Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (25 page)

T
RAVELING WITH THE SOUL STIRRERS
was different from anything Crume had ever experienced on any of the little weekend trips he had made with R.H. Harris and the Christland Singers. And traveling with Sam as his friend and advocate was different from anything that simply being a member of the group could ever have offered. It was only a matter of weeks before he was taken off salary and made a full-fledged participating partner in Stirrers business. But it was only a matter of days before he knew that he had embarked upon an adventure that would provide him with a kind of fellowship, and education, that he had never known before.

“Every night after the show, Sam knew someplace to go. And I don’t mean just one or two nights of the week, I mean
every night.
No matter how big or small the town was, Sam could find them little after-hours joints, even way out in the country. He just knew so many people, and he remembered every one, even if he didn’t see them from one year to the next. You know, we met everybody at them little small hotels—r&b, blues, gospel—because we all had to stay there. Here we are, six guys in a Cadillac, with all of our clothes—I had a guitar and amplifier, and Sam was a camera bug, he had a little portable radio, too, and eventually Paul Foster and I got a little portable twelve-inch TV, because even if you could find a room with a TV or radio, that was a ‘deluxe,’ and that would cost you extra, probably three dollars, three and a quarter a night instead of the two dollars you paid for a regular room. And we got all that stuff in one car!

“Sam used to run my legs off. I was so tired, being up all night, and then we got to go on to the next town. One particular time, I remember, it was in Raleigh, North Carolina, and we had two ladies—well, Sam knew the one he was with, and he introduced me to mine—and I said, ‘Sam, I want to go back to the hotel.’ Because I wanted to get intimate with my girl. But Sam says, ‘Oh, Crume, let’s go one more place. Just one more place.’ And we had already been to lots of places already. I said, ‘Look, Sam, let me tell you something . . . ’ Because he was driving, you know, so I couldn’t leave. I said, ‘This is the last time I’m gonna run with you. After tonight, don’t never ask me again.’ Well, he got right up in my face with that Sam Cook look on his face, and he said, ‘Crume, you just said that because you’re upset. You know you don’t mean it.’ He just laughed and said, ‘You know, man, we’re partners.’

“It didn’t mean nothing to Sam, he never got tired, and when we would travel the next day, Sam and I would jump in the backseat to get some sleep. Man, I’d be laying there, and Sam’s sitting in the middle, and all of a sudden he’d punch me and say, ‘Crume, you awake?’ I’d say, ‘No. I’m not awake. Let me sleep.’ He said, ‘Well, let me just tell you this one thing, and then you can go back to sleep.’ And he’d say that one thing, but then he’d be talking for hours—about what we were going to do the next night, and who he knew where we were going, all kinds of things.

“He’d call himself whispering, but he can’t whisper, and now I’m
never
going to get back to sleep. Because once he started talking, his story would never end. One time he woke me up to tell me, ‘You know, someday I’m going to be rich.’ He said, ‘One of these days I’m gonna be so rich I’m gonna buy me a white convertible Cadillac.’ I said, ‘Sam, did you wake me up to tell me that? Man, get outta my ear.’ He said, ‘I got a plan.’ I said, ‘Sam, I don’t want to hear nothing about what you have to say.’ ’Cause he went through money like water, he threw it away. I said, ‘Sam, you will never in your life accumulate anything. Because you can’t hold on to anything.’ But Sam was thinking way ahead, I was thinking of him, you know, doing this with the Soul Stirrers, but he was looking into the future, he was thinking way beyond the Soul Stirrers.”

S
AM SAW HIS WAY OUT
, it slowly began to dawn on Crume, through those little pop songs he was writing all the time. None of the other Soul Stirrers paid any attention to them, they didn’t even seem to notice as Sam half hummed, half sang, making up what sounded for all the world like nonsense verses in the back of the speeding Cadillac. J.W. Alexander certainly knew about Sam’s ambitions and, as someone who had started out in pop music himself, even encouraged them. Alex, newly remarried, had temporarily moved to Houston and was doing some work for Don Robey, producing gospel sides on Reverend Cleophus Robinson for Robey’s Peacock label and working with Robey’s r&b stars Bobby “Blue” Bland and Little Junior Parker, whose “Next Time You See Me” he had just helped polish for a fee of $250.

“Sam and I got ukeleles,” said J.W., “and we’d be singing pop songs. Then Sam began to write, and I got a book in New York on How to Write a Hit Song and Sell It—I forget who wrote the doggone thing. But I just told Sam to make it simple, to where little children could hum it. Housewives or truck drivers or what have you. You write that kind of melody, and lots of people will remember it. And make it danceable, that’s really the key.”

Crume at first saw the songs primarily as vehicles that Sam would use to entertain the ladies. “We’d get in a room and rehearse, sometimes we’d have a roomful of people, he’d get on my guitar and I’d sing backup—all he knew were three changes, but we’d sing those songs to the girls, try them out and see if they were acceptable. And they accepted them mostly!”

It didn’t take long, though, to realize that the songs were intended as more than just social diversion. Sam was working on them constantly, coming up with new ones all the time. The idea, he told Crume, who was as unaware of Bill Cook’s interest in Sam as the other Soul Stirrers were of the songs themselves, was to sell them to a top group like the Platters, who had just written crossover history with their number-one pop hit, “The Great Pretender,” and whom Sam had somehow gotten to meet in New York. “There’s money in songwriting,” he declared in the face of Crume’s skepticism that Sam even knew what money meant.

“He used to make me so angry. He’d go out, and, you know, he’s going to buy for
everybody.
He didn’t want
nobody
to spend their money. I said, ‘Sam, let me spend my own money.’ ‘No, no, I got it.’ Everywhere we’d go, he’d do that. The next day he’d say, ‘Let me have ten dollars.’ I said, ‘I told you to let me pay for myself.’ ‘Hey, man, let me have ten dollars.’ I say, ‘All right, but it’s the last time —’ He says, ‘Crume, you know you lying, don’t you?’ And he was right. I always let him have the money!”

It was an education for Crume in every respect. While he had scarcely led a sheltered life, and his father had brought him up on harsh tales of slavery and racial mistreatment, he had had little personal experience of the South since moving from Missouri to Chicago with his family at the age of nine, and the daily insults, the habit the others had all picked up of falling in almost instinctively with local laws and customs were things he simply was not used to. In Alabama they had a problem with the generator, and while they waited for the man to fix their car, they could hear the patrons of the diner next door cracking jokes about the niggers in the Cadillac that had broken down. The one thing they hated worse than niggers, they declared loudly, seemingly determined that the group would not miss out on the joke, was niggers with Mexicans traveling with them.

“And Paul Foster nudged me, and he said, ‘Crume, those people are talking about you.’ I said, ‘I hear ’em.’ Because at that time I had a process, and my hair was real brown, and I looked a little like a Mexican. One of our guys, R.B. Robinson, was born in Troy, Alabama, and he was deathly afraid, so he got out of the car and walked away, way down a dirt road. But I roused up, and one of them yelled, ‘That’s not a Mexican. He’s a nigger. That one’s a nigger, too.’ And boy, oh boy, we didn’t say anything. We just sat there, and they just talked about us like we were animals.”

Another time, they were late for a show in Tyler, Texas, when the universal started to make noise, but the mechanic wouldn’t even look at it that evening, telling them they could suit themselves, but he was going home for supper and wouldn’t be back till seven the next morning. It was hot and sticky, they hadn’t had anything to eat all day, “and there wasn’t no hotel or motel where we could put down in this little town, but we were parked right across the street from a store that had watermelons stacked up on the porch. Man, I kept looking at those watermelons. I was going to get one and leave some money, but Sam said, ‘Crume, don’t do that. First thing they’re gonna say, even though you got money, they’ll say you’re stealing.’ So I didn’t, and we finally settled down, all six of us, and went to sleep in the car.” And when the mechanic finally put the car up on a lift the next morning, “all it was was a little bolt that was loose. He said, ‘You guys could have tightened this up yourself.’ Can you imagine, we missed the gig and suffered through all that because he couldn’t even take the time to look at it.”

For the most part, though, race rarely intruded directly, because for the most part they rarely left their own segregated world. Everyone knew about the White Citizens Council attack on Nat “King” Cole on the stage of the Birmingham Municipal Auditorium in April, but the attitude of many in the black community was that he should have known better than to have sung for an all-white audience in Alabama. “He was born there,” was the sardonic refrain of one column in the
Amsterdam News.
“He should know how those old peckerwoods are.” On a more serious note, J.W. Alexander was reported by the
Los Angeles Sentinel
to have “electrified audiences everywhere” on the Pilgrim Travelers’ big March tour, “when he fervently ask[ed] that prayers be offered for both Miss Autherine Lucy, embattled University of Alabama coed [whose court-ordered admission in February 1956 provoked a student riot that led to her suspension, and then expulsion, by university trustees before she was even able to enroll], and the [black] citizens of Montgomery, Alabama,” whose boycott of the segregated city bus system had started the previous December. But even J.W. conceded that the quartets’ role in the civil rights struggle was a limited one—and would probably have to remain so if they wanted to retain the harmless anonymity that allowed them to operate just beneath the redneck radar. The fact that they were
gospel singers
was the one thing that made it all right for them to be driving around in their brand-new Fleetwood Cadillac. If they’d been Bobby “Blue” Bland or Junior Parker, with their flashy looks, flaunting sexuality, and aggressive new musical styles, J.W. knew they would have encountered far more frequent challenges, and far more open hostility, to their very ability to go about their business. The Pilgrim Travelers did sing for the Movement one time in Montgomery after the police canceled their show at the City Auditorium in a generalized reprisal against any kind of gathering that might sustain the spirit of the boycott. They sang at a local church, donating the proceeds to the boycott fund, but the police came into the church and put a stop to that, too.

It was three weeks out, five days at home, regular as clockwork, a
business,
Crume learned, with Crain in charge and J.J. Farley not just the practical joker but the “disciplinarian” and chaplain in the group, who levied fines and started off each rehearsal with a prayer. If you were late for rehearsal, it could cost you $10, and you had to change your wardrobe within ten minutes of getting offstage because you never met your fans with your stage uniform on or you faced another fine. Due to Sam’s habitual dilatoriness, Crain would always be telling them that the program started an hour earlier than it actually did, just as he had ever since Sam joined the group, but Crume took exception to being treated like that. “I’d tell him, ‘Hey, man, we’re grown men.’” Even though he could understand why Crain might have thought he had to do it, since Sam was always running late and might even miss a show once in a while.

“Sam liked to act like he knew everything, and I would bug the heck out of him sometimes. Sam used to say, ‘I don’t agree with your ass all the time, Crume, but at least I know you’re telling me the truth.’ You know, you could needle him because he would get so serious, and then when you’d say something to him, he’d think, you know, you were serious, too. Sometimes I’d tease him about something or other when he’d be driving, and he’d start to turning around, because he always liked to look at you when he was talking. And R.B. Robinson would say, ‘Crume, why don’t you leave him alone?’ Because Sam would be going all over the road. I wouldn’t laugh till R.B. said, ‘Leave him alone,’ but then I’d smile, and Sam would say, ‘You fucker, Crume, I’m gonna get you for that.’”

But mostly it was Sam who led the way, even for these men who had been in the business in some cases since before he was born; it was Sam, Crume realized, whose charm, vision, insistence on personal and professional growth, and, above all, natural ease set the tone for the group, and for Crume’s own experience with the group. “He made me grow up. Sam was a reader because he always wanted to learn. He was always stressing [the need] for more knowledge, even with his singing. When I came into the group, I liked to read comic books—Superman, Dick Tracy, Captain Marvel. And Sam was always in the backseat with a magazine or some kind of book. And he said, ‘Crume, damnit, you’re with the Soul Stirrers now, you got to read something educational, you got to put those damn comic books away.’ So I did. But when I’d get in the hotel, I’d curl up on the bed, man, and get my comic books out until there was a knock on the door, and then I’d hide them under my pillow until he’d leave!

“But that’s the way Sam was. He was an educational-type guy. He was the kind of guy who if you didn’t know something and Sam thought he could help you with it, he was johnny-on-the-spot! He wasn’t a moody person, but he could fly off the handle real quick, and if he thought he was right, he’d argue you down. That’s just the way he was, kind of headstrong. He would listen to you, he would listen to anybody, but after he listened to you, if he thought he was right, he’d say, ‘Hey, I’m gonna do it my way.’ But if he thought about it and [decided] he was wrong, he’d come back to you and say, ‘Damn, man, I was wrong. Hell, I was wronger than shit.’ And, you know, most of the members in the group was like that. I think Sam instilled that in us. He didn’t show his [emotions] very long. You wouldn’t see him in any extended bad moods. R.B. Robinson, our baritone singer, used to say Sam was ‘The Great Pretender.’ Just like the song.”