Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (20 page)

For Barbara, of course, it was the greatest shock of all. It hurt her deeply, altogether destroying whatever illusions she had been able to preserve. It undoubtedly hurt eighteen-year-old Marine Somerville in Cleveland, too, who had delivered her baby, Denise, on April 23, just two days before Linda was born. And it probably struck a chord with Evelyn Hicks, another of Sam’s Chicago girlfriends, who had had her daughter, Paula, a couple of weeks before that. But it was Barbara who had put her faith in Sam, it was Barbara who had believed him when he said he didn’t want to settle down or make a family life because he was trying to make a career for himself. It was Barbara who now had to rethink not just her life but her dreams.

Sam, Dolores, and her son, Joey.

Courtesy of Specialty Records

Sam moved out of the old neighborhood for the first time with his new wife and family, into the basement apartment in Soul Stirrers baritone R.B. Robinson’s building at 6505 Langley. R.B.’s wife, Dora, with a five-year-old of her own, soon befriended Dee Dee. “Sam was a man about town and the women did like him,” she told writer Daniel Wolff. “I always tried to comfort her, if there was any comforting to be done.”

Barbara brought the baby over one time at Sam’s request so that he could see her. She didn’t really know how to respond when Sam’s wife said how pretty Linda was, that she looked just like Sam, and that she, Dee Dee, wished she could have some children by Sam herself. “I said, ‘Well, you got a boy, you got a son—you know, that’s his stepfather. I guess I’ll let you have some more.’ And that was it. I had a long conversation with her, and I told her that I was gonna go on and live my life. And I would never interfere or interrupt her marriage—she never had to worry about me, is what I wanted to say. [Because] if I couldn’t be the one, I certainly wasn’t going to be the second lady.” But what Sam thought neither Barbara nor anyone else had any idea. As in so many other matters, he simply maintained an inscrutably cheerful and impenetrable calm which, for all they knew, might merely have masked the simple fact that it was all as much a mystery to him as it was to them.

J
UNE CHEEKS’ ARRIVAL
in late 1953 kicked the Soul Stirrers and Sam into high gear. Cheeks, the electrifying lead singer for the Sensational Nightingales out of Philadelphia by way of the Carolinas, represented an even more flamboyant version of Archie Brownlee’s vocal theatrics combined with the kind of physical routines that, according to gospel historian Tony Heilbut, got him thrown out of some churches. “I was the first,” he told Heilbut, “to run up aisles and shake folks’ hands. Man, I cut the fool so bad, old Archie started saying, ‘Don’t nobody ever give me any trouble but June Cheeks. . . . That’s the baddest nigger on the road.’” Born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, he joined the Gales in 1946 and would stop at nothing to wreck house, but according to Cheeks, there was no money to be made with the Gales, with the nadir occurring at a program in Miami when, after paying their hotel bill, “we wound up with fifty cents apiece. I just went and threw mine as far as it could go into the Atlantic.” The other Gales took a somewhat less charitable view of his departure. “He and his wife got a little bigheaded,” said guitarist JoJo Wallace. “Folks were telling him he was the Nightingales by himself.” So he left them after a program with the Dixie Hummingbirds in Jackson, Mississippi, “he left us there at the hotel and took the car with him!”

He was a strange fit for the Soul Stirrers, who prided themselves on their ability to get the crowd to listen without gimmicks and who already had their own strong second lead in Paul Foster. JoJo Wallace felt that he “disfigured their ministry with too big of a forceful sound.” But to Pilgrim Travelers’ bass singer Jesse Whitaker, Cheeks provided a lesson that Sam Cook still needed. “June really got Sam going. He sung hard and moved with it, you know, with gestures and stuff. When he joined, he sat down and talked to Sam about what he should do and how he should do it. A lot of times he’d [even] show him. Julius Cheeks was a strong singer, man.”

“I was the one,” Cheeks told Tony Heilbut, “[who] caused Sam Cook to sing hard. I gave him his first shout. We was working in the San Francisco Auditorium. Sam used to stand real pretty on stage. I pushed him, and he fell off the stage. People thought he was happy. I said, ‘Move, man,’ and the two of us fell into the audience. We were doing ‘How Far Am I From Canaan?,’ and things just came together.”

There is a photograph from this period that conveys some of the spirit of that moment. In it the Soul Stirrers are all immaculate in matching white suits, dark ties and handkerchiefs, and
sharp
two-tone saddle shoes. In this photograph it is Cheeks who has leapt off the stage, and the look on the other Soul Stirrers’ faces matches the expressions of the audience, as amusement, appreciation, attentiveness, encouragement, and pure curiosity vie with each other for primacy. Sam and Paul seem to be exhorting June to go ahead on, and Sam in particular seems engaged in a way that leaves any pose of cool reserve long since abandoned—he was no longer, as nine-year-old Bobby Womack, whose family group sometimes shared a bill with the Stirrers in their hometown of Cleveland, observed, just a “pretty boy that everybody could dump house on.” Cheeks, said J.W. Alexander, just wouldn’t quit. “The group [the Soul Stirrers] would sit down, and he wouldn’t go sit.” Dumping house meant everything to June, J.W. said—it was the same goal Sam had set for himself from childhood on, but now he was learning a different way to accomplish it.

They went into the studio together in March of 1954 for the Stirrers’ annual recording session. Three of the completed numbers, with Oakland gospel stalwart Faidest Wagoner accompanying the group on piano, are essentially Sam Cook solos, sung in that lyrical style that had by now become his trademark, but with an elaboration of that style that you can attribute either to growing maturity or, possibly, deeper commitment. The first, “Jesus, I’ll Never Forget,” is a lightly swinging up-tempo number with lots of “oh-oh-oh”s and “no-no-no”s for Sam to practice his ascending and descending yodels, and a confident, practiced touch that leaves no question of his vocal mastery. The second, “He’ll Make a Way,” by Cleveland gospel singer Clinton Levert, an accomplished songwriter and performer whom Sam had met and grown close to in the course of his travels, has Sam singing at the top of his range, with the Soul Stirrers backgrounding him all the way through. His falsetto here is an effortless extension of his natural delivery, carried off with a smoothness that the raw, untrained vocalist of his first Soul Stirrers sessions could never have achieved but with a poignancy, too, that R.H. Harris’ more unrelenting attack could not suggest. He employs his intricate melisma on words such as “please,” “weakness,” and, of course, “I,” which is characteristically elongated to “I-I-I-I”—but it is his patience and deliberation that are most noticeable throughout the five takes, the manner with which he has established a style so much his own that he can issue an understated and highly effective scream at the end without for a moment suggesting either imitation or lack of inspiration.

It is the song with which he begins and ends the session, though, the piano player Faidest Wagoner’s “Any Day Now,” that under any other circumstances would have had to be considered the highlight of the session. It was, said Wagoner, based on “The Bells of Saint Mary’s,” the title song of the 1945 Bing Crosby movie, and it is written with a devotional purity that climaxes in a vision of transcendent joy. Wagoner played with the Stirrers whenever they came to Oakland—she played with every major gospel group that came to town because she served as an assistant to the promoter, James Wilks, and her father, Reverend McKinley McCardell, was one of the founders of the Oakland Church of God in Christ. She had come to know the Stirrers well, even going on the road with them occasionally with her group, the Angelairs, and what she loved most about Sam was his ability to make a song’s meaning absolutely clear. He was a crowd-pleaser, there was no question about it, “all the women went wild. You know, he was always smiling, had that lovable smile on his face. [But] he was a different man from most of the singers, he had such a talent that he could just sit up and create something, make a poem out of something, and the way he did the songs was different. They had words, they had meanings—you could understand what he was talking about.”

“Any Day Now” is a masterful performance by any standard. But perhaps more significantly, it achieves a profundity that none of Sam’s previous recorded performances had approached, with a somber piano arpeggio to announce its serious and stately intent, a beautifully articulated, carefully developed vocal by Sam that starts with the lowest and ends with the highest notes in his range, and a deeper meaning, which he seems to communicate with restrained but undeniably passionate fervor. When at the conclusion of the song he declares, “Any day now, I’m going home,” his voice trails off in an almost wistfully ascendant falsetto that conveys all the heartbreak, all the hope, and all the fragility of faith.

It is, all in all, an astonishing performance, and the capstone of a remarkable session that, despite producing only four finished songs, suggests a level of discipline and control, a subordination of style to content that Sam had never before been fully capable of. But if you are looking for any sign of June Cheeks in these three songs, you will have to look elsewhere. In fact, the only overt evidence of Cheeks, at least to the untrained ear, comes with “All Right Now,” the fourth number of the day, the kind of incantatory extemporization that was commonplace for Cheeks but not for the Stirrers, at least not up until now.

Sam plays the role of setup man here, offering a perfectly modulated Bible lesson in the second verse before June Cheeks roars in and takes the song away. Here you have all the power of live performance, with June unleashing his full-throated scream and chuffing like a preacher, his expelled breath rasping both to punctuate the sermon and raise it to higher, more ecstatic ground. It goes on for at least three takes, two of which are well over three minutes, with each yielding the same ecstatic conclusion and Art merely suggesting that the other Stirrers sound their
t
’s a little more clearly in the background. “Ri
ght,
” he says, carefully enunciating and biting off the ending exaggeratedly to illustrate his point. “This is ‘All R
ight
Now,’” he pronounces, only to be met with the immediate rejoinder—by whom and in what spirit it is impossible to tell—“You don’t sing it and say ‘All r
ight.
”

With or without the
t
’s, it is clear that Rupe was excited about the performance, and subsequent to the session, he edited down the best take by almost a minute, presumably for single release. But fate intervened in the person of Don Robey, the light-skinned Houston nightclub owner and reputed numbers boss who owned Peacock Records, the label for which the Sensational Nightingales, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, and R.H. Harris’ Christland Singers all recorded. “Dear Mr. Rupp [
sic
],” he began his letter of March 25, “I had occasion to talk with Mr. Crain and Mr. Farley of the Soul Stirrers a few days ago regarding the services of [Julius] Cheeks,” the upshot of the talk being Robey’s reminder to his Specialty counterpart that Mr. Cheeks was “under exclusive contract to Peacock Records, Inc., and monies have been spent on the artist [whose] services . . . are extraordinary.” He felt sure, nonetheless, that a happy medium could be struck, for as Robey declared philosophically, “one man’s loss is another man’s gain.”

And yet, for whatever reason, that middle ground was never found. It may simply have been that Art resented the fact that Robey was looking for financial compensation when, as he noted on Robey’s letter, at the time Harris went to Robey, following his departure from the Soul Stirrers, “we said nothing about it.” Or it could have been, as Jesse Whitaker of the Pilgrim Travelers surmised, that Paul Foster saw his position threatened by June Cheeks’ more extroverted approach and the Soul Stirrers elected to go the tried-and-true route rather than gamble on Cheeks’ more volatile personality. The association in any case was soon sundered, the track remained unissued for nearly twenty years, and Cheeks returned to the Sensational Nightingales before long, leaving Sam with the lessons he had learned and a close personal connection that would survive, and thrive, on many fierce musical battles still to come.

Art finally issued “He’s My Friend Until the End,” the Alex Bradford song in which J.W. Alexander had shown such belief a full year earlier, around the time of the new session. It almost immediately rewarded that faith, with sales of over twenty-five thousand for the first half of 1954, by far the Stirrers’ best showing since Sam’s debut single three years earlier. Around the same time, J.W. Alexander put Herman Hill and Associates, a public relations firm, on retainer at $75 a month and shortly thereafter issued a press release saying that the Travelers had had their new Cadillac outfitted with “a white piano installed in the trunk and a midget record player in the glove compartment.” To J.W. it was just a way of stirring up excitement, even if the piano didn’t exist: “I had searched around to see if it was possible [to install the piano], I felt I could use it with my songwriting, but they couldn’t do it at the time. However, I did
want
it done and, all through the South especially, people would come to see the eggshell-white Cadillac with the piano in it.”