Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (10 page)

Tate, they soon found out, did not have all the resources that he claimed. His money, as Marvin Jones put it, turned out to be “very limited,” but whatever money he had, Marvin and the others quickly realized, he was more than ready to spend on them. “He was very sincere. I mean, this guy sacrificed his family, he practically forsaked his family and quit his job for the Highway QCs.”

He went to their parents for permission to manage the group and even obtained Reverend Cook’s help in purchasing a ’37 Olds to take the group out on the road. Soon they were traveling all over, not just the Midwest but Texas and Louisiana and throughout the South, struggling to make the gigs in their raggedy old car, which according to Marvin broke down “every twenty miles. And Tate would get out in his white shirt and tie and get up under the car and fix it. I remember we was on our way one Saturday to this southern Indiana town for a program and had a guarantee of so much money—the car broke down, and we couldn’t get it fixed till Monday, and we missed the program. We set in that car and sulked for two days, eating oranges and apples and bread and you name it. We went down to Tallulah, Louisiana, where Lee Richard had a grandmother. It was the first time this Chicago boy had seen cotton. We did quite a bit of stuff with the Five Blind Boys out of Jackson, Mississippi, with Archie Brownlee; they were the one group that ever ‘turned out’ on the Highway QCs, but next time we paid them back!”

Tate, as Lee Richard said, put the QCs on the map—literally. “He may not have had a lot of education, but he had a lot of know-how. And he loved us.” And Sam took to the road as if he were born to it, which in a way he was. His father was, as Church of Christ (Holiness) Bishop Conic had said, “a kind of wanderer,” and just around this time he rededicated himself wholeheartedly to his wandering, giving up his pastorship at the Chicago Heights church for a life committed to the freelance saving of souls. It was a clear choice, according to L.C. The church was “too much of a burden, family-wise. It didn’t pay enough. And it was too confining.”

Sam was no more inclined to confinement. He loved the gospel road. “He’d eat it, sleep it, walked it, talked it. Singing was his life,” Tate said. “He’d wake up at twelve [midnight], one o’clock, two o’clock, and say [of an idea that had just come to him], ‘Tate-y! Listen at this! How this go?’” And after Tate had listened and was struggling to get back to sleep, Sam would not be satisfied until he had awakened the rest of the group and rehearsed them in his new approach. It was a great adventure, an experience for which he was voracious in every respect. There were more women than he could ever have dreamt of—but he still couldn’t get enough. Tate didn’t try too hard to monitor his young protégé, but when he thought “he’d did his thing long enough,” he might interject a mild homily on the value of pacing yourself, with little hope of actually influencing Sam. As his fellow QCs by now well knew, for all of his easygoing manner and the breezy assurance of his singing, Sam
always
had his eye on the prize.

None of them really took it amiss. Sam was of a different order from the rest of them, and different rules applied, whether it came to girls or popular recognition (not infrequently one and the same thing). In the observation of Creadell Copeland, still an integral member of the group whenever he was able to make the program: “We all got individual pictures to sell, and we’d try to sell them during the break. I’d sell one on occasion. Gus—I don’t think Gus ever sold any. But Sam would sell all of his. He was the handsome boy, and he was the best singer, and he conducted himself that way. But he never got carried away [with himself]. And we didn’t have no people we were ashamed of.”

Sam never failed to apply himself to his craft, either. He was, as Tate quickly recognized, the group’s principal source of material; he had a genuine gift for making old songs new. And he
studied
music. He learned to control his voice better; he was quick to suggest new harmonies and new approaches that the group might try; he found different ways to project his personality in a more professional manner. To L.C., still struggling to achieve a similar degree of success in the same field: “The QCs were the best group I ever heard in my life. As a matter of fact, the QCs had a better sound than the Stirrers. They were more versatile—they could [even] sing pop. The Stirrers couldn’t sing no pop. The QCs were so popular, man, look here, those cats could go into a church, and that church be full of kids. Sam
brought
those kids to church. See, Sam revolutionized everything by bringing the kids.
That’s
when the Soul Stirrers noticed them.”

T
HE QUARTET UNION OF INDIANA
, of which Tate was president, presented its first state program of 1949 on Friday night, May 20, at the Antioch Baptist Church in Indianapolis, where the Pilgrim Travelers had played the month before. It featured the QCs, the Harmony Kings of South Bend, “and all groups of the local union of Indianapolis. Fail to hear this great program, and you will miss the great treat of the new season.”

The notice ran accompanied by the QCs’ new picture, all six of them (including Bubba), baby-faced and hopeful, looking as if they couldn’t wait to grow into their new uniforms.

Through Tate and his Quartet Union connections (the union served as a local branch of the organization that R.H. Harris had founded a year and a half earlier), the QCs were working at least once a month in Gary. Twenty-year-old Roscoe Robinson, who was singing with a local group, Joiner’s Five Trumpets, first met the QCs at one of those programs and was immediately won over. “The first time I heard Sam, he was shouting with the pretty voice. He was killing with that pretty voice—but he was controlling it. And all the young girls—they just couldn’t stand it, they were going crazy. So I come up to him and started talking to him and he said, ‘Well, man, I like your singing.’ I said, ‘I just can’t sing like you!’ He said, ‘Man, you ought to come over to Chicago sometime.’ And from then on I started coming over, and I rehearsed with them and stayed at Sam’s house. His mama would cook for everyone!”

The QCs’ following just grew and grew. In every city, they had a group of young ladies who showed up wherever they appeared. In Chicago, Marvin’s girlfriend Helen (“Sookie”) was at every program, and so was her aunt Gloria—“we used to call her ‘Queen.’ She was going with Lee, Sam was going with Barbara [Campbell],” and Gus was going with Agnes’ girlfriend Reba.

In almost every respect, things couldn’t have been better. The only cloud on the horizon was Tate’s inability, no matter how great his efforts, to get them a record deal. The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, still known more commonly as the Jackson Harmoneers and featuring the forceful delivery and bloodcurdling screams of twenty-three-year-old Archie Brownlee, R.H. Harris’ most extroverted disciple, were making records for the Coleman label in Newark. So were the Happyland Singers of Alabama (soon to be rechristened the Five Blind Boys of Alabama), four of them graduates of the Talladega Institute for the Deaf and Blind and all in their teens to early twenties. But no matter what he did, Tate couldn’t seem to make the right connections. All the record companies would tell him, he explained to the group, was that the QCs were too young, or that they were afraid the boys’ voices might change. They all had their excuses, he told his impatient young charges, even as the evidence existed right in front of their eyes to contradict what Tate was saying. Other young quartets were getting contracts: why not them?

They had internal problems as well, not so much stemming from their lead singer’s stardom as from lack of leadership on Tate’s part. “We
were
young,” Marvin recognized. “We were talented. But we were dumb. We didn’t have any professional sense. We didn’t realize that what you have to do is to utilize all of the resources that you have to make your group better. Which meant that if I could lead on certain things, I should lead on that song. If Jake should lead, let him lead. Because that made the group better. But the rivalry between Lee and Jake, the rivalry between the two brothers—that’s where the [problem] was. Because Lee knew that Jake could outsing him, and he never given him any opportunity. And Lee was the kind that was—oh, Lee was bodacious, he’d punch you out in a minute.” But Tate was never willing, or able, to intervene.

That was the summer, the summer of 1949, that they went to Memphis. They barely made it, as Tate’s car gave out by the time they reached the city limits. The original idea had been to do a program, or a series of programs, sponsored by the Spirit of Memphis Quartet and then move on, but when they found themselves temporarily without transportation, they made the decision, for the time being at least, simply to try to live off the land.

To sustain themselves they went on the radio at the invitation of the Reverend Gatemouth Moore, a flamboyant thirty-five-year-old recent arrival in Memphis himself. Moore, a noted blues singer and composer of the blues standard “Did You Ever Love a Woman,” had experienced a public conversion onstage at the Club DeLisa in Chicago earlier in the year in the middle of a song. He had arrived in Memphis on July 31 for a revival at the Church of God in Christ’s seven-thousand-seat home church, Mason Temple, sponsored by the Reverend W. Herbert Brewster, the great gospel composer, preacher (at his own highly influential East Trigg Baptist Church in South Memphis), and early civil rights leader. Moore was billed as the man who “turned his back on a million dollars” and sang and preached on an all-star bill that included the Spirit of Memphis, Queen C. Anderson, the soloist at East Trigg who had originated Reverend Brewster’s composition “Move On Up a Little Higher,” and the Brewster Ensemble Singers, among others.

Off of the success of that revival, Gate, a familiar figure on Beale Street, where he had gotten his start in the thirties and was seen, in the words of the
Memphis World,
as “the Memphis boy who skyrocketed to world fame,” was offered a job at the city’s (and the nation’s) first—and so far only—all-Negro-staffed radio station. WDIA had gradually introduced its new approach to programming from the previous November, and Gatemouth Moore’s arrival pretty much completed the process. He called his noontime show
Jesus Is the Light of the World
and not only played records but dispensed counsel and sold advertising (“I’m the first that brought them national accounts”). He had been on the air for barely a month when the QCs arrived in town. “I’m the one that took care of them,” he boasted. “Somebody else brought them down, but I was the only religious disc jockey, and I put them on my radio program and advertised them, advertised their appearances, so they could get a chance.”

“That’s when Memphis fell in love with us,” Marvin’s memory concurs, “when we did that show on WDIA. B.B. King was on the air then, too, sang that Pepticon jingle. And Gatemouth wanted to manage us, [but] we wasn’t interested.”

He did help them find living quarters at Mrs. Annie Brown’s rooming house, across the street from LeMoyne Gardens, the black public housing project in South Memphis, where he lived. Mrs. Brown furnished them with free room and board, recalled Essie Wade, who had just moved into the Edith Street rooming house with her new husband, Spirit of Memphis “organizer”-manager and sometime singer Brother Theo Wade. “People just helped them. They didn’t have any money, so Mrs. Brown just let them stay there. She fed her family, and she would feed all of them—I don’t remember how many there were, but there were quite a few!”

They got help from the Southern Jubilees, too, a local quartet whose members were a little older than the QCs and who presented them at a program at New Allen AME on Third Street, where a fifteen-year-old named Cornelia Lee, who was going with the Jubilees’ bass singer, was so affected by Sam’s performance, by the way he scrunched up his little face and, she thought, sang right at her, that she stuck her finger in her nose. “I never figured why I did it except that I seen somebody else do it and Sam was messing with me.” But then Sam went and told her grandmother when he and the other QCs came by after the program, and her grandma scolded her, and she jumped all over Sam as soon as her grandma left the room. The QCs used to come over to her grandmother’s house all the time—“they were just little old boys” trying to show off, as Sam would tell her girlfriends and her all about Chicago and act like he was so proud of his “big-city” ways.

Dan Taylor, the Jubilees’ twenty-two-year-old tenor singer, was very much taken with the quartet as a unit, but Sam stood out for him almost as much as he did for Cornelia Lee. “I was living on Porter Street, so they was living close around. I knew Marvin and Lee and Charles [Jake] and Gus, I mean I knowed
all
of them—but Sam was a brilliant fellow. Always fast—talked fast, moved around fast, he was a manic little rascal. But he was a nice dude, and a
good
singer, one of the clearest speakers in any lead or feature singer that I ever heard in my life. You know, there are a lot of singers that could sing as good as Sam, but they didn’t have the speech he had. He was always a noticeable fellow.”

The Southern Jubilees started taking the newcomers around Memphis and then into Arkansas and Mississippi, both out of friendship and, as Dan Taylor acknowledged, for a specific practical reason. “They had a manager, and he had a car.” For the QCs it was a whole new world. None of them had been away from home before for any extended period of time, and they made the most of it in every imaginable way. Sam, of course, was the main attraction, but there was not a single one of the QCs, as Marvin pointed out proudly, who was not resourceful. “In those days you were always invited to dinner. And if one of the girls at a program took a liking to any guy in the group, it didn’t matter who it was—if she would say, ‘Why don’t you come over for dinner?’ our line was always, ‘Well, you know, I can’t leave the guys.’” They got a lot of free meals that way and didn’t sacrifice any romantic associations.