Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (30 page)

Even Crume was beginning to feel uncertain about Sam, though. The way Sam was talking, it was difficult for anyone to tell what exactly he was going to do next. Looking at a magazine with Paul Foster, he pointed to a picture of Harry Belafonte, whose calypso-flavored “Banana Boat Song (Day-O)” was currently in the Top 10, and said, “I want to be just like [him].” To Morgan Babb, leader of the Radio Four gospel quartet, he declared, “I just want to make some money.” But to others, like Oakland piano and organ player Faidest Wagoner, he seemed to indicate unfeigned ambivalence. It was almost as if he were trying to conduct an external argument with himself. And when he went to his father for advice, Reverend Cook offered the same reassuring encouragement he had always offered his children: “Whatever you strive to be, be the best at it.” Which was, really, no answer at all.

“Lovable” (backed with “Forever”) was officially released on January 31, with a black male chorus overdubbed clumsily on both sides. It got a lukewarm reception in the trades (the material was weak,
Billboard
wrote in its March 9 issue, though new Specialty artist Dale Cook made a “personable debut [with] the church touches he injects into his style”) and sold no better than recent Soul Stirrers’ releases, but there was no question that it made a declaration from which it was going to be difficult to retreat.
Everyone
knew it was Sam, and the diverse reaction within the gospel community merely indicated the inevitability of the choice he was going to have to make. To Clarence Fountain of the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, it was just “a little penny-ante” kind of a record but “a big let-down in the gospel field.” To fifteen-year-old Aretha Franklin, who had worshipped Sam ever since she had first heard him sing with the Soul Stirrers at her father’s New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit and was now out on the gospel road herself as “the World’s Youngest National Gospel Singer,” it didn’t come in any way as a shock; in fact, it took its place immediately among her girlfriends’ and her all-time favorites. And Gatemouth Moore, who had put the QCs on the radio in Memphis in 1949, introduced the song on his gospel program on WEDR in Birmingham. But this would not by any means have been the typical reaction within the gospel world.

Quartet singers and fans up and down the gospel highway tried desperately to dissuade Sam from pursuing this new path. And not just gospel singers. When the Soul Stirrers came to Atlanta on March 24, 1957, pioneering white DJ and r&b station owner Zenas Sears (it was Sears who had set up the recording session in Atlanta for Ray Charles’ breakthrough hit, “I Got a Woman”) did everything he could to “talk Sam out of it. Preston York [Sears’ “valued friend and advisor” and lead singer for the Reliable Jubilee Four] and I spent four hours, all afternoon, trying to persuade him. ‘You can go on forever doing what you’re doing, you can go on forever. Now you’re gonna switch, you’re shooting dice, you may not make it.’” Sam seemed to listen politely, Sam was
always
polite, “the nicest guy in the world,” but Zenas was not at all sure that what he said had registered. Nor in retrospect was he convinced it should have.

“There was a whispering campaign going on,” J.W. Alexander observed. “He was ostracized, and he was hurt. One night in Tuscaloosa I said to him, ‘Hold your goddamn head up and go out there and sing.’ I said, ‘They’ll accept you. If anybody says anything, you sing.’”

Next to what Sam himself was going through, it was worst for the Soul Stirrers, who, seemingly in a collective state of denial, tried to reassure the public of something about which they could no longer help but have the gravest doubts themselves. One time, Crume remembered, they were at a radio station to promote their show, and the announcer asked Sam on the air, “Are you going to do ‘Lovable’ tonight?” Crain and the other Stirrers were beside themselves, they were certain the effect on the program would be devastating, but their audience was as enthusiastic as ever that night. Another time, a promoter said, “Sam, you really, really goofed. Everybody knows it’s you.” But Sam just said it was his brother, without even batting an eye. At one of the regular stops on their tour, they were riding down the street listening to the radio, when the DJ played “Lovable” and announced, “That was Dale Sam Cook.” Shaken, Crume turned to Sam and said, “Sam, man, everybody knows,” and that night at the program, the MC introduced “Dale Sam Cook and the Soul Stirrers.” There were “real tears” in the eyes of their fans, Crume said, “grown men and women.” And yet Crume still could not believe that Sam was actually going to leave. “I saw no reason for it. We were drawing good crowds, making good money, we really had that magnetic touch. And I just didn’t think it could get any better.”

Sam continued to have doubts of his own. He indicated to Bumps that he was ready to abandon the whole experiment, but Bumps put him off, saying, “If this [record] doesn’t make it, just give me one more chance, and if that doesn’t make it, we’ll go whole hog for the gospel field.” They shook on it, but to Bumps, Sam’s state of mind remained “dubious,” and Art’s state of mind was, if anything, even worse. To Bumps, practically at war now with his employer on a variety of financial and artistic issues, Art was little more than a “frightened businessman, any opposition whatsoever and he would pull in. So when he received various knocks from the gospel disc jockeys, he stopped the push, [and ‘Lovable’] died on the vine.”

Art, unquestionably cautious, and certainly a businessman, would have described the situation differently. He was dissatisfied not just with the sales but with the quality of the product, and after analyzing the record, “I decided Sam would sell better if instead of a funky band accompaniment [and overdubbed chorus] we used a male quartet similar to his successful Soul Stirrer records.” He felt that “the contrapuntal effect of Sam’s delicate tenor against the strong male backing would be unique in the pop field.” Nor was he going to permit Sam and Bumps to go back to New Orleans.
If
he sanctioned another pop session at all—and he was still not certain of his feelings on the subject—they would record in Los Angeles, and under his direct supervision. Bumps kept talking to him abut Sam being another Morton Downey. “I said, ‘Morton Downey has been gone a long time.’ I had no idea [if] he would make it in the secular field.”

The Stirrers returned to the studio in Chicago on April 19. Originally scheduled for February 21, the session had had to be postponed when the drummer Crain hired to join Chicago gospel keyboard stalwarts Evelyn Gay and Willie Webb turned out to be a union member and threatened to report to the union that his two fellow musicians were not. This time Crain was not taking any chances and got Sam’s brother L.C. to keep time (“No, I never did play no drums; Sam just asked me, ‘Keep the beat for me, bro’”).

It was, all in all, a highly successful outing, with the achievement of six solid masters in three hours, including two fine leads by Paul Foster and three originals by Sam. Paul’s numbers may very well have served as a kind of safeguard against a possibility that no one was willing to openly admit, but Sam’s compositions were marked by so much sincerity, and were of so uniformly high a standard, that it would have been hard at the time to concede that such a possibility could even exist. “That’s Heaven to Me” proved that gospel could actually
be
pop as Sam sang feelingly of “A little flower that blooms in May / A lovely sunset at the end of the day / Someone helping a stranger along the way / That’s heaven to me” in so pure a tenor, and with so romantic a tone, that no one—and everyone—could doubt his intent. “Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)?” was, obviously, more overtly religious, a variation on the traditional gospel theme, but once again sung with such passion, originality, and intimacy of tone (“A fella said, ‘I want you to tell me, If you were there, kindly tell me / I wonder did He really hang there / And never say a mumbling word’”) as to turn all concepts of the limitations of the form on their head. And “Mean Old World,” which according to Crain had become the Stirrers’ new “theme song,” while very much a traditional blues
and
gospel plaint, was presented here with so improbable a sense of cheerful uplift as to defy categorization, a classic example in other words of exactly the kind of song that Art and Bumps were looking for, one that, with a change of a word or two, could take its place instantly on the pop charts.

On April 20 Crain wrote to Art, “Hope you like [the] songs. I will be ready to record again in August. We are working on something now.”

Barely one week later Sam wrote to Bumps, saluting him either jokingly or inadvertently as “Hi Bumbs,” and including a tape. “Enclosed you’ll find the songs I was telling you about,” he began. “The only music I used was the guitar and I’m playing that. I hope you get a rough idea of what the songs are like.”

The songs that he had demoed were “I’ll Come Running Back to You,” the Bill Cook composition that he had recorded both in New York and New Orleans the previous year; a new approach to “Summertime,” the George Gershwin standard; and four originals, “You Were Made For Me,” “I Need You Now,” and “I Don’t Want to Cry” (all three of which he had recorded at Cosimo’s studio in New Orleans), plus “You Send Me,” a song he had been trying to get L.C. to record for Vee Jay with his group the Magnificents. Of the six, “I’ll Come Running Back to You” and “I Don’t Want to Cry” (both of which he had recorded at the Nola Studio in New York as well as in New Orleans), were the two “I definitely want to do,” and all were accompanied by a guitar that merely hinted at a melody, sometimes failing to do even that, with Sam’s voice carrying the entire burden of communication. It is almost as if one were listening to Sam playing his ukelele in the car with Crume, with the guitar tuned to an open chord and Sam sliding into very imperfect barred sixths to sketch in those “ice cream chords.”

“I’m going to New York on Saturday May 4,” Sam concluded the body of his letter. “If by then you’ve decided on the songs you want me to do, I could get in touch with this fellow ‘Obie Masingill’ [Bill Cook’s arranger] and go over the songs with him. Anyway I’ll call you Friday morning.”

Bumps’ reply is not recorded, but its import was clear. There was no way he wanted to see Bill Cook back in the picture, even through the agency of O. B. Masingill. “I hit the ceiling, and I ran to Art, and I said, ‘All right, let’s go all [out].’” And then he must have informed Sam, whether by phone or by letter, that yes, there was going to be a session but that it was going to take place in L.A.

On Friday, May 3, Crain telegrammed Art from the Hotel Cecil in New York.

MR RUPE SIR THIS IS IN REGARD TO THE RECORDS THAT YOU RECORDED OF SAM COOK. THE ONE ALREADY RELEASED (LOVEABLE) IS HURTING US IN THE SPIRITUAL FIELD. AND ANOTHER RELEASE WILL STOP US COMPLETELY SO PLEASE DO NOT RELEASE ANYMORE

THE SOUL STIRRERS S R CRAIN MGR JJ FARLEY SECT

CECIL HOTEL, RM 481

They had arrived a day early, evidently, for the weekend programs in Newark and Philadelphia that promoter Ronnie Williams had set up for the Travelers and themselves. Things clearly must have come to a head for Crain to finally acknowledge the reality he was facing. He had thought the matter resolved several weeks earlier when Sam confronted him over the issue of royalties. Sam didn’t think it right to have to split his songwriter’s royalties six ways when he wrote most of the songs and he was the most popular member of the group. There had been an ugly scene, as Crain stuck to his guns at first, insisting that was the way the Soul Stirrers did it, share and share alike. That was the way the Soul Stirrers had done it from the start. “Well, do it your way,” Sam flung back at him. “But do it with another singer.”

At that point Crain put it to a group vote—and to begin with, the group flatly turned Sam down. R.B. Robinson, who had brought Sam to the Stirrers’ attention in the first place, was the most adamant on the subject. Sam couldn’t be trusted with money. He gave it away when he had it, and he spent other people’s money when he didn’t. If Sam didn’t have a house and a car of his own, R.B. said, it was nobody’s fault but Sam’s. In the end, Sam got his way, but even Crume saw that the resolution represented an ominous trend. Just like Harris, “Sam wanted certain perks, but with the Soul Stirrers everyone was [supposed to be] equal.”

Crain had hoped against hope that that would be the end of it—but clearly it was not, and he didn’t know who to turn to. He had believed Art was his friend, but Art, it seemed, was playing a double game. There was no question about his feelings toward Bumps. “I hated Bumps. He was taking my living. The Soul Stirrers was my creation. The Soul Stirrers was all I was thinking about.” But he couldn’t think how to fight back.

J.W. meanwhile watched from his position on the sidelines, seeing the future more clearly perhaps than any of the direct participants, seeing the end of his own time at Specialty and the end of the quartet era rapidly approaching. He saw, too, how all this endless self-scrutiny was tearing Sam apart—and to no good purpose, either. Anyone with a brain in his head knew the inevitable conclusion. “So I talked to Sam back at the Cecil after our program in Newark. We were having dinner, and Sam said, ‘Alex, I want to ask you something. Do you really think I can make it?’ I said, ‘Sam, you can’t stick your head in the sand like an ostrich. You can’t be Dale Cook. You got to be Sam Cook as you are.’” If he did that, J.W. said, “I have no doubt you can make it.”

Sam never told any of the other Soul Stirrers directly. Just as he had slipped away from the QCs without ever explicitly declaring himself, he approached each of the Stirrers in private conversations that suggested the matter would continue to remain open to further discussion. To Paul Foster he said that he was “thinking about going out for himself. He said, ‘I want to create something for myself, and I would like for you to come with me.’” He hadn’t made up his mind yet, he reassured Paul, but he was seriously thinking about it. With Crain: “He asked my opinion, and I told him [to] stay.” As for Crume, “He never even told me he was leaving. [By the time] I knew anything he was gone, and we were searching for a [new] lead singer. We were getting ready to go out on tour, and he just wasn’t there.”