Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (28 page)

J.W., too, was more convinced than ever that there was no other way to go. His own experience this past year only bore out this conviction. It had been a terrible year for the Pilgrim Travelers. Total record sales had dropped to a low of 66,000, with just $1,350 in royalty income (compared to 157,000 sales and $3,000 in income five years earlier). In addition to which, J.W.’s lead singer, Kylo Turner, the center of a stable lineup for the past ten years, had left him. And Art Rupe, who he felt had always regarded him more as a trusted colleague than as just another act on the roster, seemed to have grown deaf to his suggestions and entreaties in the face of a market that continued to shrink even as new markets (prompted by the kind of exposure offered by the Apollo’s Gospel Caravan and Mahalia Jackson’s and Clara Ward’s increasing international celebrity) should have been opening up. Even the Soul Stirrers’ sales failed to reflect the wave of teenage hysteria that greeted Sam’s nightly appearances, and neither “Wonderful” nor “Touch the Hem of His Garment” managed to sell twenty thousand copies before the year was out.

Herald Attractions bookings for both groups had fallen off, too, as longtime agency head Lil Cumber was forced out in June and the new girl, who was rumored to be a girlfriend of Bumps, appeared incapable of taking well-meant suggestions and in general seemed not up to the job. Alex tried to be loyal (“I have never said you made a mistake in letting Lil Cumber go,” he wrote Art some months later, “even though I hear it daily from promoters”), but the treatment that he got in return, he felt, indicated something of the seismic shift that had taken place. In September he wrote to Art from Atlanta, pleading for more support from the company but also informing Rupe as his publisher that “the new number I was telling you about by Ray Charles [“Lonely Avenue”] is really a take off of [the Travelers’] ‘I Got a New Home.’ I’d certainly like for you [to] give a listen and see about collecting royalties for us.” When he heard nothing back from Rupe, he wrote to him again at the end of the month, pointing out that the two tunes were not just similar but the same and that people, as a result “are believing it [‘Lonely Avenue’] is us and I feel we should get something out of it.” But Art failed to follow up, and J.W. simply took it as one more indication of the extent to which gospel music was being swallowed up by pop.

His solution was to try to do in the new arena what he had always done in the gospel field: scout around for singers with broad appeal and thus prove his value to the company in a fresh way. Unfortunately, he was now dealing with Bumps, not Art, and Bumps rebuffed his efforts with a kind of condescending nonchalance, lecturing him more as if he were an inept amateur than a senior colleague. “It seems,” Bumps wrote at the end of the year in response to a tape Alex had sent him, “that you are confusing Blues with Rock ’n Roll (or Pop). We are not interested in Blues at the present time; we would like Pop tunes with a blues chord structure which lend themselves to blues backgrounds. . . . If you have any questions on this I would be most happy to cooperate with you. In writing the lyrics try to write ‘white’ for the teen-age purchaser rather than ‘race’ lyrics. It seems the white girls are buying the records these days.”

I
T WAS IN PURSUIT
of that new audience that Bumps took Sam to New Orleans in December. Bumps himself was getting married there on December 16, so the December 12 session date may have been something of a convenience, but the studio, the location, and the rhythm section were not, as they had proved their worth over and over again, with Fats Domino’s huge new pop hit, “Blueberry Hill,” only the latest commercial manifestation, though perhaps the most spectacular one to date.

Cosimo Matassa’s eponymous Cosimo Recording Studios on Governor Nicholls was a recent outgrowth of his old J&M record store and studio on Rampart and Dumaine. Matassa, whose family had long owned a grocery store in the Quarter, had gone into the jukebox business with a friend of his father’s at the age of eighteen while he was waiting to be drafted. They sold records as a sideline and then, when the war ended the following year, opened up a brand-new record store, “and my partner, a guy named Joe Mancuso, said it would be a good idea to put a room in the back where people could make personal records.”

That was the genesis of the business that had consumed him for the past decade and created an industry with no center (there were no New Orleans record labels, nor did Cosimo appear to have any driving ambition to start one of his own) other than Cos’ studio. Matassa, a cheerful, easygoing man with a quick wit and a lifelong passion for reading, seemed perfectly content to record for whatever label (Specialty, Imperial, Aladdin, Atlantic) was putting up the money, and his modest manner, uncommon curiosity and openness to both new ideas and new technology, along with a democratic embrace of people of every stripe and personal background, helped foster an unusually relaxed social and musical atmosphere. From his work with Little Richard, he was impressed after a fashion with Bumps, whom he saw as “a motivated a&r guy, I don’t know if ‘organized’ is the right word, but he was focused, and he was in charge.” Cos recognized his deficiencies as well. “Oh, if you’re talking about the next level up, I would say that he was maybe his own worst enemy. But that was because he was satisfied that he was good. He wasn’t exactly timid.”

As far as the great Sam Cook experiment was concerned, from Cos’ point of view, it was no big deal. “I had done something like that for Imperial Records with a group called the Spiders.” And, musically, it was the most logical thing in the world, “because gospel singers
sang.
It wasn’t like taking some fifteen-year-old kid and teaching him.” It was, on the contrary, working with someone thoroughly educated in how to sing and sell a song and in possession of a storehouse of musical and vocal knowledge that offered as much depth and sophistication as any musical tradition in the world. As for Sam, “I was aware of him through his gospel singing. He was disciplined. He wasn’t egotistical, despite the fact that he sang like an angel. I think he understood it better than any of us.”

Sam might very well have questioned this assumption of self-assurance. He was eager, certainly, but not confident by any means that he was ready. He was going into the studio with three songs he had already worked on with Bill Cook, plus several new ones and “Lovable,” the adaptation of “Wonderful” that he and Cook had attempted but been unable to successfully complete. The idea of “translating” Sam’s gospel hit had appealed to Art Rupe, though, who turned it over to Tony Harris, a twenty-two-year-old gospel singer who had grown up in Los Angeles and recently left his group, the Traveling Four, to move back home with his new wife. In L.A. he had joined another gospel group called the Golden Chords and met a woman named Mabel Weathers, a junior high school counselor who dabbled in the record and talent-management business. Weathers introduced the group to Bumps, who cut a pop demo on them as the Dap Daddies—which was how Tony first came to Specialty. And while nothing came of the demo, Tony continued to assiduously pursue individual opportunities of his own.

He had been unable to get a recording session, though, because, Bumps told him, Art thought he sounded too much like Sam Cook. So it should have come as no great surprise when Art came downstairs to the little rehearsal studio in the Specialty basement where he was working on a demo with Bumps, “and he asked me, Could I write a song for Sam that was similar to ‘Wonderful’? I went home and wrote the lyrics, and then I [demoed] the song myself, and Art loved it.”

Harris knew Sam a little. “I had met him after a program in San Diego—we went over some girl’s house, and later I saw him in Lufkin, Texas, Crain’s hometown, and he was on his way to some other girl’s house. I liked him, he was fun, but he was serious about what he did.” And though he certainly wasn’t aware of it at the time, it didn’t surprise Tony Harris to find out later that Sam had already taken a crack at the song or that he might have had trouble with it (“We were all kind of brainwashed about gospel music”). Nor did it bother him in the least to share the writer’s credit with Sam.

Sam sang the song to Crume on the road, at the same time that he revealed he was going to New Orleans to make a pop record. “But, Sam, that’s just like ‘Wonderful,’” Crume protested. And though he was clearly ambivalent about the matter, Sam simply replied, “Yeah, that’s why it’s going to sell.” To Crume’s even greater consternation, the recording session was set for the same day that they were scheduled to set out for New York for a return engagement at the Apollo Theater. That was okay, Sam said, he and Crume would simply fly. “How
we
gonna fly?” Crume demanded. And then Sam sprang it on him that he was expecting Crume to accompany him on the session. “No, no, Sam, no way,” Crume remonstrated. “I gotta be with the group, man. I can’t leave them stranded.” So Sam went off to New Orleans alone, revealing his plans to the other Soul Stirrers only at the last minute and telling them not to worry, that he would be in New York in plenty of time.

But in reality he was not all that sanguine about the situation. As much to protect the group as himself, he had agreed to the same plan that Art had proposed to Sister Wynona Carr: to change his name, if not his style, by just enough to sidestep the question of identity should his fans react strongly against his decision. He would be recording his first pop sides under the name of Dale Cook—it could be a brother, possibly a cousin, Sam agreed, if that was what people really wanted to believe. He would be going in, too, he rationalized, not just for himself but for his family. “I had a wonderful time, a wonderful life,” he explained just one short year later. “I was doing the thing I liked best and getting paid for it. [But] there were a lot of things I wanted to do. I wanted to do things for my family, and I wanted nice things of my own.” Or, as his father had drummed into him from childhood on, “Man looks at dollars. God looks at your heart.” And so he took the plunge.

T
HEY ENDED UP CONCENTRATING
on four songs: “Lovable” and a doo-wop ballad called “Forever” by saxophonist Red Tyler (a stalwart on the Little Richard sessions), plus “I Don’t Want to Cry” and “That’s All I Need to Know” from the New York session. Sam was backed by a small four-piece unit led by drummer Earl Palmer, with pianist Warren Myles taking typical triplet-laden New Orleans leads, and after a good deal of trouble with his phrasing (which may have been exacerbated by the combo’s own difficulty with his light, airy tone), Sam finally got “Lovable” right on the sixth take and then delivered an even better version on the seventh at almost exactly the two-minute-and-twenty-seconds length that Art had determined was optimal for pop radio airplay (“Art had been through analysis,” Cosimo Matassa remarked with wry amusement, “and he would explain to me why certain records sell”). Sam delivered his new message with the same combination of smooth conviction, precise articulation, and unerring melodic improvisation that was the hallmark of his gospel style, though there is unquestionably something missing. Or, perhaps more to the point, there is an inescapable awkwardness attached to the evolutionary process, somewhat similar to the transformation of a popular song into a television commercial. But once that process got under way, there was no lack of purposefulness, there is, certainly, no lack of intent—and there is no one else directing the show. As Cos observed, “You might argue that he was self-produced from day one. You can’t steer that kind of talent.”

The other three songs were all completed with varying degrees of dispatch and, like “Lovable,” were constructed around the same uncomplicated “ice cream chord” changes that characterized so much of the simple doo-wop-based material of the era. They were, anyone would agree, undistinguished songs elevated only by the sound of Sam’s voice—but that made all the difference and set them apart in a way that even the most sophisticated harmonic structure never could. The way that Sam drew out unexpected words (“r-e-e-a-alize” or “te-e-e-ars” or even “tho-o-ought”) at unpredictable intervals; his characteristic “Whoa-o-oa-oh,” by now an unmistakable trademark; the effortless leap into an almost weightless falsetto; the manner in which he repeats and draws out a phrase like “I know” teasingly until at last he brings it to its inevitable resolution; the endless permutations he lends to the “i” sound of “cry,” “why,” “my” until the words ring with melismatic grace and it almost seems that sound replaces meaning; above all, the purity and beauty of an instrument in which the singer takes such manifest delight and over which he exerts such striking command remain an abiding source of fascination far beyond the banalities of mere words or the thoroughly conventional I-VI-IV-V chord structure.

Oddly enough, though, the most intriguing material from the session came in a series of five songs that amounted to little more than demos, with an a cappella, almost wordless variation on “I Don’t Want to Cry” that far surpassed the finished version (if there were anything needed to prove the compelling beauty of Sam’s voice, this would be it), and Edgar Blanchard’s bright jazzy guitar chording providing the principal accompaniment on the rest. Two in particular stand out: each conveys that wistful sense of mystery and haunting melancholy that are at the heart of Sam’s sound and that nothing in the fully produced sides comes close to achieving. The first is the Bill Cook composition “I’ll Come Running Back to You” that Sam had tried at the August session in New York. No more, really, than the most conventional romantic ballad, it achieves a kind of gravitas by the very way Sam’s voice skates on the edge of naked revelation. The song begins with that most familiar of lovers’ plaints—something along the lines of who’s loving you tonight?—and yet a sense of emotional betrayal comes through that would be unimaginable were it not for the delicacy of Sam’s delivery. In the bridge the singer compares himself to a lonely king sitting forlornly on his throne. What could be more hackneyed? Once again, though, with Sam’s unique manner of delivery, what could be more heartbreaking?