Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (58 page)

It was purely a matter of belief on Alex’s part—in himself
and
in Sam. They talked a little about trying to sign Aretha Franklin, who, with her father Reverend C.L. Franklin’s permission, had announced that she was going pop just after her eighteenth birthday. J.W. had no doubt about her talent, and equally little doubt that she would go with them if asked, she was so crazy about Sam. But neither he nor Sam wanted to mess with her daddy, who had made it clear that he was going to put his daughter on a major label. So they focused on the artists they had already signed: the Soul Stirrers, Johnnie “Two Voice,” and a white boy named Joel Pauley with a resonant r&b sound, who sold even fewer records than Kylo Turner.

It was strictly a one-man operation, as Barbara kept pointing out to Sam. She made the argument vociferously, J.W. said, that “she didn’t think that was right. We had some BMI money in a little drawer. I must have been living off $40 a week, and I couldn’t even get Crain to take a record to a radio station.” So in the end, with Barbara’s approval, they kicked Crain out. “Crain lived in Chicago,” was Walter Hurst’s diplomatic observation, and long-distance calls were expensive. “Sometimes founders of empires change their minds.” Then SAR, an acronym to begin with for Sam, Alex and Roy, became, according to the understanding of the first two, Sam and Alex Records.

O
NE TOUR ENDED
, and another began. Sam started on a new Henry Wynn package in June, this one with Roy Hamilton and Little Willie John. There couldn’t have been two more opposite personalities. Hamilton, still working with Bill Cook, Sam’s original manager, was the big star to whom Sam, with Bill Cook’s encouragement, had first submitted his “little songs,” and who had provided much of Sam’s inspiration to switch over. He was, as Willie’s twenty-nine-year-old sister Mable observed, “very reserved, very dignified, a very private person.” Mable, who had only recently started opening the show for her younger brother, was banned by Willie from any of the racier aspects of the tour (and thus largely from any offstage contact with Willie), so she found herself frequently in conversation with Roy. Although a staunch member of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, he was very much interested in race, politics, and the Black Muslim doctrine of economic and social self-determination, “and he would talk to me for hours about that.” He also disapproved of her habit of eating pork. “He would look at my plate and say, ‘I don’t eat swine.’ And I’d laugh and say, ‘Well, I’ll eat enough for both of us.’” With his clean-cut appearance, near-operatic voice, and dignified stage presence, Hamilton frequently drew as many whites as blacks, and in some areas he became the show’s headliner, “but everybody,” Mable John was quick to point out, “watched everybody else’s show. And rooted for them.” Even if at the same time they did everything they could to take the show for themselves. As Mable saw it, if you had one bad performer on the show, the show was bad. But with all of Roy Hamilton’s musical and philosophical distinction, he was as competitive as the rest.

Little Willie John, by contrast, was a character, a twenty-one-year-old juvenile delinquent. “Few people,” as even his sister observed, “were more mischievous than Willie. He cared very little about anything except his music.” Others were less charitable: he was a thief in the assessment of many, “a spoiled little brat” who would, said Etta James, “pour lemonade over your head, pick your dress up over your head, [and] stick his finger up your booty.” And, of course, he would con everyone in sight, including the promoter, seemingly assuming that they would be as quick to forgive and forget as he was to forget and forgive himself. He was what his fellow musicians called a “CPA,” or constant pain in the ass. But he could sing; there was no question about that. Just five foot three, a natty dresser in his sharp little hats and ever-present pipe, he looked, said James Brown, “like a little kid playing grown-up.” Brown, still struggling to break through nearly four years after he had first started opening shows for Willie, admiringly described the unique properties of Willie’s voice to music writer Gerri Hirshey. He and Willie both sang songs about “knowing and missing,” he said, “[but] where missing makes me scream, Willie did not scream it.” Like Sam, like Roy Hamilton, he could sometimes plumb almost unbearable emotional depths with his restraint, and no matter how infuriating his offstage behavior might be, you couldn’t go up against Little Willie John onstage and not expect to work.

Sam, who had known him since the early days with the Soul Stirrers, when Willie and Mable’s family gospel group, the United Five, often appeared on the program in Detroit, was unwavering in his appreciation not only of Willie’s talent but of the “chain of devilment” that Willie’s actions were likely to set off. He just
enjoyed
Willie, much as he enjoyed Johnnie Morisette—it was as if he got a kick out of their very irresponsibility. It was a strange contrast: Sam so buttoned-down and under control, Willie a walking advertisement for chaos theory. But Sam never acted like he was above Willie, and that was probably why, as Mable John pointed out, there was no one who could calm her brother down better than Sam. “Willie could be in a rage sometimes, and Sam would just walk up to him and basically not say too much, but just Sam’s presence [would settle him down]. They had a lot of respect for each other. And he and Sam had fun.”

Sam had a lot of respect for the way Willie presented his music, too. Because unlike anyone else on the tour, and unlike most other r&b acts at the time, with the notable exception of Ray Charles and Lloyd Price, Willie always toured with his own band, the Upsetters—and had for the last two years. The Upsetters, Little Richard’s original backing group, were one of the premier r&b show bands, with lots of steps, lots of musical versatility, and a strong lead vocalist of their own. They had met Willie through the same West Coast promoter who had paired them with Dee Clark when Richard quit show business in late 1957 and, recognizing Willie as the stronger commercial talent, had transferred their allegiance to him by the spring of 1958. With members primarily out of Houston and New Orleans, they maintained a stable rhythm section plus three tenors and a baritone sax and gave Willie a
sound
that he could always count on, a manner of presenting himself that Sam couldn’t help but envy.

To Mable, Sam and her brother had a similar knack for the improvisational life of the road. They both knew where all the good restaurants were, “and they knew where all the good sisters were, ’cause they’d sung gospel everywhere, and some of the greatest cooks in the world were these Christian women. They’d bring us all the food we could eat, or we’d go to their homes, because we couldn’t eat in the restaurants, and they’d prepare as much of everything as they could, and we’d [take it with us] to the next town.”

Willie was as concerned about his sister’s reputation as he was indifferent to his own. “He would lock me in my room at night. Take my key and say, ‘I’ll bring you whatever you want back.’ I knew everything he was doing. It wasn’t that. He was just trying to keep anyone from saying anything about me.” But when it came to gambling, Willie made sure his sister was there to hold his money. Henry Wynn, who was related to the Johns on their mother’s side, accommodated the musicians by setting up places in different towns where they could get together after the show and have an uninterrupted game. Roy Hamilton didn’t gamble. And Sam just played at it. But Little Willie John was a gambling fool. And Charles took it as an opportunity that was heaven-sent. Leo Morris just looked on wide-eyed as Charles beat Willie out of all his money, till Willie had to go to Nat Margo, the white tour manager, and get some more. And then Charles and Clif would beat him out of
that.
They would play all night sometimes, said Mable, until it was time to get back on the bus and go on to the next town.

S
AM TOURED THE WEST INDIES
for the first time during the last two weeks of July. Rhythm and blues was all the rage, New Orleans music in particular, with Fats Domino’s recent hit, “Be My Guest,” the one song you heard on every radio station and in the repertoire of every local group. Sam and his entourage were scarcely prepared for the airport reception that greeted them when they landed in Nassau, as thousands of Bahamians surged against police lines to get a glimpse of Sam, and even the customs inspectors waved him through as “the man from the Wonderful World.” He played Kingston, Trinidad, Montego Bay—Leo Morris was amazed, everywhere they went, traffic came to a standstill, and at the clubs, hundreds of people would be turned away. “Everybody knew [all his songs]. They would sing along. And the women, oh God, man, you had to whip them with a stick. Charlie used to have to just literally pull them away from Sam. I mean, Charlie was a good-spirit person, and his heart was great. But we enjoyed ourselves, because we were working hard. I mean, Sam wouldn’t come down unless the people was satisfied. He wouldn’t come off the stage.”

“I
BURN WITH AMBITION
to achieve the kind of showbusiness stature that Harry Belafonte and Nat ‘King’ Cole have achieved,” Sam declared in a guest column ghosted by Jess that ran in the
New York Journal-American
within days of his return. “Or the kind of stature Jackie Robinson and Dr. Ralph Bunche have achieved in their fields. With it I can achieve material gain—and more than that, I believe that the aforementioned distinguished Americans have been able to do so much for the Negro people and for the human race because they first achieved great stature in their fields, then utilized their stature to impart to the world a better understanding of what is right and what is wrong.

“I have always detested,” Sam went on with surprising vehemence, “people, of any color, religion, or nationality, who have lacked courage to stand up and be counted. As a Negro I have—even in the days before I began to achieve some sort of recognition as a performer—refused jobs which I considered debasing or degrading.”

Show business success, he pointed out, stemmed as much from dedication to “the practical business end as to the ‘show’ end, although they are related,” and, he concluded, in words that his father must certainly have approved of: “I have the natural desire to be recognized as being ‘the best there is’ in my chosen field, and for obtaining the material things that such recognition brings. But in my case it goes even deeper than just that.”

It was a carefully worded distillation of Sam’s thinking, all cleared with Sam before Jess submitted it to Dorothy Kilgallen, the self-proclaimed “Voice of Broadway,” whose notably liberal views on race ensured its place in her column. But three days before it was published, immediately following his triumph in the West Indies, Sam started off on yet another Southern tour that—with its segregated bookings, run-down motels, and demeaning racial treatment—could only test the very basis of his belief in American democracy.

The tour had been organized for promoter Rip Roberts by trumpet player Dave Bartholomew, Fats Domino’s discoverer, bandleader, and producer, and a ubiquitous figure on the New Orleans music scene since the late 1940s. They would be going out with Bartholomew’s band, a stellar aggregation featuring twenty-two-year-old Allen Toussaint on piano, along with a host of other handpicked New Orleans talent (Ernie K-Doe, Earl King, Snooks Eaglin, the Spiders), plus co-headliner Dakota Staton, something of an anomaly in this company with her jazz-oriented supper-club act. The first show was scheduled to take place at New Orleans’ Municipal Auditorium on August 3, but when it did, there was a security force of fifty policemen on hand and the threat that if anything took place even remotely resembling the violence “that gave Negro concerts black eyes several days ago,” as Elgin Hychew put it in his “dig me!” column in the black
Louisiana Weekly,
it “might in the future make it difficult for promoters of Negro shows to obtain the facility” at all.

What had occurred at the earlier concert was just another, more mundane variation on the Jesse Belvin story. The Jackie Wilson Show, which continued to inflame audiences all across the South (it had already led to a direct ban on all rock ’n’ roll revues in Birmingham), had hit New Orleans on July 17, with Larry Williams and Arthur Prysock (the co-headliner in Little Rock in February) on the bill. “The commotion started,” the
Louisiana Weekly
reported, “when Larry Williams attempted to sing from a sitting position on the edge of the stage.” A black policeman informed him that it was against auditorium policy to sing from the floor, “and then a white officer allegedly pushed [him].” Williams, the man who wrote and recorded “Bad Boy” for Specialty Records in 1958 (he was a follower of the Johnny “Guitar” Watson/Johnnie Morisette school of thinking, in which music frequently fought a losing battle with pimping), was never one to avoid a confrontation, but it was Jackie Wilson, a former boxer, who at this point jumped from the stage and pushed the policeman, followed by five members of the band. There was no question in the mind of anyone in the crowd as to who provoked the confrontation, and bottles and bricks began to fly, as “patrons [scrambled] for the exits . . . auditorium officials got the fire hoses ready [and] ten patrol wagons came blasting their sirens to the scene.” Jackie, who never even got to perform, was bailed out at three in the morning and promptly left town, thereby avoiding charges (if the defendant couldn’t be found, the judge pragmatically ruled, there was no choice other than to dismiss), but the bitterness lingered on all sides, as some of the performers grumbled that none of this would be happening if the white man would leave them alone, others that Jackie and Larry were so damned hotheaded they just helped bring it on themselves.

What they were all agreed upon was that the situation was getting worse. As Clyde McPhatter, probably the most outspoken of them all, had said just weeks earlier while addressing student “Freedom Fighters” at the fifty-first annual NAACP Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, there could be nothing but a sense of solidarity and pride in these “young people who, rather than continue to endure the humiliation of Jim Crow, are willing to risk verbal abuse, physical assault, expulsion from school and imprisonment in Dixie dungeons . . . in this irresistible crusade.” And even in the absence of such stirring sentiments, or when such stirring sentiments were not so readily expressed, there was still a choice to be made night after night, day after day: whether you were going to continue the way the old folks had always taught, go along to get along, or stand on your own two feet like a man. Even Fats Domino, the most mild-mannered of performers, who sought to avoid controversy at all costs and like Roy Hamilton had as big a white following as a black, was dragged into it when he canceled an August dance in Viginia Beach, Virginia, after learning that “plans had been made to run a rope or fence the length of the building” to divide his fans from each other. “The New Orleans-born entertainer declined,” the
Norfolk Journal
reported, “to be a party to such obvious segregation.”