Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (24 page)

Art might have ignored it, but Richard kept calling every four or five days, from Atlanta, Albany, Georgia, Fort Lauderdale, and Jacksonville, and while the label owner didn’t hear the crying voice of B.B. King, he heard something like it, “the same [kind of] feeling, and that, coupled with a gospel sound and a little more energy, was the basis for [my] being interested.” By March 10 he had tried to set up a recording session in Atlanta, only to find out that once again there was a contractual issue with Peacock label owner Don Robey. By May those problems had been ironed out by means of a judicious loan to the artist of $600 with which he could buy out his contract, and in September Art dispatched Bumps to New Orleans to record Richard at Cosimo Matassa’s studio (where both Lloyd Price and Guitar Slim had been recorded) with the most extensive set of instructions he had drawn up to date. “I had to literally make blueprints by writing out every little detail of what we expected. [Bumps] had been through quite a brainstorming session with me. This was his big chance.” On September 13 Little Richard and Bumps entered the studio together for the first time, and five days later (“Sunday evening—Rainin’ hard—Thinking of You-All”) Bumps mailed back the session sheets and signed contract, along with an account bursting with the kind of carefully worded enthusiasm he had learned to adopt around the boss he called “Pappy.” All nine songs, he wrote, “were exceptionally good—meaning it was difficult to pick a release.” He had his own choices in mind, he admitted, “but I hate to prejudice [your] judgment.” Then, after specifying Richard’s preferences—“all real tough”—he came right out and revealed himself. “‘Tutti Frutti Au Rooney,’” he said, “is our answer to [Chuck Berry’s] ‘Mabelene’ . . . Richard is a great artist with loads of soul. He actually covers [rivals] ‘Ray Charles’ and ‘Clyde McPhatter’ on these nine [tunes].”

Time would only prove how right he was.

“Lovable”

Some girl was trying to turn him, make a pimp out of him. He said, “Bumps wants to manage me, and Bill [Cook] still wants to manage me.” He said, “I need to get me another car.” I said, “Man, once the record comes out, you’ll be able to get any kind of car you want.”

— J.W. Alexander on a conversation with Sam at the Cecil Hotel in Harlem, spring 1957

B
Y THE TIME THAT LEROY CRUME
joined the Soul Stirrers as their new guitarist in the spring of 1956, it seemed as if Sam’s future was already inescapably upon him. Roy Hamilton’s manager, Newark DJ Bill Cook, had been courting Sam even before the Shrine concert the previous summer, and he remained indefatigable in his pursuit. With his encouragement, Sam had started writing some little pop songs, and Cook got them to some of the r&b groups that he dealt with in the course of his deejaying duties as well as to Hamilton, whom Sam admired as much as anyone in the r&b world for his emotion-laden, near-operatic gospel style. Cook, a “slickster” in the not unadmiring opinion of fellow DJ Jimmy “Early” Byrd, never pushed too hard, never demanded a commitment that might elicit a rejection, but whenever the Soul Stirrers were in the New York area, he took Sam around first to the Apollo to meet his colleagues in the secular world, then to the West Fifty-seventh Street offices of Atlantic Records, home of Ray Charles, Clyde McPhatter, Ruth Brown, and just about every other high-class r&b act you could name, where he and Sam would wait in the reception area for no more than a minute or two before co-owners Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun ushered them right in.

The Stirrers, 1956: R.B. Robinson, Leroy Crume, Sam, J.J. Farley, S.R. Crain, Paul Foster.

Courtesy of LeRoy Crume

Wexler himself was perplexed by what exactly was going on. “They would just drop by the office and hang out. There was no question they were affiliated in some way. And, of course, Sam was so hip. I kept begging him to sing the ‘devil’s music,’ but he was a Soul Stirrer, and he just wasn’t ready.” As Ahmet recalled, Bill Cook put the price of their interest in Sam at helping him to get out of his Specialty contract, but “we were just waiting for things to develop.”

Then in June something did develop. Whether as a result of Bill Cook’s promises of stardom or Atlantic’s eagerness to record him, Sam finally appeared won over, and with Bill Cook he worked out a plan to win over Art Rupe in turn. In clear, plain prose and touchingly elegant block letters, Sam wrote Art the kind of letter whose format he might have learned in a high school business course. “Dear Sir,” it read:

I write this letter to ask your consideration in a matter that’s very important to me. A fellow I’ve been knowing for quite a while asked me if I would consider recording some popular ballads for one of the major recording companies if he could arrange it. I told him yes. So he arranged it for me. But it’s my understanding that I would have to get permission from you before I went through with the deal. I’m planning on doing the recordings under another name. And I would continue to record and sing with the group. I have my material ready and all I need is an okay from you. I wish you would give it your utmost consideration. Awaiting your immediate reply.

Rupe, who was not unaware of all the plots and machinations swirling around Sam but remained ambivalent about the prospect of breaking up the Soul Stirrers (“I was in the middle of a tense situation”), did not fail to respond to the urgency of Sam’s tone. After consulting with Bumps, who was unabashed in his predictions of success and had no interest whatsoever in seeing Bill Cook reap any benefit from it, he wrote to Sam care of the Soul Stirrers on July 3 in somewhat cool and disingenuous terms:

Dear Sam,

I received your letter concerning your recording under a different name for a different company.

We appreciate your honest intentions in this matter—even though we do have you signed to an exclusive recording contract.

However, we must advise you that we are not interested in having you record for anyone other than us at the present time; and, we most certainly would be very happy to record you in the Pop field ourselves—and we feel that we can offer you considerably more success.

Therefore, we suggest that you call us immediately so that we can discuss the matter further.

With kindest personal regards, we are

Yours very sincerely,

SPECIALTY RECORDS

Art Rupe

P.S.: We sent you some song contracts which we’d appreciate having you sign and return to us.

And there the matter rested for the time being.

W
ITH THE EXCEPTION
of their newest member, the Soul Stirrers did not seem to be taking this threat to their livelihood particularly seriously. To Crain, “A lot of things was going on that I didn’t know, and I’m glad I didn’t. The Soul Stirrers was all I was thinking about, because that was my creation.” To Foster, as fervent in his faith as he was in his singing, it was almost inconceivable that anyone would ever leave the gospel world, whatever the temptation. But to Leroy Crume, not yet twenty-three and on the road for the first time, everything that Sam said reverberated, and even if he was not necessarily convinced that everything Sam said would come true, he believed that Sam Cook was capable of looking into the future in a manner that none of the others either could or would.

Tall, handsome, with a prominent gap between his two front teeth and a quiet, almost courtly manner that never failed to attract the ladies, Crume had practically grown up with Sam and L.C. on the teenage gospel circuit in Chicago. He and his brothers had had a group, the Crume Brothers, who had played all the same places that the QCs played but with nowhere near the same degree of success, and when Sam joined the Soul Stirrers five years earlier, Crume had joined R.H. Harris’ newly formed group, the Christland Singers. But not before his father asked Harris, “Are you going to take care of him?” And when Harris said that he would, “My daddy looked at me and said, ‘Boy you better mind him.’ Here I am, eighteeen years old, and I thought I was a man!”

Crume had played with the Soul Stirrers, too, off and on, “they used to have me play an acoustic guitar, just set on a chair behind them when they would come around Chicago. But then when they decided that they wanted to get a [permanent] guitar player, they got this guy out of Philadelphia, Bob King, and I was hurt.”

Bob King had gotten sick, though, in early 1956, and his rapidly worsening health created a crisis for the group. Following their February 2 session, he was in and out of hospital with a kidney condition that appeared to be irreversible, and his periods of remission became briefer and further between. Crain wanted to replace him with Arthur Crume, Leroy’s older brother, but Sam, who had always liked Leroy, was adamant that Leroy was the one, and, in fact, if that was what it was going to come down to, the choice was not so much between the Crume brothers as it was between himself and Crain.

As L.C. understood it from Crain years later, “Sam told him like this. He said, ‘Okay, fine, we’ll get Arthur. But you just gonna have to get someone else to sing lead.’ Crain said, ‘What you mean, Sammy-o?’ Sam said, ‘If we get Arthur, I’ll just sing tenor, you can sing lead.’ Crain said, ‘Sam, you know I can’t sing no lead.’ Now Crain is the one who told me this, Sam never mentioned it to me. And Crain told me, ‘L.C., you know Sam wasn’t playing. And I wasn’t gonna have Sam quit the group about singing no tenor. So I said, “Sam, you’re right.”’ But, you know, Sam was right. Arthur may have been a better guitar player, but Leroy was better for Sam. Him and Sam communicated, they were on the same page.”

That may well have been so, but Crume, who had little knowledge of the political intrigue surrounding his invitation, had misgivings of his own. He had a job at the five-and-dime, where he made $46 a week, every week, with his future guaranteed. He wasn’t married, but he had an infant son to take care of. Nor had he forgotten how good R.H. Harris had been to him or how bad he had felt when the Soul Stirrers passed him over the first time. So it was little wonder that when J.J. Farley, substituting one night for the Christland’s bass singer, sidled up to him onstage and said, “Hey, fucker, you want to make a change?” his first reaction was that the Soul Stirrers’ secretary-treasurer, a notorious “jokester,” was putting him on, his second that the decision was not his but that of the man who had given him his opportunity. So he went to Mr. Harris, but even after Harris told him he would be a fool to turn down a chance like this, Crume was still reluctant to give up the security that he had for the uncertainty of life on the road—until, finally, Sam came by and got in his face and told him that he was looking at a “career opportunity.” And even then he only agreed to go out on a short-term basis, getting a temporary leave of absence from his boss.

One of the first shows that they did was in Philadelphia at the Met (more formally, the Metropolitan Opera House), an ornate hall on the corner of Broad and Poplar that seated fifty-five hundred and took up almost an entire city block. “It was an all-star show with all these heavyweight groups—I’d never been on a show like this, and I was shaking in my boots. And we was riding down the street, on our way to the auditorium, and Sam said, ‘Oh, look, there’s Bob.’ Just walking down the street, on his way to the concert—he had just gotten out of the hospital, and I was happier to see him than they were! He didn’t even have a guitar with him, he played mine the first half, and then he left and went back into the hospital, and I played the last half. We were in Florida the week after when we got the word that he had passed.

“Sam came to me then, and he says, ‘You going to stay with me now, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘No, man, I can’t stay.’ Well, he got all excited, so to get him off my case, I told him, Yeah, I’d stay. And he kept talking about, ‘We going to have some fun,’ and all that kind of stuff. But I just wanted to get back home.

“So when we got home, I went back on my job, and then the group got ready to leave and Sam came by my house, and they told him where I was. And when I came home that evening, oh, man, he got on my case. He said, ‘Man, you told me you was going to stay with the group,’ and I won’t say what he said, but he was using all kinds of four-letter words, he was really upset. Then he asked me, ‘How much money you making?’ and when I told him, he just laughed out loud. Now that made
me
mad, but that got him out of his mood, he just started cracking up about it, and he said, ‘I’ll tell you what. You come with the Soul Stirrers, and we’ll give you $125 a week and pay all of your expenses. We’ll pay your rent. We’ll buy you food. We’ll have your clothes cleaned.’ I said, ‘Sam, there’s not that much money in the world.’”