Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (38 page)

Sam went on a five-day West Coast tour with Little Richard’s band, the Upsetters, second on the bill, and an acquaintance from the Chicago gospel and r&b world, Dee Clark, singing all of Little Richard’s hits. Upon his return to L.A., he went back into the studio on November 26, then flew to New York for his second Ed Sullivan appearance with his fee doubled to $2,000, perhaps to make up for past “insult and injury.”

“Sam,” Ed Sullivan said, introducing him with that discomfiting awkwardness that was his most distinctive characteristic, “here’s the time.” Sam, looking almost equally awkward, stood with his hands clasped and elbows drawn in. The smile was removed from his face, and his hair stood up in spiky strands, as if it couldn’t quite decide between being “natural” and woolly like his father’s and J.W.’s, or slick and smoothed back as it had been for his last appearance. The musical accompaniment was different, too. He opened with “You Send Me,” but there was none of the cloyingly sweet sax vamp that had accompanied his ill-fated debut, the song was taken slower, with a barebones rhythm section, a vocal chorus, and Clif, who had just agreed to go out on the road with him as “bandleader” and arranger, leading the ensemble on guitar. And Sam just sang his song, weaving endless romantic curlicues around words so simple and repetitive (“You send me” must have been repeated two dozen times) that the mere variation of “You thrill me” carried a disproportionate weight of its own, and when he got to the release that led into the bridge (“Honest, you do”), it was like an ice floe letting go. But it wasn’t about the words, as Clif had learned at their first meeting just six months earlier. Sam had a way of turning hypnotic repetition into a kind of musical suspense that, for all of his experience in the business, Clif would never have imagined any singer could sustain. But Sam did—and he had utter confidence in his ability to do so and in his instinct for
when
to do so. Siamas at one of the early sessions had tried to interject his own well-intentioned sense of how to improve the song they were working on by giving it the “Sam Cooke feel,” and Sam had blown up at the label owner in his own quiet way, telling him, “You can’t just put in a ‘whoa-oh’ in every song, you got to feel it, man,” saying it perfectly politely but not bullshitting around, because for Sam it was a musical trademark, not a gimmick.

He came back out to sing his new Keen single, “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons” (there was no way he was going to plug his Specialty single, Bill Cook’s “I’ll Come Running Back to You,” which was by now closing in on nearly half a million sales), and Ed took the opportunity at this point to make further amends. “I did wrong one night here on our stage,” he told audience and home viewers alike, then apologized directly to Sam, adding that in the aftermath of the incident, “I never received so much mail in my life!” Sam wore a tux for this number, once again kept his gestures to a minimum, and improvised off the vocal chorus, lagging behind and singing all around the beat. And then at the end, he clasped his hands together and bowed his head as if to receive a benediction.

“You Send Me” officially hit number one in
Billboard
the next day, and Sam and Bumps celebrated in New York. As John Siamas Jr. remembered it, his father had flown in to be with them for
The Ed Sullivan Show,
but they protected him from certain elements of their lives. “Sam and Bumps said they were going to spend the night in Harlem, and my father said, ‘Okay, that sounds right.’ And Bumps said, ‘No, no, I don’t think you understand.
You
can’t spend the night in Harlem.
We
have to go spend the night in Harlem.’ So that was the one night they did not stay in the same place.”

Sam knew all kinds of girls in New York by now. He had always known a certain type of girl in New York as a Soul Stirrer, and since Crain had started booking them into the Apollo the previous year, he had had time to get to know more of them. But the girls he was meeting now were a faster crowd, more knowing, more glamorous, more sophisticated, more to his current taste. “Sam had quite a way with the ladies. I always stood back and waited my turn,” said Lithofayne Pridgon, who came out of “Dirty Spoon,” the black section of Moultrie, Georgia, and had met Sam the previous year when she arrived in New York at the age of sixteen. She had taken immediately to the life, started going with Little Willie John, and first kissed Sam in Willie’s bedroom at the Cecil, looking out the window on 118th Street. “He wasn’t the world’s greatest lover—but he was, you know, [because] he was on another page. It wasn’t so much a physical thing [as] a whole social thing. He wasn’t the most dynamic bed partner, but he was so cool it took up the slack. He was a gentleman, [which was] all the way the other way from what I was accustomed to.”

Sam, Lithofayne said, “could rub elbows with anybody,” and that in a way was as much a part of his charm as his talent, intelligence, or physical beauty. Without it, he might have been insufferable, another one of those “hincty niggers” who acted like their shit didn’t stink like everyone else’s. But Sam was as likely to salute the bum in the alley as the highest high mucky-muck. He had no intention, he firmly told family and friends, of leaving anyone, or any part of his life, behind. To that end, he convinced Crain to join Clif and him on the road. Crain could be his “road manager,” he said, he really needed him—and for all of Crain’s dedication to the Soul Stirrers, it seemed as if he had just been waiting for Sam to ask. “I’m going with Sammy-o, the greatest lead singer in the world,” he told the group, scarcely giving them time to react and bequeathing his managerial responsibilities to J.J. Farley, the bass singer from his home town of Trinity, Texas, who had joined up in 1936. Sam, Crain, and Clif were perfectly matched, with the two older men well qualified to offer different kinds of advice but equally amenable to accepting Sam’s decisions as final.

In New York Sam picked up a driver / valet, too, even though he wasn’t convinced that he necessarily needed one. Eddie Cunningham just started hanging around and running errands—he got Sam’s white leather coat cleaned for him when Sam didn’t think it needed cleaning, and after he brought it back sparkling white, Sam told his brothers, “This cat is something else.” Eddie, who was originally from L.A., was a sharp dresser who knew his way around, but more important, he knew everyone in the business. It turned out his sister was Mabel Weathers, Tony Harris’ manager, and Eddie had taken care of Tony when Tony played the Apollo earlier that fall with a little record of his own. The way Eddie saw it, Sam was going places, and he wanted to go there with him. “Sam never really hired me,” Eddie admitted to L.C. some months later. “I just started straightening up, getting him food and coffee, and then I told him, ‘You need for me to drive for you.’”

Sam remained in the East for most of the next two weeks, with a three-day interlude in Chicago, where he played a show sponsored by popular DJ and television personality Howard Miller at the Civic Opera House on the Friday following his Ed Sullivan appearance. The entire Cook family turned out. “There were so many people there, you could hardly get in,” said his twenty-two-year-old sister Agnes, who was accompanied by her husband of five years, Eddie Jamison. “We all had seats right down in the front, and we sat through both shows.” It was a rock ’n’ roll show for an almost all-white audience. Brash new rockabilly sensation Jerry Lee Lewis was the co-headliner, with the Four Lads, the mixed group the Del Vikings, Howard Miller discovery Bonnie Guitar, and Pat Boone’s brother Nick Todd on the bill. As he had on
Ed Sullivan,
Sam performed in his tux, and the Cooks had a family picture taken outside the theater, with girlfriends, neighborhood acquaintances, and Sam and L.C.’s best friend, Duck, all in tow. Everyone looks proud and pleased, with the possible exception of Annie Mae Cook, whose pale, doughy face appears to be worriedly contemplating the future. “I can say this,” Annie Mae told a reporter doing a story for
Sepia
magazine. “None of my children have turned out badly. They don’t run around with gangs and stay out all night either. . . . God has blessed us with their voices.” As to a proposed family move to Sam’s new home base of California, Mrs. Cook said, “Maybe we’ll stay six months in one place and six months in the other—just so long as Sam is satisfied.”

He played the Newark, New Jersey, Armory with Hank Ballard and the Midnighters the following night, opened a one-week engagement on December 12 at the upscale Lotus Club in Washington, D.C., and found time in between to give an extensive interview to one of the country’s most prestigious black newspapers, the
Amsterdam News,
which ran a rare in-depth feature on him just before Christmas. In the picture published with the article, you can see Sam leaning forward to engage Women’s Editor Margurite Belafonte with what one imagines to be all the charm at his disposal.

The Cook family and friends at the Civic Opera House, December 6, 1957. Left to right: Agnes, Mary, and David Cook (front), with Roosevelt (unknown last name) and Sam Milsap (in hat with dark band) behind; Leroy Hoskins (“Duck”) in dark hat, Rev. Cook, Willie Cook in white hat, Sam, L.C.’s girlfriend Barbara Clemons, Annie Mae, Charles, L.C., and Hattie Cook.

Courtesy of ABKCO

Before the interview’s Q and A format begins, several key points are established, including the fact that the “teenage idol” is not married (he had initiated divorce proceedings against Dolores on November 15) and that “unlike most of the Negro stars, all his managers [Bumps and Crain] have been and still are Negroes.”

After a brief musical history, in which he describes street-corner singing as a teenager with Johnny Carter and James “Dimples” Cochran (now with the Flamingos and Spaniels respectively), his stint with the QCs, and his discovery by S.R. Crain of the Soul Stirrers, he credits his decision to change over into the pop field to “the man who was my personal manager at the time [who] encouraged me to sing ballads [an unnamed Bill Cook],” and to Bumps Blackwell, “my personal manager now [who] had confidence in me and bought the masters from Specialty and set up ‘Keen’ Records in Los Angeles to release my discs.”

As to his family’s feelings about his music:

My father, Reverend Charles Cooke [
sic
], agrees to my work. We have talked it over, and I enjoy my work, and besides I haven’t stopped singing religious songs. I sing them when I am on tour. I like them better than I do ballads. I have more feeling for them, and they have greater meaning for me, and greater satisfaction.

Likes and dislikes?

I like the Ivy League look in clothes. I am fashion conscious. . . . I’m impressed with New Yorkers. They seem so well polished, well versed and they keep you thinking. . . . I would like to know more about psychology.

He returned to Los Angeles briefly, where Keen Records held a party at the Brown Derby in Hollywood to celebrate the official certification of the record as a million seller and the release of Sam’s first album. Sam proved himself “a prince of a guy,” the
California Eagle
reported. Everyone present was dressed to the nines: Bumps and his “gorgeous missus”; J.W. proudly avuncular in a sharp patterned suit; René with his wife, Sugar, who is beaming at Sam from underneath a stylish fur hat; a bespectacled Lil Cumber, her hair done up in marcelled waves and wearing a white fur wrap. And Sam himself is practically aglow, the sharpest one of all in his stylish pinstripe suit, wearing, the
Eagle
reported, “his sudden success in fine style [with] no padding, no put-on,” as he stands beneath portraits of other recording greats like Dean Martin and Nat “King” Cole, his close-cropped, almost “natural” haircut in sharp contrast to the gleaming, processed look that stares out from the album cover in his hand.

He seems possessed of an almost serene self-confidence, as well he should be. He has just completed his first real tour as a star, he is on the cover of the current
Cash Box
magazine with Bumps and John Siamas, and he will be opening in three days at the Uptown in Philadelphia, from which he will go on to New York for an appearance on
The Steve Allen Show
at a fee of $2,500, his third Sunday-night network appearance in two months. The criticism of the press can scarcely touch him, the criticism of the church seems almost irrelevant when he has friends like Lil Cumber, a columnist now as well as a booking agent, who will defend him against the naysayers. “If church people feel that Sam deserted them,” Lil wrote in a widely quoted column, “they alone are to blame. If they would support their own, then the offers from the other side would not seem so appealing.” Sam’s “charm, modesty, and devoutness” were unexceptionable, she declared, citing her own background in the spiritual field, but “it is this writer’s belief that the final decision to change was due to the churchgoers’ themselves” and specifically their refusal to support gospel music financially.