Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (17 page)

The percentage of white teenagers in this new consumers’ pool was impossible to calculate precisely, but there was no question they were present in ever-increasing numbers, and from this point on, Art Rupe’s attention would turn more and more not so much to reaching them directly as to providing the kind of rhythm and blues with a gospel tinge that was susceptible to crossover success. It was not that he lost his love for pure gospel music—he saw the new hybrid in fact as something of an adulterated derivative, and if it came down to personal taste, there was little question of which he would prefer. But there was equally little question which, as a businessman, he felt it incumbent on him to pursue.

T
HE COOK FAMILY SHOWED UP
en masse when the Stirrers played Detroit. There was a family group on the program called the United Five, made up of two sisters and three brothers, the youngest of whom was fourteen. Twenty-one-year-old Mable John thought nobody could beat her baby brother, who was known as “Little” Willie John because of his impish face and diminutive stature. Willie could really “sell,” to the young girls and older women alike—the older women would take their hats off sometimes, those big wide hats that Mahalia used to wear, and throw them at his feet. But Sam, she soon realized, was at least his equal, as much for his cool demeanor and his refusal to enter into the common fray as for his undeniable gifts.

“It didn’t matter who he was up against,” Mable said, “because he didn’t do it as a competitor. All these Baptist sisters would sit down at the front, and they would scream. We would laugh at them because we were kids, but they were serious. They would yell things like, ‘Sing, honey. Sing, child,’ and I often wondered what was going on in some of their minds. Maybe I didn’t need to know. But you know what? Sam never allowed it to distract him. If he saw he had your attention, he could sing directly to you and almost be whispering. And when he got through, you would feel that he was talking to no one else in the room but you. [But then] the whole building would go up in smoke!”

Sam was so excited driving his family back to Chicago that he kept turning around to tell his sixteen-and-a-half-year-old sister Agnes stories until, finally, she had to tell him that if he turned around one more time, she would never ride with him again. What irritated Agnes even more was the way he continued to try to protect her, as if she were still twelve years old rather than the mother of a one-year-old child herself. Not only did he insist on keeping her away from all the other singers on the program, he kept her away from his own group as well. It was as if he thought she was going to
embarrass
him in public, even though he would have said that he was just doing it for her own good, she didn’t know these guys like he did.

To ten-year-old David it was just exciting to see his brother onstage, especially “when he would get into a song and the people started shouting. Everybody loved Sam—he was a lot of fun, always telling jokes and making people laugh. I remember when he used to come off the road we would sleep together [in the same bedroom], and he would wake up in the middle of the night and start humming a tune and then write it down—and I would get peeved sometimes, because I had to go to school the next day. He always exuded confidence. I really admired that. And he was a very good artist, too. He drew all the time.”

Sam’s older brother Charles started going out on the road with the group around this time. Twenty-five years old, an army vet, and an independent operator who had added drugs and women to his portfolio of convertible assets, he cut a dapper figure, with his draped suits, carefully trimmed mustache, and elaborate process, and the other Stirrers were glad to have him as their driver. Charles for his part found that he loved the road, and he was as mesmerized as everyone else by his brother’s accelerating poise and self-assurance. Sam had grown up with them all, he looked like they did, he even
sounded
like they did (Papa said it was the “Cook sound” that made him), but for all of the undeniable family resemblance, there was simply no telling where Sam’s compelling power came from.

Unlike Sam, Charles was a good driver. “They was glad I was along, because they could relax, and I could do the driving while they slept. And they had a big fine car, so that was right up my alley. We stayed in these little small hotels—maybe twelve, fifteen rooms. This one man in Texas built a place up over his garage just for the Soul Stirrers, and his wife cooked for us and everything. Sometimes they had [other] special places for us to eat. This was all new to me, but it wasn’t new to them. They had traveled this road before. I remember we went back to Clarksdale, we played all different places [with] the Blind Boys and the Pilgrim Travelers—but when they announce the Soul Stirrers, Sam would be standing at the back of the church, and they’d come down the aisle, and, man, people would just start in to shouting when they’d start singing their theme song. The house would almost come down then, just by them walking in. Them young girls, man. It was quite a scene when Sam would get to town.”

I
N AUGUST REVEREND AND MRS. COOK
, Sam, Charles, L.C., and Sam and L.C.’s closest friend, Duck (Leroy Hoskins), all set out for Los Angeles to attend the National Interdenominational Singers Alliance, an umbrella organization virtually interchangeable with the National Quartet Convention. L.C. and Duck rode with the elder Cooks; Charles drove Stirrers’ utility singer R.B. Robinson and his family; Lou Rawls, whom L.C. had now joined in the Holy Wonders (sponsored by the Quartet Convention to attend the Alliance festivities), drove out with Farley, the Soul Stirrers’ bass singer, while Sam rode with Crain and the rest of the group. The convention took place at the famed St. Paul Baptist Church at Forty-ninth and Main, where Professor J. Earle Hines, widely credited with having brought gospel music to L.A., served as music director, and the morning service was broadcast by Joe Adams, the Mayor of Melody, over KOWL. It was Reverend and Mrs. Cook’s first trip to California, and they planned to combine it with the annual Church of Christ (Holiness) convention a few days later. Five thousand singers from all over the country were expected to attend, announced the
Los Angeles Sentinel,
and the Soul Stirrers and Pilgrim Travelers were featured, along with two of the founders of the National Quartet Convention, the Famous Blue Jays and R.H. Harris with his Christland Singers, on the program that kicked off the festivities.

It was the “nationally known” Soul Stirrers who were pictured with the news item in a recent publicity photograph that showed them grouped in three rising pairs around a mike. Sam is left front beside a bespectacled Paul Foster. His hair is longish and lightly processed, his mustache still not fully grown in, and he has the same half smile as all the other Stirrers save for Crain, whose immaculate center part is his most distinctive feature and whose broad lips are tightly pursed while still conveying a kindly expression. They are all wearing light-colored, lightly patterned suits with broad lapels, each with a white handkerchief and a striped tie with a boldly colored vertical pattern that appears almost to be licking at the stripes. They look like
stars,
and to nineteen-year-old Lou Rawls, who had “never been out of Chicago in my life, it was overwhelming. It was a church full of egos—I mean, this was the elite. I knew who they all were, I had seen them all in Chicago at one time or another, but to be in the same place with all of them at the same time. And Sam was the new kid on the block, he was something they’d [never] heard.”

“Sam was singing,” recalled L.C., almost as carried away by Sam’s success as Lou, “and this lady two rows in front of me threw her baby up in the air. And, I mean, lucky some man caught that baby, ’cause she really throwed it, man!”

It was an exciting time for them all, and everyone in the extended Cook family was on their best behavior. There were lots of fine-looking women at the convention, both on the program and in the audience, and everybody strutted around wearing their uniforms and bragging about whose version of “Dig a Little Deeper” was the best. Leroy Hoskins introduced himself to everyone as Duck Cook, and, L.C. noted with mock chagrin, “Some girl come by and told my father, said, ‘Reverend Cook, all your sons are nice, but that Duck is the nicest.’ Papa just said, ‘What he do, honey?’ He didn’t say, ‘That ain’t my boy.’ He just said, ‘Yeah, that Duck Cook is really something.’ Duck’s own family would get mad at him, his brother Lester would say, ‘You think you’re a Cook,’ and Duck would say, ‘I am.’ The rest was just acquaintances, but Duck was all of our best friend.”

Just as the convention was about to start, Mahalia Jackson announced the details of her latest European tour, which would begin in November, take her on a swing of seven European countries, and earn something like $100,000. She appeared on Ed Sullivan’s top-rated Sunday-night television variety show now as “the queen of the Gospel singers” and would sell out Carnegie Hall once again in October two weeks after the Travelers and the Stirrers played DuSable with the Blind Boys on a tour that J.W. had announced would take in “101 cities.” J.W. was still trying to figure out how to get his quartet and the Stirrers onto the more lucrative circuit that Mahalia and Clara Ward and the Ward Singers were blazing. Nothing had ever come of the European tour he had announced the previous year, and, with record sales flat (the Travelers sold 153,000 records from their entire catalogue in 1952, the Soul Stirrers a sharply reduced 78,000), he was chafing at his inability to break out of the endless round of small churches and segregated southern auditoriums that he and Crain knew so well.

B
ARBARA DISCOVERED
that she was pregnant toward the end of the summer of 1952. She and Sam had been messing around for the last couple of years, first at a friend of Sam’s house, then at the Evans Hotel whenever Sam had the money, sometimes even at Sam’s house when his mother and father were out of town and the coast was clear. She was living with her mother and her mother’s husband, Mr. Cornelius, working a little job and paying $15 a week rent for her room, but when she was finally forced to admit that she was pregnant that fall, her mother did the worst thing she could possibly have done: she called up Sam and invited him to dinner. He showed up with his brother L.C., and everything was going pretty well until her mother announced, as if this was something he would want to know about and take care of right away, that her daughter was expecting his child. At that point L.C. just said, “Man, I’ll see you later,” and bailed. Then her mother, to Barbara’s eternal embarrassment, kept on about it with Sam, refusing to let up until Sam finally stormed out, saying he didn’t think it was his child and he wasn’t ready for marriage now, anyway—he had a career to think about. Barbara tried to tell herself that he didn’t really mean it, this wasn’t her knight in shining armor, and she knew what boys were like, the way they needed to impress not so much others as themselves—she knew how good Sam was at that. He maintained his own little impenetrable world. But still she couldn’t help but admit to herself that she was simply “outdone.” For all of the ups and downs of their relationship, she had never doubted up till now that she would somehow “get her man.” But now she was at a loss as to what to do.

Her mother tried to make up her mind for her.

After Sam left, her mother forbade her ever to see him again. Which was a joke, given her mother’s own history with men and virtual abandonment of the responsibilities of parenthood. But she wasn’t sure what choice she was going to have in the matter. The Cook family was going to welcome her departure from their son’s life. With the exception of L.C. (and she wasn’t so sure of him now), they had never thought she was good enough for Sam. She couldn’t go to her other boyfriend, Clarence, the one her Grandmother Paige denounced as a racketeer, because he was in jail on what he termed one of his frequent “vacations” from drug dealing. He had tried to warn her about Sam, he had told her Sam was not the man he appeared to be—in Clarence’s view, Sam was not a man at all. But she was always inclined to put that down to jealousy, even though Clarence knew she was not in love with him and said it didn’t matter, he would always protect her, anyway. But right now he was in no position to protect her. And for the first time she doubted that Sam really loved her. She felt like she couldn’t believe any of that shit ever again.

Barbara wasn’t the only one of Sam’s worries. His Cleveland girlfriend, Marine Somerville, had gotten pregnant probably during the same week as Barbara on a trip she had made to visit him in July, and there was another girl in Chicago who said she, too, was going to have his baby in the spring. Crain clucked that Sam was going to have to learn to take better care of his business, that even though this was the kind of thing that could happen to any of them, there were lots of girls out there who just wanted to have your baby—but, son, Crain told him, you’ve got to learn to deal with the
situation,
there was no reason to “call it trouble, it was just a way of life.”
Unless
you let it interfere with the group.

He was twenty-one years old, and he felt like all of a sudden he was being asked to grow up in a hurry. His parents moved to Cleveland that winter with his little brother David when his father got a new church to pastor. Then L.C. went into the army in February; Charles and Willie were on their own; the two older girls were married; and Agnes by now was married, too. For all of his success, he felt a little bit at loose ends, and he was impatient for change, although in the absence of having encountered it, he might have found it difficult to define. He knew in many ways just what he was capable of: he had the power to make people fall in love with him, both onstage and off. But in his adeptness at allowing each person to see whatever it was he or she wanted to see, in his seemingly effortless ability to play whatever role was assigned to him, he had yet to discover a voice of his own.