Biography by
Bruce Eder
Sam Cooke was the most important soul
singer in history -- he was also the inventor of soul music,
and its most popular and beloved performer in both the black
and white communities. Equally important, he was among the
first modern black performers and composers to attend to the
business side of the music business, and founded both a
record label and a publishing company as an extension of his
careers as a singer and composer. Yet, those business
interests didn't prevent him from being engaged in topical
issues, including the struggle over civil rights, the pitch
and intensity of which followed an arc that paralleled
Cooke's emergence as a star -- his own career bridged gaps
between black and white audiences that few had tried to
surmount, much less succeeded at doing, and also between
generations; where Chuck Berry or Little Richard brought
black and white teenagers together, James Brown sold records
to white teenagers and black listeners of all ages, and
Muddy Waters got young white folkies and older black
transplants from the South onto the same page, Cooke
appealed to all of the above, and the parents of those white
teenagers as well -- yet he never lost his credibility with
his core black audience.
In a sense, his appeal
anticipated that of the Beatles, in breadth and depth. He
was born Sam Cook in Clarksdale, MS, on January 22, 1931,
one of eight children of a Baptist minister and his wife.
Even as a young boy, he showed an extraordinary voice and
frequently sang in the choir in his father's church. During
the middle of the decade, the Cook family moved to Chicago's
South Side, where the Reverend Charles Cook quickly
established himself as a major figure in the religious
community. Sam and three of his siblings also formed a group
of their own, the Singing Children, in the 1930s. Although
his own singing was confined to gospel music, he was aware
and appreciative of the popular music of the period,
particularly the melodious, harmony-based sounds of the Ink
Spots, whose influence could later be heard in songs such as
"You Send Me" and "For Sentimental Reasons." As a teenager,
he was a member of the Teen Highway QCs, a gospel group that
performed in churches and at religious gatherings. His
membership in that group led to his introduction to the Soul
Stirrers, one of the top gospel groups in the country, and
in 1950 he joined them.
If Cooke had never
recorded a note of music on his own, he would still be
remembered today in gospel circles for his work with the
Soul Stirrers. Over the next six years, his role within the
group and his prominence within the black community rose to
the point where he was already a star, with his own fiercely
admiring and devoted audience, through his performances on
songs like "Touch the Hem of His Garment," "Nearer to Thee,"
and "That's Heaven to Me." The group was one of the top acts
on Art Rupe's Specialty Records label, and he might have
gone on for years as their most popular singer, but Cooke's
goal was to reach audiences beyond the religious community,
and beyond the black population, with his voice. This was a
tall order at the time, as the mere act of recording a
popular song could alienate the gospel listenership in an
instant; singing for God was regarded in those circles as a
gift and a responsibility, and popular music, rock &
roll, and R&B were to be abhorred, at least coming from
the mouth of a gospel singer; the gap was so great that when
a blues singer such as Blind Gary Davis became "sanctified"
(that is, found religion) as the Rev. Gary Davis, he could
still sing and play his old blues melodies, but had to
devise new words, and he never sang the blues words again.
He tested the waters of popular music in 1956
with the single "Lovable," produced by Bumps Blackwell and
credited under the name Dale Cooke so as not to attract too
much attention from his existing audience. It was enough,
however, to get Cooke dropped by the Soul Stirrers and their
record label, but that freed him to record under his real
name. The result was one of the biggest selling singles of
the 1950s, a Cooke original entitled "You Send Me," which
sold over two million copies on the tiny Keen Records label
and hit number one on both the pop and R&B charts.
Although it seems like a tame record today, "You Send Me"
was a pioneering soul record in its time, melding elements
of R&B, gospel, and pop into a sound that was new and
still coalescing at the time.
Cooke was with
Keen for the next two years, a period in which he delivered
up some of the prettiest romantic ballads and teen pop
singles of the era, including "For Sentimental Reasons,"
"Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha," "Only Sixteen," and "(What
A) Wonderful World." These were extraordinarily beautiful
records, and in between the singles came some early album
efforts, most notably Tribute to the Lady, his album of
songs associated with Billie Holiday. He was unhappy,
however, with both the business arrangement that he had with
Keen and the limitations inherent with recording for a small
label -- equally to the point, major labels were knocking on
Cooke's door, including Atlantic and RCA Records; Atlantic,
which was not yet the international conglomerate that it
later became, was the top R&B-oriented label in the
country and Cooke almost certainly would have signed there
and found a happy home with the company, except that they
wanted his publishing, and Cooke had seen the sales figures
on his songs, as well as their popularity in cover versions
by other artists, and was well aware of the importance of
owning his copyrights.
Thus, he signed with RCA
Records, then one of the three biggest labels in the world
(the others being Columbia and Decca), even as he organized
his own publishing company, Kags Music, and a record label,
SAR, through which he would produce other artists' records
-- among those signed to SAR were the Soul Stirrers, Bobby
Womack (late of the Valentinos, who were also signed to the
label), former Soul Stirrers member Johnny Taylor, Billy
Preston, Johnnie Morisette, and the Simms Twins.
Cooke's RCA sides were a strangely schizophrenic
body of work, at least for the first two years. He broke new
ground in pop and soul with the single "Chain Gang," a
strange mix of sweet melodies and gritty, sweaty
sensibilities that also introduced something of a social
conscience to his work -- a number two hit on both the pop
and R&B charts, it was his biggest hit since "You Send
Me" and heralded a bolder phase in his career. Singles like
bluesy, romantic "Sad Mood," the idyllic romantic soul of
"Cupid," and the straight-ahead dance tune "Twistin' the
Night Away" (a pop Top Ten and a number one R&B hit),
and "Bring It on Home to Me" all lived up to this promise,
and also sold in huge numbers. But the first two albums that
RCA had him do, Hits of the Fifties and Cooke's Tour, were
among the lamest LPs ever recorded by any soul or R&B
singer, comprised of washed-out pop tunes in arrangements
that showed almost none of Cooke's gifts to their advantage.
In 1962, Cooke issued Twistin' the Night Away, a
somewhat belated "twist" album that became one of his
biggest-selling LPs. He didn't really hit his stride as an
LP artist, however, until 1963 with the release of Night
Beat, a beautifully self-contained, dark, moody assembly of
blues-oriented songs that were among the best and most
challenging numbers that Cooke had recorded up to that time.
By the time of its release, he was mostly identified through
his singles, which were among the best work of their era,
and had developed two separate audiences, among white teen
and post-teen listeners and black audiences of all ages. It
was Cooke's hope to cross over to the white audience more
thoroughly, and open up doors for black performers that, up
to that time, had mostly been closed -- he had tried playing
the Copa in New York as early as 1957 and failed at the
time, mostly owing to his inexperience, but in 1964 he
returned to the club in triumph, an event that also yielded
one of the most finely recorded live performances of its
period. The problem with the Copa performance was that it
didn't really represent what Sam Cooke was about in full --
it was Cooke at his most genial and non-confrontational,
doing his safest repertory for a largely middle-aged,
middle-class white audience; they responded
enthusiastically, to be sure, but only to Cooke's tamest
persona.
In mid-1963, however, Cooke had done a
show at the Harlem Square Club in Miami that had been
recorded. Working in front of a black audience and doing his
"real" show, he delivered a sweaty, spellbinding performance
built on the same elements found in his singles and his best
album tracks, combining achingly beautiful melodies and
gritty soul sensibilities. The two live albums sum up the
split in Cooke's career and the sheer range of his talent,
the rewards of which he'd finally begun to realize more
fully in 1963 and 1964.
The drowning death of
his infant son in mid-1963 had made it impossible for Cooke
to work in the studio until the end of that year. During
that time, however, with Allen Klein now managing his
business affairs, Cooke did achieve the financial and
creative independence that he'd wanted, including more money
than any black performer had ever been advanced before, and
the eventual ownership of his recordings beginning in
November of 1963 -- he had achieved creative control of his
recordings as well, and seemed poised for a breakthrough. It
came when he resumed making records, amid the musical
ferment of the early '60s. Cooke was keenly aware of the
music around him, and was particularly entranced by Bob
Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind," its treatment of the
plight of black Americans and other politically oppressed
minorities, and its success in the hands of Peter, Paul
& Mary -- all of these factors convinced him that the
time was right for songs that dealt with more than twisting
the night away.
The result was "A Change Is
Gonna Come," perhaps the greatest song to come out of the
civil rights struggle, and one that seemed to close and seal
the gap between the two directions of Cooke's career, from
gospel to pop. Arguably his greatest and his most important
song, it was an artistic apotheosis for Cooke. During this
same period, he had also devised a newer, more advanced
dance-oriented soul sound in the form of the song "Shake."
These two recordings heralded a new era for Cooke and a new
phase of his career, with seemingly the whole world open to
him.
None of it was to be. Early in the day on
December 11, 1964, while in Los Angeles, Cooke became
involved in an altercation at a seedy motel, with a woman
guest and the night manager, and was shot to death while
allegedly trying to attack the manager. The case is still
shrouded in doubt and mystery, and was never investigated
the way the murder of a star of his stature would be today.
Cooke's death shocked the black community and reverberated
far beyond -- his single "Shake" was a posthumous Top Ten
hit, as were "A Change Is Gonna Come" and the At the Copa
album, released in 1965. Otis Redding, Al Green, and Solomon
Burke, among others, picked up key parts of Cooke's
repertory, as did white performers, including the Animals
and the Rolling Stones. Even the Supremes recorded a
memorial album of his songs, which is now one of the most
sought-after of their original recordings, in either LP or
CD form.
His reputation survived, at least among
those who were smart enough to look behind the songs -- to
hear Redding's performance of "Shake" at the Monterey Pop
Festival, for example, and see where it came from. Cooke's
own records were a little tougher to appreciate, however.
Listeners who heard those first two, rather poor RCA albums,
Hits of the Fifties and Cooke's Tour, could only wonder what
the big deal was about, and several of the albums that
followed were uneven enough to give potential fans pause.
Meanwhile, the contractual situation surrounding Cooke's
recordings greatly complicated the reissue of his work --
Cooke's business manager, Allen Klein, exerted a good deal
of control, especially over the songs cut during that last
year of the singer's life. By the 1970s, there were some
fairly poor, mostly budget-priced compilations available,
consisting of the hits up through early 1963, and for a time
there was even a television compilation out there, but that
was it. The movie National Lampoon's Animal House made use
of a pair of Cooke songs, "(What A) Wonderful World" and
"Twistin' the Night Away," which greatly raised his profile
among college students and younger baby-boomers, and
Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes made almost a
mini-career out of reviving Cooke's songs (most notably
"Having a Party," and even part of "A Change Is Gonna Come")
in concert. In 1986, The Man and His Music went some way to
correcting the absence of all but the early hits in a
career-spanning compilation, but since the mid-'90s, Cooke's
final year's worth of releases have been separated from the
earlier RCA and Keen material, and is in the hands of
Klein's ABKCO label. Finally, in the late '90s and beyond,
RCA, ABKCO, and even Specialty (which still owns Cooke's
gospel sides with the Soul Stirrers) each issued
comprehensive collections of their portions of Cooke's
catalog.Content provided by All Music Guide. Copyright
2008 All Media Guide, LLC.
