the label, continued to sell well into 1954, with eventual sales of nearly two hundred thousand copies, Specialty’s highest mark for gospel sales and more than enough to qualify it as a solid r&b hit. But that, of course, was the exception, not the rule, and while Mahalia Jackson was continuing to develop a widescale white audience with her Carnegie Hall concerts and European tours, signing a five-year deal with Columbia Records in August for the kind of money (a reported $25,000 a year) that up till now had been available only to a popular recording artist, Rupe could see that the day of pure gospel, the music that had most inspired him and to which he owed so much of his success, was past and gone. Continuing with the quartets, he now knew, was going to be as much a matter of faith and hope as anything else—though he was not prepared to offer outright charity. He was, as always, committed to a hardheaded business approach and unstinting efforts on behalf of every act signed to the Specialty label.

  At the same time, his deal with Johnny Vincent, the young New Orleans record hustler to whom he had issued such explicit instructions on sales and production methods, was paying off with undreamt-of results. Art didn’t much like Vincent or trust his work ethic, either, but one of his first signings, a twenty-seven-year-old New Orleans-based bluesman named Eddie Jones, who dressed in a fire-engine-red suit and occasionally dyed his hair blue, delivered Specialty’s all-time bestseller to date with his very first release, issued under the name of Guitar Slim. The song, a fiery gospel-laced number called “The Things That I Used to Do,” which Slim claimed had been auditioned for him by the devil in a dream, hit the charts in January and remained there for the first five months of 1954, occupying the number-one r&b position for fourteen weeks and becoming one of the biggest-selling blues records of all time. More significantly, it established a style, blues with an unashamed dollop of soul, as Slim’s strong church-inflected voice set the tone while the piano and simple but elegantly voiced instrumental arrangement by fellow New Orleans resident (and Atlantic recording artist) Ray Charles supplied the undeniable gospel underpinnings.

  “The Things That I Used to Do” was followed almost immediately on the charts by the record debut of Roy Hamilton, a big-voiced, church-trained singer out of Jersey City, New Jersey, by way of Georgia. Hamilton applied his unmistakable vocal talents to an openly gospelized version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein inspirational showtune “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which vied with “The Things That I Used to Do” for eight weeks at the top of the r&b charts and even reached number twenty-one on the pop charts. Most remarkable of all, Hamilton, a clean-cut, strictly stand-up singer with no suggestive moves or lyrics and no suggestive instrument other than his voice, played to mixed crowds whose “predominantly [white] femme audience,” reported Cash Box on the occasion of a riot in Revere, Massachusetts, “went beserk and stormed the stage.”

  From this point on, there was absolutely no question of the course that Rupe, and Specialty, would follow. Art soon severed his connection with Johnny Vincent because of what he saw as Vincent’s maddeningly undisciplined approach and questionable business ethics, but he was determined to find the key to the crossover sales that he had stumbled upon almost inadvertently, first with Lloyd Price, now with Guitar Slim. It was clear to him that it lay somewhere in the cracks between blues and spiritual music, he suspected that it might exist in the “crying style” of rising blues star B.B. King, but one thing he was certain of: it was, like all the music he had recorded, somehow rooted in rhythm, and with the crack recording unit that he had found in Cosimo Matassa’s Rampart Street studio (and with the crossover recognition that Crescent City native Fats Domino was beginning to enjoy), he was convinced that its geographical locus was New Orleans, and its spiritual heart was gospel music.

  Just how convinced can be seen in a series of letters he wrote in early 1955 to the singer he had dubbed “Sister” Wynona Carr from the time she first arrived in the Specialty studio in 1949 on J.W. Alexander’s recommendation. Carr had enjoyed solid gospel sales and had even had something of a hit the previous year with “The Ballgame,” a self-penned number pitting Jesus against the Devil in—what else?—a ballgame. This was followed in rapid succession by “Dragnet For Jesus” and “15 Rounds For Jesus,” both of which remained unissued, as Art urged her instead to consider recording secular material or, barring that, to “try to write words in the blues field to songs in the Gospel field that have been hits in the past. For example, you know what Ray Charles did with ‘I Got a Woman’ [his end-of-the-year groundbreaking single in which Charles took Guitar Slim’s approach one step further by basing the song directly on the Southern Tones’ “It Must Be Jesus,” a popular gospel release in the summer of 1954]. Also, Little Walter took [Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s] ‘This Train’ and made it into ‘My Babe,’ and it was a big hit. That seems to be what the people are buying today, and even if you cannot sing these numbers in your style, we certainly need them desperately for our other artists.”

  THE STIRRERS HAD THEIR ANNUAL SESSION in February of 1955, but this time in Chicago and, for the first time, without the supervising presence of Art or even Alex. No outtakes appear to have survived, but the four master takes would constitute the group’s next two singles, as sure an indicator as you could get of Art’s wholehearted approval (there was nearly a year and a half, by way of contrast, between Wynona Carr’s recording of “The Ballgame” and its release in the fall of 1953).

  It was a different kind of session in other respects as well, with the meticulous manner in which each s
ong was built serving as testimony to the continuing perfectionism of the Stirrers’ approach. In addition, the quietly stated interplay on organ and piano of Willie Webb and Eddie Robinson, longtime stalwarts on the Chicago gospel scene, for the first time provided the group with the kind of accomplished professional backing on which other quartets had long since capitalized.

  The first number was a finely measured composition by twenty-two-year-old James Cleveland, onetime boy soprano and Mahalia Jackson accompanist, currently musical director of Reverend C. L. Franklin’s New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit and the only male member of the Caravans. Taken at a grave, almost stately pace, “One More River to Cross” has the simple classic construction that gives a pop song like Irving Berlin’s “Always” its unforgettable impact. Jesse Farley’s burbling bass introduces the chorus’ initial harmonizing of the title phrase, with Sam’s delicate tenor wafting over it and offering the variations that fill out its meaning. There is just one more river to cross before, he declares, he reaches his journey’s end, there is just one more river to cross “before I’ll be free from sin.” The imploring hesitancy of his delivery, the contrast between his fervent desire for release and the Stirrers’ forcefully voiced reiteration of the theme only serve to bolster the artful construction of the song, and when Sam brings the message home with the kind of hypnotic repetition that is at the heart of gospel music’s evocation of spiritual transcendence, there remains that same gentle, almost quizzical but disarmingly eloquent touch that will always set him apart from Archie, June, or even his chief second, Paul Foster.

  “Nearer to Thee” represents the pinnacle of Sam’s songwriting to date, the kind of narrative skill that J.W. considered to be Sam’s mark and that so many of Sam’s gospel peers saw him create nightly in the extended live extemporizations that were the bell note of any gospel program. But where others created fervor through their “shouts,” Sam created fervor by telling a story—and here the thematic centerpiece of the story was the familiar hymn “Nearer My God to Thee,” which in the first verse the congregation is singing “in a voice that was loud and clear,” in the second represents a measure of Christian faith, and in the concluding verse offers comfort and consolation to the singer. Like “One More River to Cross,” Sam’s song is thoughtfully constructed, but in that middle verse an interesting thing happens, as you feel Sam’s imagination for a moment take flight, with impersonal moral lessons suddenly yielding to personal illumination, as the singer delares: “Songs have a feeling / There’s a story in every song that we sing / Songs have been known to lift heavy burdens / If all of our troubles to God we ought to bring.” And for once you feel as if you might be peering into Sam’s own soul.