Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (21 page)

The Pilgrim Travelers had their virtual miniature piano, the Soul Stirrers had Sam. “We were doing very well,” J.W. said. “We were a good drawing card [on the road], and we would get a new Cadillac every year.” But at the same time, record sales were coming harder and harder (only “I’ve Got a New Home,” a Whitaker composition with a catchy, almost pop feel, came close to matching previous Travelers’ bestsellers), and, in J.W.’s view, they were all going to have to work just a little bit harder, and perhaps come up with new and more up-to-date methods, if they were to sustain their success in the long term.

For Art Rupe the new year was only providing further proof of his recent revelation. His faith in the dramatic, swooping style of Alex Bradford had paid off as “Too Close,” Bradford’s initial single for the label, continued to sell well into 1954, with eventual sales of nearly two hundred thousand copies, Specialty’s highest mark for gospel sales and more than enough to qualify it as a solid r&b hit. But that, of course, was the exception, not the rule, and while Mahalia Jackson was continuing to develop a widescale white audience with her Carnegie Hall concerts and European tours, signing a five-year deal with Columbia Records in August for the kind of money (a reported $25,000 a year) that up till now had been available only to a popular recording artist, Rupe could see that the day of pure gospel, the music that had most inspired him and to which he owed so much of his success, was past and gone. Continuing with the quartets, he now knew, was going to be as much a matter of faith and hope as anything else—though he was not prepared to offer outright charity. He was, as always, committed to a hardheaded business approach and unstinting efforts on behalf of every act signed to the Specialty label.

At the same time, his deal with Johnny Vincent, the young New Orleans record hustler to whom he had issued such explicit instructions on sales and production methods, was paying off with undreamt-of results. Art didn’t much like Vincent or trust his work ethic, either, but one of his first signings, a twenty-seven-year-old New Orleans-based bluesman named Eddie Jones, who dressed in a fire-engine-red suit and occasionally dyed his hair blue, delivered Specialty’s all-time bestseller to date with his very first release, issued under the name of Guitar Slim. The song, a fiery gospel-laced number called “The Things That I Used to Do,” which Slim claimed had been auditioned for him by the devil in a dream, hit the charts in January and remained there for the first five months of 1954, occupying the number-one r&b position for fourteen weeks and becoming one of the biggest-selling blues records of all time. More significantly, it established a style, blues with an unashamed dollop of soul, as Slim’s strong church-inflected voice set the tone while the piano and simple but elegantly voiced instrumental arrangement by fellow New Orleans resident (and Atlantic recording artist) Ray Charles supplied the undeniable gospel underpinnings.

“The Things That I Used to Do” was followed almost immediately on the charts by the record debut of Roy Hamilton, a big-voiced, church-trained singer out of Jersey City, New Jersey, by way of Georgia. Hamilton applied
his
unmistakable vocal talents to an openly gospelized version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein inspirational showtune “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which vied with “The Things That I Used to Do” for eight weeks at the top of the r&b charts and even reached number twenty-one on the pop charts. Most remarkable of all, Hamilton, a clean-cut, strictly stand-up singer with no suggestive moves or lyrics and no suggestive instrument other than his voice, played to mixed crowds whose “predominantly [white] femme audience,” reported
Cash Box
on the occasion of a riot in Revere, Massachusetts, “went beserk and stormed the stage.”

From this point on, there was absolutely no question of the course that Rupe, and Specialty, would follow. Art soon severed his connection with Johnny Vincent because of what he saw as Vincent’s maddeningly undisciplined approach and questionable business ethics, but he was determined to find the key to the crossover sales that he had stumbled upon almost inadvertently, first with Lloyd Price, now with Guitar Slim. It was clear to him that it lay somewhere in the cracks between blues and spiritual music, he suspected that it might exist in the “crying style” of rising blues star B.B. King, but one thing he was certain of: it was, like all the music he had recorded, somehow rooted in rhythm, and with the crack recording unit that he had found in Cosimo Matassa’s Rampart Street studio (and with the crossover recognition that Crescent City native Fats Domino was beginning to enjoy), he was convinced that its geographical locus was New Orleans, and its spiritual heart was gospel music.

Just how convinced can be seen in a series of letters he wrote in early 1955 to the singer he had dubbed “Sister” Wynona Carr from the time she first arrived in the Specialty studio in 1949 on J.W. Alexander’s recommendation. Carr had enjoyed solid gospel sales and had even had something of a hit the previous year with “The Ballgame,” a self-penned number pitting Jesus against the Devil in—what else?—a ballgame. This was followed in rapid succession by “Dragnet For Jesus” and “15 Rounds For Jesus,” both of which remained unissued, as Art urged her instead to consider recording secular material or, barring that, to “try to write words in the blues field to songs in the Gospel field that have been hits in the past. For example, you know what Ray Charles did with ‘I Got a Woman’ [his end-of-the-year groundbreaking single in which Charles took Guitar Slim’s approach one step further by basing the song directly on the Southern Tones’ “It Must Be Jesus,” a popular gospel release in the summer of 1954]. Also, Little Walter took [Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s] ‘This Train’ and made it into ‘My Babe,’ and it was a big hit. That seems to be what the people are buying today, and even if you cannot sing these numbers in your style, we certainly need them desperately for our other artists.”

T
HE STIRRERS HAD THEIR ANNUAL SESSION
in February of 1955, but this time in Chicago and, for the first time, without the supervising presence of Art or even Alex. No outtakes appear to have survived, but the four master takes would constitute the group’s next two singles, as sure an indicator as you could get of Art’s wholehearted approval (there was nearly a year and a half, by way of contrast, between Wynona Carr’s recording of “The Ballgame” and its release in the fall of 1953).

It was a different kind of session in other respects as well, with the meticulous manner in which each song was built serving as testimony to the continuing perfectionism of the Stirrers’ approach. In addition, the quietly stated interplay on organ and piano of Willie Webb and Eddie Robinson, longtime stalwarts on the Chicago gospel scene, for the first time provided the group with the kind of accomplished professional backing on which other quartets had long since capitalized.

The first number was a finely measured composition by twenty-two-year-old James Cleveland, onetime boy soprano and Mahalia Jackson accompanist, currently musical director of Reverend C. L. Franklin’s New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit and the only male member of the Caravans. Taken at a grave, almost stately pace, “One More River to Cross” has the simple classic construction that gives a pop song like Irving Berlin’s “Always” its unforgettable impact. Jesse Farley’s burbling bass introduces the chorus’ initial harmonizing of the title phrase, with Sam’s delicate tenor wafting over it and offering the variations that fill out its meaning. There is just one more river to cross before, he declares, he reaches his journey’s end, there is just one more river to cross “before I’ll be free from sin.” The imploring hesitancy of his delivery, the contrast between his fervent desire for release and the Stirrers’ forcefully voiced reiteration of the theme only serve to bolster the artful construction of the song, and when Sam brings the message home with the kind of hypnotic repetition that is at the heart of gospel music’s evocation of spiritual transcendence, there remains that same gentle, almost quizzical but disarmingly eloquent touch that will always set him apart from Archie, June, or even his chief second, Paul Foster.

“Nearer to Thee” represents the pinnacle of Sam’s songwriting to date, the kind of narrative skill that J.W. considered to be Sam’s mark and that so many of Sam’s gospel peers saw him create nightly in the extended live extemporizations that were the bell note of any gospel program. But where others created fervor through their “shouts,” Sam created fervor by telling a story—and here the thematic centerpiece of the story was the familiar hymn “Nearer My God to Thee,” which in the first verse the congregation is singing “in a voice that was loud and clear,” in the second represents a measure of Christian faith, and in the concluding verse offers comfort and consolation to the singer. Like “One More River to Cross,” Sam’s song is thoughtfully constructed, but in that middle verse an interesting thing happens, as you feel Sam’s imagination for a moment take flight, with impersonal moral lessons suddenly yielding to personal illumination, as the singer delares: “Songs have a feeling / There’s a story in every song that we sing / Songs have been known to lift heavy burdens / If all of our troubles to God we ought to bring.” And for once you feel as if you might be peering into Sam’s own soul.

The last two songs of the session, “Be With Me Jesus” and “I’m So Glad (Trouble Don’t Last Always),” were equally well performed but more conventional in approach, with the first, an original by Sam, building on Paul’s preaching exhortations, and the second, a sixteen-bar spiritual also known as “When Death Comes Creeping In Your Room” or “Run, Sinner, Run,” distinguished from its innumerable predecessors primarily by the confident curlicues of Sam’s voice. In fact, what is most remarkable about the entire session is the manner in which Sam takes charge. Even on “Be With Me Jesus,” on which Paul’s robust tenor takes the nominal lead, it is Sam’s voice that deliberately breaks the logjam of emotion that Paul establishes, it is Sam’s unmistakably idiosyncratic, lightly swinging, and graceful style that resolves the tension and takes the song to new and higher ground.

“Dear Art,” Crain wrote the Specialty label owner a day or two after the session from his new Woodlawn Avenue home in Chicago, “Please release ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ [
sic
] and ‘Be With Me, Jesus’ right away.” And in a follow-up letter a week later, he added, “I trust that I made a good session. The songs go over big with the audiences wherever we appear. . . . Which one do you think is best? ‘Nearer to Thee’ is a house reaker [
sic
], SMILE. I set them up with ‘I’m So Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always.’” And he concluded by recommending that “Be With Me Jesus” and “One More River to Cross” should come out “just after the other two sides.”

As indeed they did. Perhaps sensing a hit, Art followed Crain’s instructions to a T, giving up on their current single, “Any Day Now,” which had failed to sell in any great numbers, and releasing “Nearer to Thee” within two months of the session. It took off immediately, selling almost twenty-five thousand copies in its first three months on the market and forty-three thousand by the end of the year. As per Crain’s suggestion, the label owner followed up with “One More River” in June, while “Nearer to Thee” was still cresting, and
it
sold twenty-two thousand over the next six months. So the Soul Stirrers found themselves commercially resurrected, surpassing the Pilgrim Travelers for the first time (the Travelers sold a paltry fifty-three thousand records overall for the year), despite the controversy that J.W. deliberately ignited with the use of a saxophone on one of the Travelers’ new releases. But whether their fortunes were waxing or waning, for all of Art’s unambiguous intentions to keep on recording gospel music, neither group could miss the vast gulf that separated success in the gospel world and success in the uncharted land of rhythm and blues.

“W
E COULD SEE
how it was affecting us,” said the Pilgrim Travelers’ Jesse Whitaker. “Say there was a club down the street, church up here. You go by the club, you can’t find a parking space. Go up to the church, and you can. We could see it.” It didn’t tempt Whitaker to make a change any more than it tempted Clarence Fountain of the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, because, as Fountain said, “You don’t turn your back on God.” A promise had been made, and it was not one to be easily broken. But neither man failed to recognize the temptations set out along the way, and both acknowledged how natural it was to feel envy for the rewards that others were reaping, for the “big dollar” and “the swimming pool in the backyard” that were held out as enticements merely for singing different words to your song.

Sam seemed more and more sure of himself and his ground. “He ruled Crain,” Clarence Fountain observed of the power shift that had taken place within the group. Sam was now the unquestioned star, and where the older man might once have instructed, or even reprimanded, his young protégé, he now seemed content to follow wherever Sam chose to go. Which for the most part was fine because, as virtually all of his peers were prepared to admit, Sam’s instincts were good, his character almost unfailingly cheerful, and, whatever circumstances he found himself in, he rarely surrendered his winsome appeal. But as Clarence Fountain pointed out, he didn’t take a backseat to anybody, either. “He always thought highly of himself. He had confidence that he could do as good as anybody.” And Jesse Whitaker certainly recognized, from having been on the road with him for nearly five years now, that he wasn’t all sweetness and light. “He had a temper. Oh, he’d let you know. When somebody would do something to him, or somebody didn’t do something right, you go to the café and [the meal] wasn’t fixed right, boy, he’d get on them.”

To L.C., on the other hand, out of the army now and with little else to occupy him as he cast about for a musical career of his own, the picture was unclouded, the transformation in his brother’s fortunes complete. “Everybody loved him. Sam said to me, ‘I don’t have to turn out the church [the way Archie Brownlee does], because I am going to sing pretty to them, and my personality and everything are going to get me over.’ And he was right! I would go out on the road with him a lot of times with the Stirrers, and the Blind Boys would be turning out the house. Crain would go get Sam then. ‘Come on, Sammy-o, it’s time for you to walk down the aisle.’ See, Crain was a very shrewd man. And Sam would say, ‘L.C., walk with me,’ and we would walk down that aisle, and the people just forget all about Archie, the Blind Boys would be
over
—because all the attention goes to Sam. Well, that was Crain’s strategy. And as we walk down the aisle, everybody who touch Sam would be giving him money, people would just put twenty-dollar bills in his hand, and he would pass them right back to me. I said, ‘Don’t go down that aisle too fast now, Sam, wait for me!’ I mean, he could mess up a whole program just by walking in.”