Sam Cooke

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rhythm and blues singer

Personal Information

Born Samuel Cook, January 22, 1931, in Clarksdale, MS; died of a gunshot wound, December 11, 1964, in Los Angeles, CA; son of Charles (a Pentecostal minister and domestic servant) and Annie May (Carl) Cook; married Dolores Mohawk, October, 1953 (divorced, 1958); married Barbara Campbell, 1959; children: (with Campbell) Linda, Tracey, Vincent (deceased).

Career

Began as teenage singer with the gospel quartet the Highway QCs, late 1940s; joined the Soul Stirrers, 1951; made several gospel records with them and toured extensively; began solo career in 1957 with the pop single "Lovable"; formed own music-publishing company and management agency, late 1950s; signed with RCA Records, 1960; wrote and recorded several Top Forty hits in the early 1960s.

Life's Work

Sam Cooke was one of the first African American performers to bridge the falsely-created gap between "black" and "white" music in the 1950s. In a career that began with singing gospel in Chicago churches and landed him on the Tonight Show crooning R&B pop songs in the 1960s, the movie-star-handsome Cooke rose to become one of rock and roll's earliest pop stars, and was among the most worshipped performers of his generation. His best-known hits were "You Send Me" and "Chain Gang," and his success helped lay the groundwork for numerous African American performers to follow. Yet the singer was also a savvy entrepreneur who retained tight artistic and financial control over his career in an age when wide- scale cheating and fraud were common to the record industry.

Overshadowing his photogenic smile and business acumen, however, were Cooke's distinctive tenor and his unique, shivery way of hitting the high notes; this style would later become a trademark of soul singers like Otis Redding and Al Green, but it was something he had perfected ages ago when singing lead in a gospel quartet that sometimes pitched their harmonies too high by habit. It was this borrowing from one African American musical genre to help create another that added to Cooke's achievement, and made his untimely death all the more tragic. "Like Aretha Franklin ... Cooke was one of the clearest embodiments of the tension between the sacred and the secular that continues to define the American cultural and political landscapes," wrote The Nation's Gene Santoro.

Cooke was born January 22, 1931, in Clarksdale, the heart of Mississippi's Delta country. His father, Charles Cook Sr. (the "e" was added later by his son) was a Pentecostal minister who also worked as a domestic servant. When economic repercussions from the Great Depression worsened the already-hardscrabble life in the Delta region, Charles Cook moved to Chicago and found work there as an assistant pastor, and soon sent for his family. Sam Cooke and his siblings--Mary, Hattie, Agnes, brothers David, L.C., and Willie--lived in an apartment on Cottage Grove Avenue located in what has been termed the nation's first true African American urban neighborhood, Bronzeville. Their lives were regimented by church and school; a typical Sunday would begin with church services at six in the morning and continue through the evening with more services, choir, and bible-study classes.

Cooke began singing in the church choir at age six. By the time he was in his teens, he and his siblings had formed a singing group that was actually earning them pocket money. Though his training was in gospel music, Cooke was also known to sneak into bars and sing for money by himself, providing him with a glimpse into another, less holy kind of urban life. In high school Cooke began singing with the Highway QCs, a gospel quartet and one of many in his hometown at the time. It was an extremely popular format: the quartets--with their tight vocal harmonies sung a cappella style-- were a near-secular version of gospel music that played to packed church audiences. Cooke's angelic lead voice, combined with his winning smile and onstage charm, made him a star from the start. He was a popular teenager at Wendell Phillips High School, and he had many girlfriends, but not long after graduation Cooke ran into trouble with the law and spent three months in Cook County jail. Some pornographic material then popular among teenagers had found its way into the elementary school classroom of one of his girlfriends, and the minister's son was arrested on a morals charge.

The setback may have shown Cooke how easy it was to be lured into sin in the urban world, and how difficult it was to get back on track after an experience with the racist and extremely dangerous criminal justice system in a large Northern city. After his release, Cooke resumed his work with the QCs, and one of their first big breaks came when they were invited to Detroit to sing at the Reverend C. L. Franklin's church. The New Bethel Baptist Church was already becoming a famous stage for gospel acts, and the exposure of Franklin's young daughter, Aretha, to all of this would later make her a star. Another coup came when the QCs were invited to Memphis to sing on the radio on WDIA, at the time a well-known and influential black radio station in the South.

The Highway QCs, however, were but a copy of Bronzeville's most famous gospel quartets, the Soul Stirrers, and when the Stirrers' lead singer quit in 1951, Cooke was invited to replace him. Soon he was earning $50 a week on tour with the group, who enjoyed a far- flung fan base. The paycheck was hard-earned, however: the quartet crisscrossed the South--during an era when any African American in any kind of car was reason enough to be stopped and questioned by local police--to sing to sold-out church audiences. Some years they traveled up to 100,000 miles over twelve months.

The Soul Stirrers became extremely popular with Cooke as frontman; the original members were older, and Cooke possessed star appeal and loved to play to the crowd. Teen girls began crowding the stage at their shows, which was unusual in gospel audiences--though older women had no qualms about showing enthusiasm for the music; this was considered as evidence their music had rightly invoked the Holy Spirit. Soul crooner Wilson Pickett once noted, "Them sisters fell like dominoes when Sam took the lead," according to Life. When Cooke joined, the Soul Stirrers had just signed a recording contract, and in short time they traveled to Los Angeles to record for the Specialty label, owned by a white gospel impresario named Art Rupe. These singles "capture his finest vocal moments," wrote Joe McEwen in an essay on Cooke in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll. "He never sang songs that were more erotic or buoyant than the love songs he sang about his Lord," he added.

Cooke's recording career with the Soul Stirrers faded along with the popularity of gospel during the 1950s. The singles--"Peace in the Valley" (1951, their first and most successful), "How Far Am I from Canaan?" (1952), "Jesus Paid the Debt" (1953), "One More River" (1955)--became fewer and far between, and each sold less and less. But it was during this era that Cooke perfected a signature vocal trick that would later make him famous. One night in 1953, when he was singing "How Far Am I from Canaan?," Cooke could not hit the high notes--sometimes the others pitched it too high out of habit for their former lead singer--so "he just floated under," onetime Soul Stirrer and later Cooke's manager S. R. (Roy) Crain remembered in You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke. "The technique," wrote author Daniel Wolff, "fit in beautifully with the Soul Stirrers' tight, light harmonies. It was ... an urban sound: cool, sophisticated, and yet shot through with emotion." The audience, Crain and gospel-scene colleague J. W. Alexander remembered, went wild in response.

As his star rose, and with little real home life, Cooke was enjoying the perks of a musician's life. He had a child out of wedlock with his high-school girlfriend, Barbara Campbell, but the following year married another woman, Dolores Mohawk, whom he had met in California. As the decade progressed, Cooke saw that religious music was losing ground as rock and roll--in many ways, a less threatening hybrid version of several black musical traditions--gained in popularity. A producer named Robert "Bumps" Blackwell soon joined Specialty, and brought his talent for making successful R&B records--"Long Tall Sally" with Little Richard had been his creation. Blackwell noticed the way audiences responded to Cooke onstage and thought he should be making pop records. Yet in the world of gospel, even the suggestion of such was heresy. Among the performers, fans, and behind-the-scenes people, there was a high wall separating religious-themed music and that of the "devil." To scale that wall was the worst sin a gospel singer could commit.

In 1956, Cooke wrote his first pop song, "Lovable," and recorded it on the sly with Blackwell under the name Dale Cook. It was not a success, and many of Cooke's fans saw through the ruse immediately since his tenor was so distinctive. He tried to say it had been done by his brother "Dale," but few believed him. Rupe was not happy about the crossover anyway, and Specialty failed to promote it. When the label president discovered Cooke and Blackwell recording another pop song one night with white background singers- -a serious transgression in gospel--he became angry and fired Blackwell on the spot. According to Wolff's biography, Rupe looked around the studio and hired a hanger-on who had been looking for work at the label; it was Sonny Bono's first big break.

In his anger, Rupe also signed away the rights to the track that Cooke and Blackwell were working on that day, "You Send Me." Thus Blackwell and Cooke signed with a fledgling pop label, Keen Records, and released their single in September of 1957. "You Send Me" hit No. 1 on both the R&B and pop charts and sold 1.7 million copies--and lawyers for Specialty began looking for a cut. Rupe was reportedly livid about Cooke's success as a solo artist, and to skirt legal entanglements both Cooke and Keen executives quickly decided to credit the songwriting on "You Send Me" to L. C. Cooke, Sam's brother, to avoid paying publishing royalties to Specialty. (The song had technically been written while Cooke was still under contract to them as a songwriter).

Such legal headaches made Cooke determined to retain legal and financial control over his artistic career from then on. He soon became partners with J. W. Alexander in the already-formed KAGS Music, his friend and advisor's song publishing company. This meant Cooke would receive his own royalties. It was groundbreaking at the time for artist to have financial control over his songbook; only Berry Gordy, founder of Motown, would later outdo Cooke in establishing himself outside a cutthroat recording industry known for its dishonest practices. Racism seemed a fact of life in the entertainment industry. The same year "You Send Me" hit No. 1, Cooke's last-place slot on the Ed Sullivan Show was cut off due to time constraints--an insult seen as deliberate by his African American fans. The slight only spurred records sales, and Sullivan gave Cooke what amounted to a fawning apology when he was rebooked a few months later. In one incident in New Jersey, Cooke and the band had stopped at a roadside restaurant, and the waitress there refused to take their order; when someone put "You Send Me" on the jukebox she continued to ignore them while swooning at the jukebox to her favorite song, completely unaware who the men were.

Cooke was originally positioned by Keen as a teen idol for African American girls, but it soon became clear that white audiences found his style appealing as well. The early years of rock and roll were marked by odd rules of conduct seemingly aimed at stifling the cross-cultural appeal of the music: in the South, segregated audiences were common, divided by a rope between whites (right and center of stage) and Negroes (to the left). In live shows on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, police would become belligerent and menacing if white teenagers got up to dance. Cooke also made history by appearing on one of the first mixed bills in the South in the fall of 1958, when he played with Danny and the Juniors and Conway Twitty, among others; still, the event was plagued by threats of trouble from the local Ku Klux Klan.

In 1958 Cooke wrote and released several singles for Keen, including "Stealing Kisses" and "Win Your Love," but none did as well as "You Send Me." Some encouraged him to give up rock and segue over to a more upscale audience. In 1958, he appeared at New York's priciest supper club, the Copacabana, in some awkward performances which soured him on the idea of moving "up." He instead grew resistant to the idea of what he felt was "selling out" to white audiences, as he noticed some of his fellow performers had done, and approached the dilemma from another angle: the following year, he toured with Jackie Wilson, brought in huge crowds, and was able to force one promoter in the South to desegregate the seating.

Meanwhile, Cooke's personal life was as melodramatic as ever. He divorced Mohawk, but then nearly died in a car accident shortly thereafter (it put fellow passenger Lou Rawls into a coma); later a despondent Mohawk was killed after driving into a tree while intoxicated. There were paternity suits from women claiming to have had his child, but in 1959 he married Barbara Campbell, the mother of his daughter Linda. The ceremony was performed in Chicago by his father.

Cooke's second marriage coincided with his pursuit of a more solid foundation for his artistic abilities than the small Keen label. He desired a major-label contract, and with it the powerful manager and solid marketing people who would push his records. Cooke's decision to leave Keen ignited a bidding war among the big labels, and it was the team of Hugo (Peretti) & Luigi (Creatore), two cousins who were A&R men at RCA, who managed to lure Cooke there. After Harry Belafonte, a calypso singer, Cooke was RCA's first significant African American signee. His first single for the label, "Teenage Sonata," was released in early 1960 to dismal results, but its follow-up, "Wonderful World," released in April, fared much better; his third that year, August's "Chain Gang," gave him another gold record. The song had been inspired by call-and- response tunes Cooke and his fellow bandmates had heard from the prison work gangs as they drove through in the South--virtually the modern-day version of the slave spiritual. Cooke wrote, arranged, and produced "Chain Gang," and devised its unusual percussion: a stick hitting a leather stool instead of the drum, and banging the microphone on the base to get the clanky "chain" sound.

Cooke had formed his own label, SAR, in 1959, and the first act he signed was the Soul Stirrers, whose career had declined considerably after Cooke's departure. SAR headquarters, at 6425 Hollywood Boulevard, was also home to several other gospel and R&B acts, including Lou Rawls, Billy Preston, and a young Cleveland family of gospel singers known as the Womacks. Cooke's excellent ear for pop hits gave him the confidence to experiment with different musical styles in his solo career on RCA. Most of Cooke's singles for the label charted in the Top Forty. In the summer of 1962 he released "Bring It on Home to Me," cited by McEwen as "perhaps the first record to define the soul experience" for its audacious borrowing directly from the gospel call-and-response style and the seen-it-all mood of Cooke's vocals. Its B-side, "Having a Party," also fared well, and remained an unusual statement on the cross-racial appeal of Cooke's music: the song begins as an innocuous, assuredly "white" party, and by the time of its close the background sounds disclose a far hipper, more raucous bash.

Cooke still toured extensively in early Sixties--including several dates with an eighteen-year-old Aretha Franklin in 1961--but made his home in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. He and Barbara had two more children, and friends remembered him as generous with his fortune, on some occasions buying cars or fur coats as gifts for no reason. Yet fame brought with it its own difficulties: in the summer of 1962 Cooke was plagued by a bizarre rumor that he was suffering from leukemia, was near death, and planned to donate his eyes to Ray Charles; other versions had him already dead. The unsubstantiated gossip bothered him greatly. "In the Clarksdale of Sam's infancy," wrote Wolff, "there were whispers that pacts with the devil--strange midnight transactions--gave people unearthly artistic power. This was like some modern version of that payback."

Real tragedy did befall Cooke, however, in June of 1963, when his eighteen-month-old son Vincent drowned in the family swimming pool. Friends marked this incident as a turning point in his life, as Wolff's biography recounts, and afterward the singer grew far more introverted and sought solace in alcohol. At the same time, Cooke would need his full range of talents to counter the coming changes in popular music. By 1963 the British invasion and the Motown sound were making huge inroads into the charts. Cooke hired Allen Klein as his new manager. Klein was an accountant-turned-management impresario famous for auditing record-company books and forcing them to pay past-due royalties to artists. Cooke also toured England with Little Richard. Audiences were responsive, but Cooke felt ostracized by the general public. In his hotel room one night, Cooke penned "Another Saturday Night" there, which yielded him another No. 1 hit and his biggest success of 1963. That year his SAR label also released a song by Valentinos (actually the Womack Brothers), "It's All Over Now," which was immediately covered by the Rolling Stones and became one of their first huge hits.

Cooke's life came to a mysterious, scandal-obscured end one night in December of 1964, when he checked into a motel on South Figueroa in the rough Watts section of Los Angeles with a woman who had a criminal record for prostitution. He and Lisa Boyer had met earlier at a restaurant, where Cooke's companions there remembered him pulling out a large wad of cash--as he usually carried on him--when it came time to pay for drinks. Both the cash, his license, and credit cards and a ring were missing when police arrived and found him dead in the motel manager's office later that night. The manager, Bertha Lee Franklin, claimed that Cooke--looking for Boyer who had fled with his clothes and money--had kicked down the door and lunged at her, so she shot him in self-defense. His last words were, "Lady, you shot me."

Upon hearing radio reports of his death, fans began congregating outside the seedy motel. At the coroner's inquest a few days later, Boyer claimed she had been kidnapped, the Cooke family lawyer was not allowed to cross-examine the witnesses, and in the end the jury ruled it justifiable homicide. Several outrageous conspiracy theories were heard, but it was more likely that the police's slipshod investigation had failed to look more probingly into the matter. Two funerals for Cooke were held, in Chicago and Los Angeles, and at the latter Ray Charles sang "Angels Watching Over Me." Outside both were agitated mobs of grief-stricken fans. Two months later, Cooke's widow became the wife of Bobby Womack when the young singer reached the age of twenty-one and could marry without consent. Supposedly Cooke had died without a will, and his widow and Cooke's former business associates battled in court for years over his estate and royalty rights.

RCA released "Shake" eleven days after Cooke's death, but the song's B-side, "A Change Is Gonna Come," may have been more indicative of Cooke's legacy to black music. The song was reportedly inspired by the Bob Dylan protest song "Blowin' in the Wind," and he had performed it on the Tonight Show shortly before his death. "Curtained with shimmering strings," wrote McEwen in the Rolling Stone homage, "and anchored by a dirgelike drumbeat, `Change,' like Martin Luther King's final speech, in which he told his followers he had been to the mountaintop, was appropriately ominous, as if to anticipate the turbulent years facing black America," he continued. Cooke was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one its first honorees in 1986.

Awards

Awarded gold single for "You Send Me," 1957 and "Chain Gang," 1960; Inducted posthumously into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, Ohio, 1986.

Works

Selective Discography

• (With the Soul Stirrers; on Specialty Records) "Peace in the Valley," 1951.
• "Come, Let's Go Back to God," 1951.
• "I'm Gonna Build on That Shore," 1951.
• "How Far Am I from Canaan?" 1952.
• "Just Another Day," 1952.
• "Jesus Paid the Debt," 1953.
• "He'll Welcome Me," 1953.
• "He's My Friend Until the End," 1954.
• "Jesus, I'll Never Forget," 1954.
• "Nearer to Thee," 1955.
• "One More River," 1955.
• "Wonderful," 1956.
• "Touch the Hem of His Garment," 1956.
• (as solo artist) "Lovable," Specialty, 1957.
• "You Send Me," Keen, 1957.
• "I'll Come Running Back to You," Specialty, 1957.
• "For Sentimental Reasons," Keen, 1957.
• "I Don't Want to Cry," Specialty, 1958.
• "You Were Made for Me," Keen, 1958.
• "Stealing Kisses," Keen, 1958.
• "Win Your Love," Keen, 1958.
• "Love You Most of All," Keen, 1958.
• "Everybody Likes to Cha Cha," Keen, 1959.
• "Only Sixteen," Keen, 1959.
• "Summertime," Keen, 1959.
• "I Need You Now," Specialty, 1959.
• "There I've Said It Again," Keen, 1959.
• "T'Ain't Nobody's Bizness," Keen, 1959.
• "Teenage Sonata," RCA, 1960.
• "You Understand Me," RCA, 1960.
• "Wonderful World," Keen, 1960.
• "With You," Keen, 1960.
• "Chain Gang," RCA, 1960.
• "So Glamorous," Keen, 1960.
• "Sad Mood," RCA, 1960.
• "Mary Mary Lou," Keen, 1960.
• "That's It--I Quit--I'm Movin' On," RCA, 1961.
• "Cupid," RCA, 1961.
• "Feel It," RCA, 1961.
• "Twistin' the Night Away," RCA, 1962.
• "Bring It on Home to Me," RCA, 1962 (B-side, "Having a Party").
• "Nothing Can Change This Love," RCA, 1962.
• "Send Me Some Lovin'," RCA, 1962.
• "Another Saturday Night," RCA, 1963.
• "Cool Train," RCA, 1963.
• "Little Red Rooster," RCA, 1963.
• "Ain't That Good News," RCA, 1964.
• "Good Times," RCA, 1964.
• "Cousin of Mine," RCA, 1964.
• "Shake," RCA, 1964 (B-side, "A Change Is Gonna Come").
• Sam Cooke: The Man and His Music, RCA, 1986.
• Sam Cooke With the Soul Stirrers, Specialty, 1991.
• The Great 1955 Shrine Concert, Specialty, 1993.
• Sam Cooke's SAR Records Story, 1959-1965, ABKCO, 1994.

Further Reading

Books

• Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, edited by Anthony DeCurtis and James Henke, Random House, 1992, pp. 135-138.
• Wolff, Daniel, with S. R. Crain, Clifton White, and G. David Tenenbaum, You Send Me: The Life & Times of Sam Cooke, William Morrow, 1995.

Periodicals

• Entertainment Weekly, December 10, 1993, p. 88.
• Guitar Player, June 1996, p. 132.
• Jet, January 27, 1997, p. 20.
• Life, December 1993, p. 28.
• Nation, March 13, 1995, p. 357.

— Carol Brennan

See Sam Cooke Lyrics

• Born: January 22, 1931, Clarksdale, MS
• Died: December 11, 1964, Los Angeles, CA
• Active: '50s, '60s
• Genres: Rhythm & Blues
• Instrument: Vocals
• Representative Albums: "Portrait of a Legend 1951-1964," "Night Beat," "Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963"
• Representative Songs: "You Send Me," "Only Sixteen," "Wonderful World"

Biography

Sam Cooke was the most important soul singer in history -- he was also the inventor of soul music, and its most popular and beloved performer in both the black and white communities. Equally important, he was among the first modern black performers and composers to attend to the business side of the music business, and founded both a record label and a publishing company as an extension of his careers as a singer and composer. Yet, those business interests didn't prevent him from being engaged in topical issues, including the struggle over civil rights, the pitch and intensity of which followed an arc that paralleled Cooke's emergence as a star -- his own career bridged gaps between black and white audiences that few had tried to surmount, much less succeeded at doing, and also between generations; where Chuck Berry or Little Richard brought black and white teenagers together, James Brown sold records to white teenagers and black listeners of all ages, and Muddy Waters got young white folkies and older black transplants from the South onto the same page, Cooke appealed to all of the above, and the parents of those white teenagers as well -- yet he never lost his credibility with his core black audience.

In a sense, his appeal anticipated that of the Beatles, in breadth and depth. He was born Sam Cook in Clarksdale, MS, on January 22, 1931, one of eight children of a Baptist minister and his wife. Even as a young boy, he showed an extraordinary voice and frequently sang in the choir in his father's church. During the middle of the decade, the Cook family moved to Chicago's South Side, where the Reverend Charles Cook quickly established himself as a major figure in the religious community. Sam and three of his siblings also formed a group of their own, the Singing Children, in the 1930s. Although his own singing was confined to gospel music, he was aware and appreciative of the popular music of the period, particularly the melodious, harmony-based sounds of the Ink Spots, whose influence could later be heard in songs such as "You Send Me" and "For Sentimental Reasons." As a teenager, he was a member of the Teen Highway QCs, a gospel group that performed in churches and at religious gatherings. His membership in that group led to his introduction to the Soul Stirrers, one of the top gospel groups in the country, and in 1950 he joined them.

If Cooke had never recorded a note of music on his own, he would still be remembered today in gospel circles for his work with the Soul Stirrers. Over the next six years, his role within the group and his prominence within the black community rose to the point where he was already a star, with his own fiercely admiring and devoted audience, through his performances on songs like "Touch the Hem of His Garment," "Nearer to Thee," and "That's Heaven to Me." The group was one of the top acts on Art Rupe's Specialty Records label, and he might have gone on for years as their most popular singer, but Cooke's goal was to reach audiences beyond the religious community, and beyond the black population, with his voice. This was a tall order at the time, as the mere act of recording a popular song could alienate the gospel listenership in an instant; singing for God was regarded in those circles as a gift and a responsibility, and popular music, rock & roll, and R&B were to be abhorred, at least coming from the mouth of a gospel singer; the gap was so great that when a blues singer such as Blind Gary Davis became "sanctified" (that is, found religion) as the Rev. Gary Davis, he could still sing and play his old blues melodies, but had to devise new words, and he never sang the blues words again.

He tested the waters of popular music in 1956 with the single "Lovable," produced by Bumps Blackwell and credited under the name Dale Cooke so as not to attract too much attention from his existing audience. It was enough, however, to get Cooke dropped by the Soul Stirrers and their record label, but that freed him to record under his real name. The result was one of the biggest selling singles of the 1950s, a Cooke original entitled "You Send Me," which sold over two million copies on the tiny Keen Records label and hit number one on both the pop and R&B charts. Although it seems like a tame record today, "You Send Me" was a pioneering soul record in its time, melding elements of R&B, gospel, and pop into a sound that was new and still coalescing at the time.

Cooke was with Keen for the next two years, a period in which he delivered up some of the prettiest romantic ballads and teen pop singles of the era, including "For Sentimental Reasons," "Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha," "Only Sixteen," and "(What A) Wonderful World." These were extraordinarily beautiful records, and in between the singles came some early album efforts, most notably Tribute to the Lady, his album of songs associated with Billie Holiday. He was unhappy, however, with both the business arrangement that he had with Keen and the limitations inherent with recording for a small label -- equally to the point, major labels were knocking on Cooke's door, including Atlantic and RCA Records; Atlantic, which was not yet the international conglomerate that it later became, was the top R&B-oriented label in the country and Cooke almost certainly would have signed there and found a happy home with the company, except that they wanted his publishing, and Cooke had seen the sales figures on his songs, as well as their popularity in cover versions by other artists, and was well aware of the importance of owning his copyrights.

Thus, he signed with RCA Records, then one of the three biggest labels in the world (the others being Columbia and Decca), even as he organized his own publishing company, Kags Music, and a record label, SAR, through which he would produce other artists' records -- among those signed to SAR were the Soul Stirrers, Bobby Womack (late of the Valentinos, who were also signed to the label), former Soul Stirrers member Johnny Taylor, Billy Preston, Johnnie Morisette, and the Simms Twins.

Cooke's RCA sides were a strangely schizophrenic body of work, at least for the first two years. He broke new ground in pop and soul with the single "Chain Gang," a strange mix of sweet melodies and gritty, sweaty sensibilities that also introduced something of a social conscience to his work -- a number two hit on both the pop and R&B charts, it was his biggest hit since "You Send Me" and heralded a bolder phase in his career. Singles like bluesy, romantic "Sad Mood," the idyllic romantic soul of "Cupid," and the straight-ahead dance tune "Twistin' the Night Away" (a pop Top Ten and a number one R&B hit), and "Bring It on Home to Me" all lived up to this promise, and also sold in huge numbers. But the first two albums that RCA had him do, Hits of the Fifties and Cooke's Tour, were among the lamest LPs ever recorded by any soul or R&B singer, comprised of washed-out pop tunes in arrangements that showed almost none of Cooke's gifts to their advantage.

In 1962, Cooke issued Twistin' the Night Away, a somewhat belated "twist" album that became one of his biggest-selling LPs. He didn't really hit his stride as an LP artist, however, until 1963 with the release of Night Beat, a beautifully self-contained, dark, moody assembly of blues-oriented songs that were among the best and most challenging numbers that Cooke had recorded up to that time. By the time of its release, he was mostly identified through his singles, which were among the best work of their era, and had developed two separate audiences, among white teen and post-teen listeners and black audiences of all ages. It was Cooke's hope to cross over to the white audience more thoroughly, and open up doors for black performers that, up to that time, had mostly been closed -- he had tried playing the Copa in New York as early as 1957 and failed at the time, mostly owing to his inexperience, but in 1964 he returned to the club in triumph, an event that also yielded one of the most finely recorded live performances of its period. The problem with the Copa performance was that it didn't really represent what Sam Cooke was about in full -- it was Cooke at his most genial and non-confrontational, doing his safest repertory for a largely middle-aged, middle-class white audience; they responded enthusiastically, to be sure, but only to Cooke's tamest persona.

In mid-1963, however, Cooke had done a show at the Harlem Square Club in Miami that had been recorded. Working in front of a black audience and doing his "real" show, he delivered a sweaty, spellbinding performance built on the same elements found in his singles and his best album tracks, combining achingly beautiful melodies and gritty soul sensibilities. The two live albums sum up the split in Cooke's career and the sheer range of his talent, the rewards of which he'd finally begun to realize more fully in 1963 and 1964.

The drowning death of his infant son in mid-1963 had made it impossible for Cooke to work in the studio until the end of that year. During that time, however, with Allen Klein now managing his business affairs, Cooke did achieve the financial and creative independence that he'd wanted, including more money than any black performer had ever been advanced before, and the eventual ownership of his recordings beginning in November of 1963 -- he had achieved creative control of his recordings as well, and seemed poised for a breakthrough. It came when he resumed making records, amid the musical ferment of the early '60s. Cooke was keenly aware of the music around him, and was particularly entranced by Bob Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind," its treatment of the plight of black Americans and other politically oppressed minorities, and its success in the hands of Peter, Paul & Mary -- all of these factors convinced him that the time was right for songs that dealt with more than twisting the night away.

The result was "A Change Is Gonna Come," perhaps the greatest song to come out of the civil rights struggle, and one that seemed to close and seal the gap between the two directions of Cooke's career, from gospel to pop. Arguably his greatest and his most important song, it was an artistic apotheosis for Cooke. During this same period, he had also devised a newer, more advanced dance-oriented soul sound in the form of the song "Shake." These two recordings heralded a new era for Cooke and a new phase of his career, with seemingly the whole world open to him.

None of it was to be. Early in the day on December 11, 1964, while in Los Angeles, Cooke became involved in an altercation at a seedy motel, with a woman guest and the night manager, and was shot to death while allegedly trying to attack the manager. The case is still shrouded in doubt and mystery, and was never investigated the way the murder of a star of his stature would be today. Cooke's death shocked the black community and reverberated far beyond -- his single "Shake" was a posthumous Top Ten hit, as were "A Change Is Gonna Come" and the At the Copa album, released in 1965. Otis Redding, Al Green, and Solomon Burke, among others, picked up key parts of Cooke's repertory, as did white performers, including the Animals and the Rolling Stones. Even the Supremes recorded a memorial album of his songs, which is now one of the most sought-after of their original recordings, in either LP or CD form.

His reputation survived, at least among those who were smart enough to look behind the songs -- to hear Redding's performance of "Shake" at the Monterey Pop Festival, for example, and see where it came from. Cooke's own records were a little tougher to appreciate, however. Listeners who heard those first two, rather poor RCA albums, Hits of the Fifties and Cooke's Tour, could only wonder what the big deal was about, and several of the albums that followed were uneven enough to give potential fans pause. Meanwhile, the contractual situation surrounding Cooke's recordings greatly complicated the reissue of his work -- Cooke's business manager, Allen Klein, exerted a good deal of control, especially over the songs cut during that last year of the singer's life. By the 1970s, there were some fairly poor, mostly budget-priced compilations available, consisting of the hits up through early 1963, and for a time there was even a television compilation out there, but that was it. The movie National Lampoon's Animal House made use of a pair of Cooke songs, "(What A) Wonderful World" and "Twistin' the Night Away," which greatly raised his profile among college students and younger baby-boomers, and Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes made almost a mini-career out of reviving Cooke's songs (most notably "Having a Party," and even part of "A Change Is Gonna Come") in concert. In 1986, The Man and His Music went some way to correcting the absence of all but the early hits in a career-spanning compilation, but since the mid-'90s, Cooke's final year's worth of releases have been separated from the earlier RCA and Keen material, and is in the hands of Klein's ABKCO label. Finally, in the late '90s and beyond, RCA, ABKCO, and even Specialty (which still owns Cooke's gospel sides with the Soul Stirrers) each issued comprehensive collections of their portions of Cooke's catalog. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide

Man Who Invented Soul [Box Set] Buy this CD	One Night Stand! Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 Buy this CD	Best of Sam Cooke [RCA Bonus Tracks] Buy this CD	You Send Me [Pegasus] Buy this CD	Peace in the Valley [Get Back] Buy this CD
Rhythm and the Blues Buy this CD	Complete Specialty Recordings of Sam Cooke Buy this CD	16 Most Requested Songs Buy this CD	All Hits Buy this CD	Hem of His Garment: 23 Gospel Gems Buy this CD

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