Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (77 page)

Over the years, his collection had grown, as he moved from city to city with his wife and son; he had added sheet music and old 78s and cylinder recordings by historic black “minstrel” entertainers like Bert Williams to his search for manuscripts as rare as a first edition by eighteenth-century poet Phyllis Wheatley, but he kept his passion secret from virtually all of the black r&b singers he helped make into stars. “I wanted to be a businessman. I didn’t go to the nightclubs [except for business]. I didn’t hang out. I was busy with another career as a collector.” Of all the artists with whom he interacted Sam was virtually the only one who exhibited a strong independent interest in black history. “He read. He wanted to read. He would come over to my place, and I’d have to hide my books! I couldn’t get him away from Dunbar’s [1895 collection],
Majors and Minors.
He’d sit there and read about [how Dunbar] was an elevator operator and put out his first book himself. That fascinated him.” Sometimes Sam would set Dunbar’s poems to music, singing the words from memory to the accompaniment of his guitar.

Montague was busy promoting himself and his first big show in the area, “Magnificent Montague’s Down Home Soul Show & Dance Featuring Ben E. King, Jimmy Reed, Gene McDaniel, the Shirelles,” and a host of at least twenty other advertised stars, including Dionne Warwick and Otis Redding, whose debut Stax single, “These Arms of Mine,” the disc jockey was doing his best to break. He was calling in favors from all the record companies, putting every name he could plausibly suggest on posters and handbills that in many cases he was distributing himself (some of the advertised stars, like Ben E. King, seemed unlikely to show due to previously advertised bookings in other parts of the country)—and in general doing all in his power to promote the January 4 date. Conducting an on-air interview with Sam at this point could do nothing to hurt the show, and if his listeners came away with the impression that Sam might make an unscheduled appearance at Rockland Palace (despite the unadvertised fact that he would be on tour with King Curtis in Texas at the time), well, then,
caveat emptor,
as Montague himself might impressively intone.

The interview took on the aspect of a refined version of the Dozens, as Sam and Montague traded lighthearted barbs in the form of elaborate repartée. “Good afternoon, darling,” Montague began, “here in the studio we have a man who calls himself Mister Soul. He claims he is a singer, and he claims he has a background that makes him eligible to be a part of your show.” “Well, that’s very simple to do,” replied Sam laughingly. “Believe me,
very
easy to do. I want to say that knowing you as long as I have, I’ve had a chance to even sit back and observe you, you understand?” “Mmm, I see. In other words, you’ve been trying to gather some material for
your
soul through mine.” To which Sam could only respond, amid much laughter, “I have no retort, no retort.”

They went on from there, touching briefly on topics from Sam’s origins in gospel music to the changes that take place in all of us over the years. “You look a little older,” said Montague. “A little thinner.” “Well, no, I haven’t changed that much, Montague,” Sam hastened to reply. “[But] I would say as a singer grows older, his conception grows a little deeper, and . . . it gives him a better insight on telling the story of the song he’s trying to sing.” All of it was only prelude, though, to the poetry contest that Montague clearly had in mind from the start.

Which of his records was his favorite? Montague asked his guest, and Sam picked out one of his very earliest compositions, “You Were Made for Me.” “Now, what is the first line, Sam?” says Montague, upon which Sam delivers the opening stanza of the song with feeling.

A fish was made to swim in the ocean

A boat was made to sail on the sea

But sure as there are stars above

You were made for me.

“And I can recap that,” Montague jumps in, reciting his own elaboration on the song, which once you get past the initial fish-and-ocean part, enters into neo-Shakespearean waters. “We must get together and collaborate at least once on a song,” declares Sam good-humoredly. To which Montague suggests a second improvisation, this time on Sam’s “second-best record.”

“My second-best record? My current one—I love this very, very much—called ‘Nothing Can Change This Love.’” He then recites the opening lines: “If I go / A million miles away / I’d write a letter each and every day / ’Cause nothing can change the love I have for you.”

“If I should go beyond the clouds,” Montague comes back:

Beyond the world renown

If I should in my sleep stumble out loud

Darling, I am not afraid to write your name a thousand times

For nothing in this crazy world can change my love

I know, thank God, that nothing can change my love for you.

There is, once again, much laughter, and Sam says, “You know, I can’t cap that.” “No, no, no,” says Montague, “I wasn’t trying to get you to cap that. I was merely looking at you, trying to observe. And I think that to close the show up very nicely, Sam, I would like for you to hum something for my darlings. In other words, every day I try to describe ‘soul.’ Maybe you could hum eight bars of what soul represents.” And indeed Sam does. “And when the humming’s over,” Montague declares, with a sincerity that does indeed cap the interview, “and time finds its soul / All I can say to you, darling, is: ‘Sam Cooke’s yours, he’ll never grow old.’”

On a more explicitly political note, Sam gave an interview to a reporter for the ANP (the Associated Negro Press, the black newspapers’ wire service) in which “he urged all tan performers to pay more attention to the Negro press. ‘This is the bridge over which 99% of us must cross,’ he said. . . . In New York for a concert at the turn of the year, he told this writer that wherein the liberal ‘white press’ will write a Negro up, it will not tell his story. ‘All of us would be in grave danger if through lack of interest we let “our papers” down. More advertising dollars should be spent by both the artists and the promoters throughout the country.’ He further pointed out that [most Negro] performers . . . make the bulk of their money off Negro fans. Only a handful of them can balance their books by working the plush supper clubs in Hollywood, Las Vegas, Miami, and New York. Even those few must look to the followers of the Negro press for that extra profit dollar.” And, the story concluded, “he pledged himself to greater recognition of such papers.”

It was a time, as Montague might have pointed out in one of his more apocalyptic moods, in which everything seemed to be coming to a head. James Baldwin had just published a book-length essay in the
New Yorker
a month before that led with a quote from the old spiritual, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water / The fire next time,” and Sam undoubtedly pored over Baldwin’s message, couched in language no less ornate than Montague’s but richer, more ironic, and suggestive of deeper meanings by far. “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended you to perish,” Baldwin wrote in the portion of the essay that was couched as a letter to his namesake nephew “on the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation.

Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and
for no other reason.
. . . You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and
how
you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this . . . [but] please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words
acceptance
and
integration.
There is no reason for you to try to become like white people, and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that
they
must accept
you.
The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that
you
must accept
them.
. . . You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.

T
HE GOSPEL CONCERT
lived up to its billing in every respect but one. The below-zero weather kept attendance to advance ticket sales (it was the “coldest New Year’s Eve in history,” reported the
St. Louis Argus
), but the audience of six thousand was rewarded with a show in which each group seemed to go to extra lengths to get the house. Sam couldn’t have been happier, not just to be singing once again for a gospel crowd but to be reunited for the first time in a long time with the Soul Stirrers. It seemed almost as if he had been neglecting them, with recent sessions by nearly every other SAR act and a second album from the Stirrers long overdue. He had never given up on the idea of breaking them in the pop market, though, and Jerry Brandt, whom Sam had invited to the program with his fiancée at the last minute (“He calls me and says, ‘I want to show you something you never saw before in your life’”), couldn’t get over what a powerful singer Jimmie Outler was. His voice was rougher than Sam’s, but he possessed that same uncommon gift of communication, and Brandt had visions of signing him to a pop contract.

Onstage, said Brandt, it was like hand-to-hand combat, but in the end the real battle was not with the other groups but within the Soul Stirrers themselves, as Jimmie Outler matched Sam note for note, verse for verse, pushing him to ever greater heights. “Sam gets three lines, Outler gets three lines, they’re fighting it out, and then all of a sudden all hell breaks loose, all these women are throwing their arms up in the air, shivering and passing out. There must have been about fifty [women] in white nurse’s uniforms, stretchers were coming, people were fainting, the show in the audience was the most amazing thing I ever saw in my life. And I thought, ‘Holy shit, they’re actually having orgasms, thinking they’ve been touched by the hand of God!’”

Brandt had never seen Sam put on a better show, he had never seen him work so hard, if only because in a conventional secular setting he wouldn’t have had to deal with that kind of competition. In the end, said Crume, still the Stirrers’ principal songwriter and guitarist, whom Sam had recently taken to addressing as Crumé because, he said, that was the way the French would pronounce his name, Sam simply had nothing left to give. “He was singing his heart out, and I kept urging him on, but he said, ‘Crumé, I’ve given them all I got. I haven’t got any more.’” And so, as the
Chicago Defender
reported, Sam declared, in the well-known words of General MacArthur, “I shall return.”

T
HE KING CURTIS TOUR
began three days later in Texas, and from the start there was no question that it would be a memorable time. L.C. was out for almost the entire month (“Sam just told Crain, ‘Whatever money L.C. needs, you give it to him’”), and J.W., in keeping with his new intention to have more hands-on involvement on the road, was committed for the duration—but no one enjoyed himself more than Charles Cook. “King Curtis and I, you understand, we loved to gamble. King Curtis had a lot of money, and I had a lot of money—because I had
Sam’s
money—and anytime he’s offstage, like for intermission, we’d get to gambling. Sam knew I could gamble. And, boy, I used to win a lot of money off of old King Curtis, I used to beat him out of his money!” One time, according to Charles, “I left him so bad he had to borrow money to pay his band.” They played dice, cards, everything. “A lot of times,” said guitarist Cornell Dupree, whom Curtis had brought up from Fort Worth to join the band the previous year, “we’d be driving [to the next town after the show], get to the hotel, and instead of going to bed, they’d get on the floor and start shooting craps. I can remember one incident when Curtis had won a lot of money and handed the money to me [to] hold, and I nodded off to sleep, and Charlie was sneaking the money out of my hand while I was sleeping and shooting that with Curtis!”

At one point in the tour, in Norfolk, Virginia, Sam, who was an indifferent gambler at best, broke the game and, to Charles’ disgust, gave the money back. “I said, ‘Man, you’ve got to be crazy. You don’t give nobody their money back. They wouldn’t give it back to you.’” But Sam insisted. “Those people have families, man,” he told his brother. “With as much money as I make, man, I’m not going to take their little money.” And in the face of L.C.’s and Charles’ vigorous protests, he quizzed each player about how much he had lost, even as L.C. pointed out that the man Sam had just given $100 to hadn’t come into the game with $5.

The Harlem Square Club in Miami was one week into the tour. That was where Hugo and Luigi had agreed to record Sam’s live show. No one was ever sure after the fact exactly how this came about. J.W. thought it might have been the effect of the cousins seeing Sam at the Apollo in November, but Luigi had no such specific recollection and thought the idea probably came from Sam. It might have been the tape that Atlanta station owner Zenas Sears had sent to RCA. It may even have been that Sam heard from the Womack brothers how James Brown had recorded his own show at the Apollo and it struck a competitive note. Or it may simply have been Sam’s pride in his new act. But in any event, the two RCA engineers who had recorded
Belafonte Live at Carnegie Hall
(which, after three years, was still on the charts) were flown down with mobile recording equipment, and both Hugo and Luigi showed up (though Hugo disappeared to visit another of their acts, Perry Como, in Jupiter Beach) to record an album tentatively titled
One Night Stand.