Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (18 page)

The Further Education of Sam Cook

S
AM’S STYLISTIC BREAKTHROUGH
, like all great discoveries, has been variously ascribed to accident, necessity, invention, and the illumination of genius—and it was undoubtedly a combination of every one of those elements. According to Crain, it took place in Fresno, according to J.W. Alexander in San Jose, where “Sam pitched the song a little high, kind of out of range, and when he got to the highest note in the song, he couldn’t make it, so he bent it, and the ‘trick’ went over so well that Crain told him to keep on doing it.”

“He just floated under,” Crain said, describing the first appearance of what would almost immediately become Sam’s most recognizable vocal trait, a lilting “yodel” (“whoa-oho-oh-oh-oh”) that he could interpolate at will into the body of any song, thereby lending it an altogether different flavor, a yodel that, unlike R.H. Harris’ daunting octave leaps, softened rather than intensified the thrust of the song, evoking once again the crooning style of Bing Crosby and the Ink Spots to which Sam had been drawn since childhood.

“What I was doing wrong,” he told his old friend and teenage quartet rival Leroy Crume, who would join the Soul Stirrers himself just three years later, “I was trying to sing too high, I was killing myself.” And, Crume added, “He might not have liked to admit it, but he was [still] trying to sing like R.H. Harris.” Once he hit upon this new device of his own, he was “Sam Cook all the way.”

Exactly when or where it happened will continue to be subject to debate (Crain sometimes ascribed the transforming moment to a program with the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and various QCs insisted that he sang that way all along), but there is no question that it came into full flowering sometime before the Soul Stirrers’ February 27, 1953, session in Los Angeles—because that is where you can hear Sam’s yodel clearly manifest itself for the first time.

The Soul Stirrers, late 1953–early 1954: June Cheeks on the floor, as Sam, Paul Foster (with glasses), and the other Stirrers look on.

Courtesy of Ray Funk

The session was unusual in a number of respects. To begin with, Art Rupe was not present and put J.W. Alexander in charge, writing to Crain two and one-half weeks earlier: “I am indeed very sorry that I can not be with you for your recording session but Alex assured me that you two will put your heads together and really make us some hits. I have all the confidence in the world in you Roy, and I want you to know that I am very particular when it comes to letting groups record on their own without me being present. You and the fellows should consider this a very honor of my esteem of your wonderful talents and ability.” And he enclosed a check for $300 (and four copies of the group’s contract renewal) both as proof of that esteem and as proof, too, that “we are not dropping the Soul Stirrers (Smiles), but are continuing our very pleasant relationship.”

Alex took his duties seriously, bringing a Pentron tape recorder to the Stirrers’ hotel to monitor their material and picking out one song, Alex Bradford’s “He’s My Friend Until the End,” to concentrate on. It offered, as he saw it, a good opportunity for Sam to demonstrate his newfound approach and, like a number of compositions by the Chicago-based twenty-six-year-old Bradford (whom he was about to recommend to Art as a recording artist in his own right), it was an exceptionally well made combination of passionate belief and skillful homiletics in a style well suited to Sam’s long-standing strengths.

That was the first song they recorded when they went into the studio, and J.W.’s faith was immediately rewarded. Sam’s singing was as supple as ever, his manner easy and unforced, and the number worked very much like a romantic pop song, with Sam breaking into an occasional falsetto and the Stirrers chirping away in the background much in the manner of the Orioles, the Ravens, or one of the other “bird” groups who were so popular on the r&b charts. The piano and organ that Art had contracted for in an effort to modernize the Stirrers’ sound competed clumsily for space, and the drums were no more necessary for establishing the beat than at the previous session, but Sam’s vocal performance could not have been improved upon in either of the two takes that have survived.

The leads on the next few songs were, surprisingly, divided between Sam and Paul, and the instrumental accompaniment did not improve, but Sam’s singing was of a new standard, in which the interplay of the voices was consistently guided by his growing confidence and the skimming lightness of his fluid, all-purpose yodel. Probably the single most arresting moment of the session was his interpretation of a 1948 Mahalia Jackson number, “I Have a Friend Above All Others,” that in his version stands as a beautifully modulated cri de coeur in which “Whoa, Lord” is incorporated into his yodel, then apostrophized, first as “Savior divine,” then, with the voice dropping to an almost romantic level, as “Friend of mine.” But it is on a much more literal presentation of Lucie Campbell’s “He Understands, He’ll Say, ‘Well Done’” (retitled “End of My Journey” by Crain) that Sam for the first time unveils his own original yodel, no longer simply a melismatic variation on melody or the acrobatic elongation of vowels, but a
Sam Cook
yodel, which, however shyly it may declare itself at first, will almost immediately become the hallmark of the Sam Cook sound.

“I Have a Friend Above All Others” remained unissued for twenty years, and, in the aftermath of the session, one wonders if Art’s uncharacteristic willingness to relinquish control momentarily stemmed not so much from his esteem for the group as from his increasing uncertainty as to what to do with them. In any case, no single from the session was issued for six or seven months, and it was a full year before “He’s My Friend,” the number in which J.W. so strongly believed, was finally released, achieving a degree of success that vindicated J.W.’s judgment—but by then any number of other events had intervened.

The world of music, Art Rupe felt, sometimes gloomily, sometimes with real excitement about the commercial possibilities that were opening up, was rapidly changing. With the remarkable breakthrough of Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” the previous year and a growing recognition on the part of the record industry that this was turning into a “full-fledged trend,” everyone was looking for their own crossover hit, and Art was not about to be left behind. He continued to have some degree of success with Price, though nothing like the cataclysmic success of that first record, but he needed to expand his horizons. With Lloyd about to be drafted, and with the boy and his mother more trouble sometimes than they were worth, he needed to open up the New Orleans territory in a way that he could not achieve simply by occasional visits from California. So he hired a flamboyant young record entrepreneur from Laurel, Mississippi, named Johnny Vincent to serve as a regional distributor and talent scout, and to act as a location producer, attempting to pass on all the lessons he had learned in the business in a detailed memo that covered everything from “General Policies in Distributor Relations” to “How to Sign Up a Recording Artist.” “Remember,” he wrote to Vincent in the spring of 1953, “that a recording session costs money.” And at the conclusion of a set of specific production tips (“The most important thing is to bring out the words. . . . However, at no time shall the rhythm be lost”), he stressed that “All of the above technique does not mean anything if the song is not sung . . . WITH FEELING AND SOUL. . . . Never show anger or disgust. KEEP PRAISING EFFORT . . . KEEP THEM RELAXED.”

Art had recently remarried, he was thinking of starting a family with his new wife (and longtime secretary), Leona, and he was also doing something that he absolutely detested: like every other independent label owner, he was paying money to get his records played. This was at total odds with his business ethics, his belief in economic determinism, and his sense of fair play, not to mention his respect for the dollar—but there was nothing he could do about it, it was no longer a level playing field, and the only way for Specialty to remain competitive was to pay like everybody else.

All of these factors undoubtedly entered into his asking J.W. Alexander to take on full-time a&r (artist and repertoire, or “production”) duties at Specialty at around this time. The label had been pretty much of a one-man operation up until now. By Art’s estimate he had produced, “I’d say ninety-five percent or more of everything—that was the part of the business that I really enjoyed.” So, to offer Alex the opportunity not simply to recommend gospel groups but, with Art’s approval, to sign and produce them, too, was a tremendous concession on the label owner’s part. But it would have meant Alex having to leave his group, and this J.W. was not prepared to do. For the time being, then, things remained pretty much as they were, with the recently signed Five Blind Boys of Alabama, whom J.W. had recommended off a strong showing at a Detroit program the previous year, getting the lion’s share of the label’s gospel sales with their debut release, “When I Lost My Mother,” in March. The single, delivered with the powerhouse punch of the better-known Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, sold so well that it easily outstripped sales of all current Stirrers’ and Travelers’ singles combined over the first nine months of the year and eventually went on to sell nearly a hundred thousand copies.

The Stirrers and the Travelers remained a strong draw on the road, nonetheless. They were out with the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi all through April and May of 1953 and then in June set out with the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Spirit of Memphis on a Herald Attractions- sponsored “Gospelcade” that ran head-to-head with Clara Ward’s far better known Gospel Cavalcade but, according to Herald’s own publicity apparatus, set “attendance records” everywhere it went.

The Blind Boys, whose four-man nucleus had originally met at Alabama’s Talladega Institute for the Deaf and Blind in 1938, had started out their musical life as the Happyland Jubilee Singers. A 1948 program in Newark with the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, then known as the Jackson Harmoneers, was their defining moment, both nominally and stylistically, as promoter Ronnie Williams billed a Battle of the Blind Boys, and the overwhelming power of Harmoneers lead singer Archie Brownlee was persuasive in converting the Happylands from a group that featured gospel and the older jubilee repertoire in almost equal measure to an up-to-date quartet that performed almost exclusively in the hard-hitting gospel style. Their lead singer in that style, Clarence Fountain, was, in fact, so close to Archie, as J.W. wrote to Art in April, that “most people think that ‘When I Lost My Mother’ [the Alabama group’s big hit] was done by . . . Archie [and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi] and that helps the record sell.” It was Clarence’s scream that did it, J.W. observed, and as he saw it, the confusion could only help both groups.

Clarence Fountain and the Blind Boys of Alabama took pretty much the same view of Sam that Archie and Percell Perkins had two years earlier: “He was young, stylish, and the girls liked him—but, hey, we’d tear the house down on him in a minute because we was the Blind Boys, and we knew how to sing.” They were so hot at the time, the other groups all let the Blind Boys close, but one time, bass singer Johnny Fields said, Crain insisted that they open for the Stirrers, and when Sam expressed misgivings, Crain said, “No, let them. They can’t go but so far.” As it turned out, the Blind Boys killed the crowd that night and wouldn’t turn them loose—the Soul Stirrers, according to Fields, didn’t even get a chance to sing. “Boy, Sam jumped on Crain like he had stole something. ‘I told you, man, not to call them Blind Boys first.’ Boy, we set there laughing, [but] when it was over everybody was shaking hands. It wasn’t an envious thing.”

Sam was different, the Blind Boys all agreed. He had qualities, both musical and personal, that made him stand out. Some people, said Johnny Fields, thought Sam was stuck up because of the way he carried himself—some of the other singers were jealous because of the way he attracted all the young girls. “But he had such a nice personality, and [you] didn’t never have to guess about Sam. It wasn’t a game. If he liked you, he was just down-to-earth, and if he didn’t like you, or something happened, he would let you know where he was coming from.”

One of the most likeable things about him, said Blind Boys lead singer Clarence Fountain, was that he was the same with everyone, young, old, sighted, blind. “He was an all right cat, he had a good, solid mind, and he could just stop and read you a book. He’d ride with us all the time, and he’d read us westerns and things of that nature, and he could almost put you there, right back in the same time when the book was wrote and how things were going on—he had a good eye for reading, a good eye for everything. See, he liked the Blind Boys. We was all right with him. He didn’t mind taking you to the bathroom, doing things with blind people that a lot of people don’t like to do. Sam was all right when he was all right.”