Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (23 page)

In the absence of any filmed record of the performance, we can only imagine some of the more extravagant visual details, and, because of the way in which the tape boxes were labeled and stored, it is impossible to reconstruct the exact order of the program. But it is not difficult to summon up the pandemonium that greeted the little “skip and hop” of Birmingham native Dorothy Love as she sang the Harmonettes’ big hit, “Get Away Jordan,” and impishly stared down all the groups sitting up onstage awaiting their turn to go on who thought “they didn’t need us women. And we just kept showing up!”

Brother Joe May showed up, too, the “Thunderbolt of the Middle West,” in his black preacher’s robes and gold cape, with nothing but a piano to bolster a voice that scarcely needed amplification, just roaring out his faith, staking out his belief in modulations, both vocal and emotional, that you would think would tear out a man‘s guts, not to mention his vocal cords, when repeated night after night. They were aware of it, every one, spectator and performer alike: how could they not be? Everyone warned June Cheeks that he was going to blow out his voice if he didn’t learn to hold back—and what about Archie with the Five Blind Boys? How long before
his
voice was little more than a scarred and ravaged instrument? But there was no holding back, it seemed, when the spirit took you, whether the spirit was the spirit of the moment or, as so many insisted, the spirit of the Holy Ghost.

Most of the songs were far longer than they were on record, extended by both an elevation of feeling and an absence of commercial constraints. Whether it is the Pilgrim Travelers performing their “Straight Street,” the Caravans, with James Cleveland’s hoarse imprecations setting off Albertina Walker’s commanding lead and Cassietta George’s distinctive stylings, or the touching sincerity and bluesy conviction of Brother Joe May’s seventeen-year-old daughter Annette and gospel veteran Ethel Davenport, there is a rising and inexorable tide of emotion, a wave of feeling on which everyone is carried, until it reaches a crescendo no longer dependent upon the performance itself but upon the spirit of every person in the auditorium. It’s as if the room is lifting off and everyone in the room with it—it lifts the performers higher, it lifts the audience higher, and if you have ever been there, you will never forget it, nor will you ever again be able to imagine summoning it up by artificial means.

But at the center of the evening, and at the center of the whole emotional experience, is the Soul Stirrers’, and Sam’s, performance, different from any other Sam Cook performance on record because for once there appears to be no artifice, no calculation, and if there is, it is so artfully concealed as to reinforce the hyperreality of the moment.

The first number, “I Have a Friend Above All Others,” is a reworking of the song that Sam sang with such breathy intimacy in the studio two years earlier as a kind of inspirational love song in which “Savior divine” was paired with “Friend of mine.” Here it is not so much transformed in structure as intensified in style, as even the gentle lilt of Sam’s yodel takes on a preacher’s rasp altogether absent not just from the original but from any of Sam’s studio efforts.

“Be With Me Jesus,” from the most recent session, a nearly eight-minute-long duet between Sam and Paul Foster, only reinforces this sense of urgency, as Sam seconds Paul’s extended extemporizations with both chanting repetition and emphatic exhortation (“Come on, Paul,” “Sing it, Paul”), until the tension becomes almost unbearable and Sam reenters with his own only slightly more modulated voice. At the end, after declaring “I can breathe” and repeating “Now, Lord” over and over, Paul embarks upon a fervent recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm, with the calming words delivered in a way that both intensifies and crumbles meaning, as Paul enters into a state where he is practically speaking in tongues. “Oh, oh, oh, oh, surely, surely, surely, oh oh oh oh oh, GOODNESS AND MERCY SHALL FOLLOW ME ALL THE DAYS OF MY LIFE,” he shouts, and you begin to think it is going to go on forever until, finally, Sam’s voice enters once again, resolving the tension once and for all and allowing the crowd a collective sigh of relief.

But not for long, as Sam bears down on the familiar opening notes of “Nearer to Thee,” his current hit single, delivering the lines with a forcefulness that immediately elicits a crowd response. “The minister was preaching,” he declares, “and the congregation was standing near,” and from the start there is an atmosphere of palpable expectation, a thrill of recognition that runs through the house as Sam spins his familiar tale, but this time in the phlegmy gargle of the preacher himself. Emphatic hand claps push the song along, lift it with that note of irregular encouragement so different from the stolid timekeeping of most secular music to a higher note of anticipation, until, for the first time, the crowd really breaks loose as Sam reaches the words that will form the resolution of every verse, the old familiar spiritual that each person in the song is singing, “Nearer My God to Thee.”

From that point on, he is home free, as singer and audience challenge each other to ever-greater exchanges of emotion, and the intensity of the singing, complemented by Bob King’s barely audible chording and bluesy fills, generates an onrushing avalanche of feeling from which there is no turning back. When Sam sings “Songs have a feeling / There’s a story in every song that I sing,” the crowd clearly feels a surge of sympathy for the singer, but when, after acknowledging in the first of a series of new verses that “Trouble is one thing / That comes into everybody’s life some time,” he concludes with a determined reaffirmation of his faith (“I’ll never give up / Every day I’m going to get nearer / Father, let me get nearer to Thee”), the room spontaneously explodes. The song builds and builds—it is as if he is extending not just its length but its breadth and scope—and when Paul comes in behind him with his fervent support, the momentum is unstoppable.

“Nearer to Thee,” Crain said, was the group’s “stick.” That and “Be With Me, Jesus” were “how we put the hammer on.” And what made it work, from Crain’s point of view, was the interplay between Sam and Paul, with the congregation hollering “and Paul talking in tongues [until] they formed a line out in front of us to keep Sister Flute [Crain’s term for the old lady in the congregation who started the shouting] off of us. Because she came for us, she meant it, she wasn’t playing. She just wanted to [touch] that boy. Everybody loved that boy. I wish I was educated enough to tell you what that boy was.”

You can hear it. You can feel it. There’s no doubt about the ecstatic exchange, as Sam introduces yet another new verse in which he is characterizing not just an abstraction now but
himself,
a self who can be lonely and vulnerable (“Sometimes I like to be in the company / And then again I like to steal off all alone”) but who can always be consoled by the familiar message of the song (“I know God will make my burdens all right / If I tell him, ‘Lord, I’ve got a desire / Just to be nearer, NEARER TO THEE’”).

Then, amidst the roars of the crowd, he expands the territory even further. “Do you know, do you know that bad company,” he declares, “will make a good child go astray,” and the heart of every mother, and many a father, in the audience goes out not just to that child gone astray but to the beautiful child up on the stage of the Shrine Auditorium who is preaching this lesson of sin and redemption.

But I don’t care what that child may do

That mother, she’ll pray for, pray for him, night and day

When they bring that child to the mother,

No matter, it’s no matter what the problem may be

When they say, Who is that child?

The mother say, That child is mine

I’ve been praying to Jesus to let my boy,

To let my boy

Get nearer, Father, let him get nearer to Thee.

And now Paul comes racing back, and the crowd gives an evocative roar of recognition mixed in with ecstatic whoops as Sam and Paul duel back and forth and Sam builds up to his final verse, the verse that is clearly intended to suggest his own mother, Annie Mae, though no one in the audience is likely to know that “Nearer My God to Thee” is, in fact, her favorite song. “I remember when I was a little boy,” Sam sings, cannily measuring the crowd’s emotional response but at the same time abandoned to it:

Mother used to steal off, steal off all alone

I used to wonder

What my mother was doing (help me, Lord)

I crept out one morning

I found Mother with folded arms

And Mother had her eyes up,

She was looking up toward the sky

And I, I saw the tears

As they fell down [from] my mother’s eyes

But I could still hear the song Mother was singing,

Nearer My, Nearer My God to Thee

It is almost too much. Just Sam and Paul are left, Paul testifying, as Crain has described him, Sam echoing, guiding, touching, trading off word for word until at last they reach the almost wordless peroration of the song, a grace note, a singular manifestation of purity, a momentary glimpse of transfiguration, but one that is almost immediately abandoned for the transforming experience all over again, to be offered this time perhaps by Dorothy Love and the Original Gospel Harmonettes, at another program by June Cheeks or the Blind Boys, but always a new challenge to rise up to, a new lesson to be learned.

For Bumps it truly did represent a transcendent experience and an epiphany that had little to do with the rational plan for getting ahead on which, with a healthy dose of self-promotion thrown in for good measure, he had so far based his life. “It was awesome, phenomenal: [Sam] was like a black Billy Graham. Shit, the girls were following him around like the pied piper. Girls and young guys . . . but the chicks would just be completely gone.” He saw something else, too, though. He saw that Sam Cook was bigger than the world in which he was living. He saw with the blinding force of revelation that Sam Cook should go pop.

That was what he told Art the following night at the celebratory dinner that the label owner held for all the groups at the Watkins Hotel on Adams Boulevard in the elegant “Sugar Hill” section of black Los Angeles. J.W. just sat and quietly seethed as this slick interloper who had taken the job that J.W. had turned down without any of the knowledge that should have gone with it, suggested to Art that they should test the market and try this kid that he had barely met on some popular tunes. Art was dead set against it, and so, for that matter, was Sam. Crain was, naturally, horrified and would have had Bumps thrown out on the spot if he could. But J.W., who always tried to rise above personalities and prided himself on taking the long view, sought out Art after the dinner. “I told him Bill Cook [the Newark DJ who managed the enormously succcessful Roy Hamilton] had been trying to get Sam to change over. And I had been working with Sam, too, and he was damn good. I said, ‘Art, this kid is going to want to change over.’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. I’m selling records on the Soul Stirrers.’ I said, ‘Art, if you don’t do it, someone else will.’”

With the exception of the Gospel Harmonettes, each of the Specialty acts had recording sessions scheduled following the July 22 program: Brother Joe May on August 2, the Travelers on the fourth, and the Soul Stirrers two weeks later. In the wake of the concert’s success, and what would appear to have been a renewed commitment to the future of gospel at Specialty, Rupe’s approach to the Soul Stirrers’ session was peculiarly limited, with Bob King’s guitar for the most part underutilized, the addition of drums doing nothing for the pulse of the music, and, in the aftermath of the session, not a single song selected by Art for release. It’s hard to understand why. “Last Mile of the Way,” a 1950 Mahalia Jackson recording, was inspiringly sung, and, when Sam finally took over the lead exclusively from Paul on the ninth take, Sam’s composition “He’s My Guide” became one of their better simulations of a live performance, with Sam’s throatily strangled screams a new contribution to his rapidly growing vocabulary of vocal techniques. “Pilgrim of Sorrow” was probably the session’s highlight, with Bob King’s shimmering tremolo-laden guitar suggesting the kind of blues feeling with which Roebuck “Pop” Staples was just beginning to make a name with his family group, the Staple Singers, and Sam’s moody, bluesy, melancholically triumphant vocal providing a distinctive counterpoint to the more conventional gospel fare.

There is no record of Art’s reaction, though there was certainly no question of his intention to have the group back in the studio again (he would rerecord two of the songs at their next two sessions). Perhaps he simply felt their hearts were not in it. Or perhaps his mind was on other things, as, not long afterward, the live recordings were permanently shelved and it seemed as if the gospel catalogue was once and for all relegated to secondary status in the label owner’s commercial calculations, if not in his heart.

Bumps in any case was getting ready to go to New Orleans on his first independent a&r expedition. The primary goal was to record a singer who, on Lloyd Price’s recommendation, had sent Art a tape back in February just after Bumps’ arrival at the company. “Mr. Art Rupe,” the singer announced at the front of the tape, “you are now going to hear Little Richard and his Upsetters . . . ”