Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (45 page)

Bob Tate could appreciate that it was a revue with something for everyone; even the “working girls” turned out for Johnny “Guitar” Watson. But there was no question who was the focal point. “You know, a voice comes along every so many years that just captivates the people, and [Sam] had one of those voices. After Sam got through upsetting the house, there wasn’t nothing you could do.” Tate was the kind of taskmaster who could piss a lot of people off because he wanted his music right, but, he quickly came to realize, Sam wanted it right, too. That was what made playing Sam’s music so satisfying, and there was no question Sam was satisfied with the job
he
was doing, because when the tour was over, Sam told him to hang loose, he had a few weeks’ worth of bookings to fulfill, but then they’d be going out again very soon.

S
AM BARELY HAD TIME
to get acquainted with his five-year-old daughter before he was off again for club dates in Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis. Linda was enthralled as he drew elaborate pictures for her on long sheets of paper, and they drove around, the three of them, in his wing-tipped Cadillac, while his latest record, “Win Your Love For Me,” played on the radio. She loved the sound of the congas, it was as if they were calling to her from some far-off land, and she loved the way her father spoke to her, almost as if she were an adult. He talked to her about his plans. He talked to her about his music. And he told her about himself and her mother, how they had first fallen in love, but then things didn’t work out and they hadn’t been able to get along. That didn’t mean they hadn’t always loved her, though, and now that she was finally with him, he was going to take care of her and make sure everything was all right. He would sit with her for what seemed like hours just talking in that calm, soothing voice, animated with love and laughter. There was no question about it, Barbara thought, he had really gotten his daughter’s heart.

H
E OPENED FOR TWO WEEKS
at the swanky Black Orchid on Rush Street in Chicago on August 21 backed by Clif and a sophisticated white jazz combo, the Joe Parnello Trio. The focus of the set was not the hit numbers he had recently been playing for delirious audiences up and down the West Coast but a selection of standards like the ones he had been recording recently for his forthcoming second album (Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters’ “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive,” Billie Holiday’s “I Cover the Waterfront,” the Ink Spots’ “The Gypsy,” even the Mills Brothers’ “Someday You’ll Want Me to Want You”). Johnny Mathis had broken attendance records at the Black Orchid in May, but,
Variety
reported, “Sam Cooke’s disk stature is of very uncertain value here, [and] this intime smart spot . . . will have to count largely on external factors . . . per the wide open spaces at the opener.”

Variety
’s reservations, interestingly, had less to do with Cooke’s “nice beat,” “authoritative piping,” or “smart catalogue” than with his “vocal sincerity for outfront focus. As they play now, pipes are a bit too mechanical to really rouse tablers. Talk is minimal, his patter limited to some brief intros, and spoken without a show bizzy flavor.” He was, in other words, as
Variety
saw it, still suffering from that same inability to loosen up that Larry Auerbach had first noted in his Elegante and Copa appearances, and that Jess Rand was convinced was holding him back from gaining the acceptance of an upscale white audience.

The
Chicago Defender,
on the other hand, was burdened with no such doubts. They deemed the smart-spot debut of this hometown phenomenon “socksational” and dispatched a reporter and photographer to capture it in a two-part feature that would run the following month. Skipping the jitters of opening night for a weekend crowd of hometown friends and acquaintances, they found a singer who was “completely relaxed, [endeared] himself to his audience by telling them little things about [each] song,” and effectively mesmerized that audience by “drawing them into the mood with his soft voice. . . . If he’s crooning a ballad, you can hear an audible sigh when he finishes. But if he belts out with something like ‘Canadian Sunset’ the audience joins him in popping their fingers [and] when he’s through cries of ‘more, more’ follow him off the stage.”

It’s always hard to adjudicate these kinds of aesthetic, social, and, unquestionably, racial divisions, especially so long after the fact, but the pictures taken by
Defender
photographer Cleo Lyles show a very relaxed Sam, sleekly elegant in his tux and jubilant on a visit to his old neighborhood, where he is shown surrounded by friends and acquaintances and bemused by his brother L.C.’s boldly blond girlfriend Barbara Clemons. The text once again elucidates what he has clearly come to see as the Horatio Alger pattern of his life: his father’s faith, the family’s history, the triumphs of the Singing Children and the Highway QCs, not to mention the sodality of the Junior Destroyers social club, with each family member and QC, Duck, and even several Junior Destroyers (including Cleo Lyles) duly named. He fully expounds upon the debt he owes to spiritual music and his various mentors, Crain most of all, and L.C. is credited as the prolific songwriter responsible for much of his success. L.C., the story mentions, is “better known in the musical world around Chicago as Larry Lee,” but it fails to note that L.C. is about to embark for the first time on a full-fledged career of his own. He has just signed with the Checker label, in fact, where he will soon cut his first sides (not as “Larry Lee” but as L.C. Cook) under the supervision of his longtime manager, Magnificent Montague, recently returned to Chicago after two years of exile on the Coast.

His principal hobby, Sam tells Cleo Lyles, is photography, and he shows Lyles the $600 Hasselblad 500C with which he likes to take candid shots. He has a lot more equipment at home, he says, for with his success, he has been able to afford far more than he could ever have dreamt of. As to what he plans to do with his money in the long term, however, “I’m setting on it and waiting,” he wisely declares.

In Detroit he played for the first time at the famous Flame Show Bar, one of the most celebrated “black-and-tan” (white ownership, black locale, mixed clientele) showplaces in the country, where both LaVern Baker and Johnnie Ray were discovered and where Gwen Gordy, the sister of a young songwriter named Berry Gordy who had cowritten Jackie Wilson’s first two hits, had the photography concession. It was a gala occasion, and Crain invited Little Willie John’s sister Mable, whose family gospel group had appeared on programs with the Soul Stirrers and who now worked for Gwen and Berry Gordy’s mother’s insurance company. “Everybody went to see him,” said Mable, “they never had so many Christians at the Flame! ’Cause, naturally, they loved him as a gospel singer, and they wanted to see the transition. And he was great. He was handsome, well dressed, composed, and he did what Mrs. Gordy taught me [in the insurance business]: if you want to be good at anything and you want a following, don’t try to sell your product first, sell yourself. Because once they trust you, people will buy [whatever you’re selling]. That’s what Sam did, he sold himself, and the church people just crowded the Flame.”

In St. Louis he played the Club Riviera, the self-billed “Showplace of America,” and stayed at the Atlas Hotel two blocks away, where his Hasselblad was stolen, along with most of his clothes. By the time the story got back to Los Angeles, by way of Chazz Crawford’s
California Eagle
gossip column, a “thoughtful thief” had taken the trouble “to pay Sam’s hotel bill on the way out,” just another example of the way in which celebrity both paid its own way and exacted its dues. The following week the
Eagle
reported with equally poetic license that Sam might get “the Negro lead in Columbia Studio’s ‘Last Angry Man’ film.” It was rumored, reported Chazz Crawford on an uncredited tip from Jess Rand, that “Sammy Davis wanted the role but would be too old for the part.”

Jess had been getting Sam’s name in the papers on a regular basis for the last six months, mostly on the pretext of movie contracts and movie roles that no one had yet considered him for, but he had little doubt that they would. All kinds of new opportunities were opening up. You could read about them in the Negro press every week. It was impossible to miss the great strides that were being made in the entertainment world by Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier and Nat “King” Cole. And while there were bound to be disappointments along the way, like the cancellation of Nat’s highly regarded network television show the previous December after its failure to attract a single national sponsor, the critical reception of Sidney’s bold new film,
The Defiant Ones,
seemed almost like the dawning of a new era of brotherhood and understanding. In every interview, Sam spoke of his acting ambitions, referring to the training he had received the previous summer, and he was confident that Jess, with all of his Hollywood connections and his longtime “in” with the William Morris Agency, which had been affiliated with Sammy Davis Jr. going back to the mid-forties, would help guide him to the achievement of his dream.

So he could weather a little thing like a robbery. It only went to show that now at last he actually had something to lose.

SONG STAR SAM COOKE TO MAKE TOUR OF DEEP SOUTH

NEW YORK.—Sam Cooke, America’s newest and most widely acclaimed male vocalist, who catapulted [to] fame with his hit recording of “You Send Me,” is poised for another record-breaking tour of the South.

The dynamic song star, who quit the famous Soul Stirrers gospel unit to climb to musical heights such as achieved by Roy Hamilton, Billy Eckstine, and Johnny Hartman . . . will return to many familiar scenes and thousands of admirers [who] have staunchly supported his appearances as a popular singer. . . .

Cooke’s tour of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and North Carolina is being arranged by B.B. Beamon, the Atlanta, Ga. promoter.

—
Atlanta Daily World,
Wednesday, September 17, 1958

T
HE CALIFORNIA TOUR
with the Valiants turned out to be little more than a rehearsal for a considerably more ambitious undertaking: a kind of self-contained Sam Cooke Show, with Sam’s old champion, B.B. Beamon, sponsoring him. To the Valiants’ intense disappointment, neither they, nor any of the other Keen acts that had accompanied Sam on the West Coast tour, were included on this one. They had certainly expected to be, and they were even more miffed to discover that their place had been taken by the Pilgrim Travelers.

“We were hurt,” said Rip Spencer. “We thought we had a good relationship with Sam and Bumps, and we thought for sure Sam was going to take us. The Travelers had no movements. They were good singers, but it was an old man’s sound. But Sam knew them longer than us, and I guess his friendship with them was more dedicated than [it] was to us. And after that we kind of lost contact.”

Musical director Bob Tate’s opinion of the Travelers as a pop act wasn’t any higher. “They had never sung with a band before, and they had no arrangements. They would just get up there and sing, and we’d have to find what key they were in and write the music behind that. This one guy, George McCurn [“Oopie,” the bass singer], we’d play the introduction, and he’d back up to the bandstand, and I’d punch him in the back to let him know that it was time to sing.”

They went out in two Cadillacs, a station wagon, and a truck for the equipment. They opened at the Magnolia in Atlanta after playing a warm-up date in Macon. Jackie Wilson was booked with them at the Magnolia for one night only, and, after having failed to show for B.B. Beamon’s birthday celebration in July, he promised his fans in the pages of the
Daily World
that this time, “barring an act of Divine providence,” he would be there. “It has never been my policy to not fulfill all engagements I’ve booked,” he told the paper but could well understand why the promoter was concerned about “the adverse publicity I’ve received, and I plan to give him and the public an explanation.”

If he did, it didn’t impress Bob Tate—in fact, nothing about Jackie impressed Bob very much. Back at the hotel, Jackie asked if anyone had any reefer, and when some was produced, Jackie said that was fine, but he had to have his rolled for him. Bob said, “What do you mean, you have to have it rolled? We’re giving you a gift here, you roll it.” Then Jackie said, “You don’t realize who I am. I’m Jackie Wilson.” And Bob said, “Yeah? You don’t realize who I am. I’m Bob Tate.”

After that, things went from bad to worse. As Tate recalled, Jackie failed to show for rehearsal, and when he did finally appear that night and his road manager produced his music just before he was due to go on, “We were like, ‘Well, so? What are we supposed to do with this?’” The result was a predictable shambles. “It was not kind of raggedy, but all the way ragged—I didn’t [even] bother to tune him up. He took his tie off, and nobody made any advance to get it. The women [just] weren’t reacting. And when he went offstage, he was scratching his head.”

Sam’s show, on the other hand, was an unmitigated triumph, with women climbing over each other to get to him, and Sam’s driver, Eddie Cunningham, implacably kicking them off the stage as they grabbed at his watch, his rings, his tie. “But Sam,” Tate observed, “didn’t care. I mean, he wouldn’t wear anything cheap. Man, chicks would pull their drawers off and throw them on the stage.” It was the usual scene of pandemonium. Which only went to show, as Bob Tate pointed out, “Never mess with anybody that has to play your music.”

They went on to Chattanooga, Augusta, Charleston, and Asheville, with the excitement growing nightly and Sam gaining confidence with each performance. Even the Travelers acquired more polish and assurance as they showed off their close harmonies and increasingly practiced precision steps. Every night, there was a point in the show that Bob Tate came to expect when “all of a sudden Sam would turn his head all the way back, and it was like something just straight out of his gospel, he’d just tear up the whole house. I mean, you didn’t know what he was doing, it was some kind of thing he did with his voice, it wasn’t a yell, [but] the women would go nuts. And you’d be playing your horn, and you couldn’t concentrate for listening to him.”