Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (13 page)

To Marvin he posed the question outright. “We had a program at 3140 South Indiana, Reverend Childs’ church. We were sitting in the car talking, and he said, ‘Hey, Marvin, if you had a chance to go to the Soul Stirrers, what would you do?’ Well, I didn’t know it was a loaded question, so I said, ‘Man, if I had a chance to go with the Soul Stirrers, I’d leave in the morning.’ And that’s exactly what he did. And we were very, very close, we was [practically] in the same skin.”

He approached Lee and Jake Richard in much the same way. Lee always remembered how Sam showed up in a brand-new pair of cowhide shoes and a new pair of pants that Lee later presumed the Soul Stirrers had bought for him. “He said, ‘I got something I got to ask you on. I want y’all’s opinion.’ He said, ‘What y’all think of me singing with the Soul Stirrers?’” But he never came right out and said he was going to do it.

Creadell, like the rest of them, knew that Harris had left the Soul Stirrers, and he had even heard that Sam was rehearsing with them, “but I didn’t give much credence to that, because the Highway QCs were the center of Sam’s life—we were a group, and none of us ever thought beyond the group. Then Jake came and told me. That’s about all I can remember—I don’t remember Sam ever coming to the group and saying anything. But I know we were all just devastated.”

Reverend Cook alone saw no ambiguity in the situation. Sam came to him for advice, “and I told him, ‘Anytime you can make a step higher, you go higher. Don’t worry about the other fellow. You hold up for other folks, and they’ll take advantage of you.’ The only way that he could prove [himself] was to get with somebody that was going somewhere. And the Soul Stirrers were, boy, they
were
—no matter that they tried to snub him, wouldn’t let him sing [when he was with the QCs].” To Reverend Cook it was a simple matter of economics. It was a question of making a living. Sam wasn’t singing to save souls. There was only one way to save souls, and spiritual singing was not it. Spiritual singing, like every other earthly pursuit, was only a means to an end.

Soul Stirring

The Soul Stirrers were very well named. They tried to get [that] feeling, emphasized and built themselves up on soul-stirring—slower singing, very melismatic. That’s why Sam was the way he was. Sam was shaped in large measure by the Soul Stirrers during their rehearsals. He reacted to them as they pushed him, like a good rhythm section inspires an instrumentalist . . .

— Art Rupe

S
AM COOK HAD EVERY REASON
to be nervous, but he didn’t overtly betray it. He remained silent, watchful, polite, while label owner Art Rupe and Soul Stirrers manager Roy Crain debated his presence in the small rehearsal studio at Specialty Records, at 8508 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, a day or two before the Soul Stirrers’ scheduled March 1 recording session.

Rupe, a balding, bespectacled, tautly controlled and ambitious man with a passion for organization and an unwavering belief in his own carefully worked-out plans and principles, was furious. Despite the fact that the Soul Stirrers had been out on the Coast for the past two and one-half weeks for a series of programs with the Pilgrim Travelers, the thirty-two-year-old Rupe had heard not one word from Crain about changes in the group’s lineup. Where was Harris? he demanded of Crain again and again. It was Harris who had signed the contract; it was
Harris
who was the draw. Surely Crain could understand that. The group’s record sales on the Aladdin label were at a standstill when they first came to him a little more than a year ago, but he had signed them because of his belief in their lead singer. Who was this kid Crain had brought into the studio? Crain was crazy to have permitted Harris to leave. Maybe they should just postpone the session until Crain could get him to return.

Sam and Lou Rawls, ca. 1952.

Courtesy of Barbara Cooke and ABKCO

Crain, a stolid-looking, full-faced, dark-complexioned man of thirty-nine with an abundance of “mother wit” and a pragmatic streak that led him never to challenge authority in a situation in which he did not hold the upper hand, explained patiently that it wasn’t a matter of his letting Harris go, that he had, in fact, argued against it, but Harris had plans of his own—and, besides, this kid could sing. And if Art didn’t want to believe
him,
he should ask Alexander, who had been out with them off and on for the last three months.

Thirty-five-year-old J.W. (James Woodie) Alexander, variously known as J.W., Jim, Jimmy, Alex, Alec, or Elec, depending on race, gender, occasion, or regional accent, was not as reluctant as Crain to interpose himself in the argument. A tall, soft-spoken, elegantly dressed man with a polished bearing, a deceptively deferential manner of speech, a pealing, high-pitched laugh, and a shock of prematurely gray hair, Alexander had in effect served as advisor and scout for Rupe ever since bringing his group, the Pilgrim Travelers, to the label on the eve of the Musicians Union strike that began on January 1, 1948. Like every other label owner, Rupe frantically stockpiled all the sides he could in the weeks preceding the announced strike, but a cappella quartet singing, he quickly realized, could be a way of getting around the recording ban altogether, since singers were subject to neither union membership nor rules. For the full year that the strike continued, Rupe added to his gospel catalogue and discovered to his surprise that gospel music sold—perhaps not in numbers that could match a big r&b hit, but with a steadier buildup and a longer life span—to an audience whose loyalty ensured that they would not only buy the latest record release but continue to purchase a favorite quartet’s back catalogue for years to come.

Alexander had proved himself to the young record company owner again and again, first with the label’s two biggest-selling gospel numbers up till that time, “Jesus Met the Woman at the Well” and “Mother Bowed,” both of which had sold over 120,000 copies, then by steering such gospel stars as the Soul Stirrers, Brother Joe May, and the Gospel Harmonettes in Specialty’s direction. Alex never directly challenged his label “boss,” but he always got his point across. And Rupe always listened.

Alexander’s message on this occasion was very simple. He had been out with the Soul Stirrers since early December, he had witnessed the kid’s very first performance in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, an inauspicious debut by some standards but a program that proved not only the kid’s talent but his mettle. He had faith, he told Rupe, in the unique qualities of communication that this boy had exhibited from the time that Alexander had first spotted him two years earlier at the Young Men’s Christian Club in Chicago, Illinois.

But he had a contract on Harris, Rupe persisted stubbornly. And he wanted Harris to honor that contract.

J.W. was unfazed. “I said, ‘Art, Harris has left the group.’ I said, ‘You haven’t even heard the kid. Why don’t you give him a chance?’”

R
UPE WAS STILL NOT
altogether convinced when they entered the Universal Recorders studio on Hollywood Boulevard on March 1, but, he told Alexander, only half joking, he was willing to allow him one mistake. He hadn’t gotten this far in a hard business without learning to trust his instincts. It continued to bother him that Crain had given no advance warning—that was no way to do business. And while there was no question that the kid could sing, he didn’t have Harris’ authority, he didn’t have Harris’ command, and there was a real question, it seemed to Rupe, of whether he would ever have Harris’ fans. Still, with the group assembled and rehearsed, it seemed like it was worth the gamble—and, in fact, it didn’t compare with all the calculated gambles he had already made in setting up and establishing his company.

He had first come to California in 1939 as Arthur Goldberg, from McKeesport, Pennsylvania, with the idea of going into the motion picture industry, but he soon discovered that the record business offered a far greater window of independent opportunity. In 1944 he put several hundred dollars of his savings into a company called Atlas Records, which had advertised in the newspaper for “investor partners.” What he got from this experience, as he often liked to say, was an enduring lesson in how
not
to run a record company. One of the principal elements of that lesson was that there was no point in trying to challenge the mainstream record companies—RCA, Columbia, Decca, with their vast catalogues of popular songs—on their own turf. So, having grown up in a mixed neighborhood with a broad exposure to both blues and black church music, he settled on “race music” as his field and invested $200 of his remaining $600 in a selection of 78s, which he played “until they got gray” in order to discover exactly what went into a race-records hit. With a stopwatch and a metronome he made a detailed study of length, beat, feel, and lyrical content, “and I established a set of rules or principles which I felt would enable me to make commercial records. Some of the music moved me so much it brought tears to my eyes.”

At this point the logical next step was to establish a company of his own, and this he did, first with the Juke Box label, then with Specialty in the fall of 1946. His study of what constituted a hit paid off with a string of Top 10 chart entries by Roy Milton, Joe and Jimmy Liggins, Camille Howard, and, in 1950, Percy Mayfield, whose inspired plea for racial understanding, “Please Send Me Someone to Love,” had hit number one just three months prior to the Soul Stirrers’ session and was still riding high on the r&b charts. This number represented not just the commercial culmination of Specialty’s efforts to date but the marriage of retail and aesthetic success for which Art Rupe had always striven (Mayfield, a homegrown poet from Minden, Louisiana, was in Rupe’s view “as great as Langston Hughes” in his own way). At the same time, his guiding principle in business remained, necessarily, to stay in business. He prided himself on his ability to make the best deal possible from the standpoint of both survival and self-interest (he saw the competition as fierce and, frequently, unprincipled) and then, uncompromisingly, to adhere to it. His guiding principles in the studio were to be well rehearsed, use the best equipment, place the vocals up front in order to emphasize the words—and, above all, bring out the
feeling
in the music. “Gospel was my favorite type of music, not for religious reasons but because of the feeling and the soul and the honesty of it. To me it was pure, it wasn’t adulterated, and that’s why I reacted to it.” As for his own role: “I guess my talent was having empathy for what they were doing and truly feeling it, and also, I guess, being discriminating to a degree, being a hairsplitter. To me the performance was the thing. Making a record to me was analagous to producing a play, with an introduction, development of a plot, even acts and a coda, or an ending. That was the principle that I followed.”

T
HEY BEGAN THE THURSDAY
-afternoon session with what Art considered to be eminently sensible choices. Among the songs the group had presented to him at rehearsal were two by Thomas A. Dorsey, the acknowledged father of contemporary gospel music. The new singer took the chorus on the first one, “Come, Let Us Go Back to God,” a morality tale decrying today’s sinful ways, his high, plaintive voice coming perilously close to breaking at times as he seemed determined to impress everyone present with the intensity of his feelings. His voice did, in fact, break and even go out of tune a little on the second, a 1939 composition called “Peace in the Valley,” which Dorsey had written for Mahalia Jackson but which neither Jackson nor any other gospel singer of note had yet recorded. As the Soul Stirrers did it, the song, with its relaxed, almost country-and-western flavor, turned into a vehicle perfectly suited to showcase the contrast between Sam’s lilting gift for melody and Paul Foster’s unreservedly exhortatory second lead. They ran through four full takes of the song, each hovering right around the two-minute-forty-second mark that Rupe believed to be optimal for airplay, as Paul doubled the chorus and took the song home while the group chanted hypnotically in the background.

The session continued with varying degrees of success over the next couple of hours. The kid could certainly sing, but Rupe took exception to the easygoing, almost lazy way he sometimes went about it. On the fourth song, “I’m on the Firing Line,” which amounted to virtually a solo vehicle, he sang his lead as though he were crooning a pop song, while the group offered little more than the restrained prompting you might find on an Ink Spots record. If this was meant as some kind of new “intimate” approach to gospel, it was clearly one with which the producer had little sympathy, and he cut the group off after one take while writing “nothing happens” on the session sheet.