Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (59 page)

Sam’s New Orleans show went off without a hitch, and columnist Elgin Hychew congratulated his fellow citizens on their restraint while chiding them for their failure to acknowledge the superiority of Dakota Staton’s singing style. “The SAM COOKE crowd,” Hychew wrote, “did not fully dig the delightful set of tunes from her night club repertoire,” and some of the city’s “more serious-minded jazz lovers” stayed away. But the audience response to Sam was one of unqualified approval at every stop on the tour, and it soon became clear to his fellow performers, New Orleanians all, that this was a response he had come to both expect and exploit.

“Some people said he was kind of snobbish,” said Ernie K-Doe, an extravagantly extroverted young entertainer who had yet to have a hit of his own. To K-Doe, though, Sam was not so much snobbish as “picky. Everything had to be exact with him. He pick the places he want to go in. If it didn’t look [just] so, he didn’t go in. If you couldn’t play his music right, Sam didn’t sing.” To Allen Toussaint, on the other hand, the elegant young pianist and arranger who chose his words as carefully as his notes, Sam was “hip but not rowdy. Extremely hip but not the kind of guttural hip that carries a knife. Hip that carries a comb or a handkerchief.” Which may have been a different way of saying the same thing.

“Chain Gang” hit while they were in Texas, and it hit with a force matched by nothing since “You Send Me,” eclipsing even “Wonderful World” and eventually reaching number two on the pop charts. Sam sang it in the car, with Leo beating out the rhythm on the back of the seat, and in Texas, Florida, and Alabama, it rapidly became everyone’s number-one request. People sang along, just like they did on his old songs—they knew it from the first time they heard it because, as Luigi pointed out, it was nothing more than one long conversational sentence, “it was just a story,” and that was what people fastened on to.

All the musicians headed back to New Orleans after the tour wound up in Dothan, Alabama, and Sam told his new drummer they’d be going out again in about a month. Leo Morris was glad for the time off, but he couldn’t wait for the touring and good times to start up again. Sam had told him repeatedly how pleased he was with his work, he had even given him a cash tip. All in one-dollar bills. “One hundred one-dollar bills. It was too big to fold in your pocket. He said, ‘Here, little brother, this is for you.’”

T
HERE WAS ANOTHER
Johnnie Morisette session scheduled just a few days after Sam got home. Johnnie contributed a couple of the songs himself this time, including “Dorothy On My Mind,” a gospel rewrite that, with Alex, L.C., and Crain all singing the background, vividly evoked the spirit of the Paramount Gospel Singers’ 1949 “I’ve Got Heaven On My Mind.” He did a song of J.W.’s, too, that Sam had been thinking about recording, an innocuous triplet-laden ballad called “You’re Always On My Mind” that in typical “Two Voice” fashion he just ripped into.

Sam seemed, as always, to take inspiration from Johnnie’s unquenchable spirit, and he ran the session in a manner that served that spirit. He appeared to believe that if he could only translate Johnnie’s appetite for life into the grooves of a record, they would have a surefire hit. J.W. was a little more skeptical. He had no doubt about Johnnie’s talent, just his commitment. He could see right through Johnnie. Johnnie was a big bullshitter, and he was always hustling Sam with one story or another for money that was just going to go to his girls. But as J.W. saw it, he was a likeable enough fellow as far as that went, and Sam wasn’t some naive mark off the street; if he enjoyed Johnnie’s line of jive and didn’t mind laying out something for it, there was no reason not to keep working with Johnnie in the studio. He had the talent, and, J.W. would have been the first to concede, with his unusual vocal propensity he even had the commercial potential.

The Soul Stirrers, meanwhile, were long overdue for a return to the recording studio, but Sam and J.W. were in a quandary as to what to do about it because in the year since their first session, they had lost their lead singer. This had come about after Johnnie Taylor got into an automobile accident in which he hit a little girl who ran out into the street in front of his car. The girl wasn’t seriously injured, but the police suspected Johnnie of driving under the influence, and on closer investigation, the influence turned out to be marijuana. “I been smoking weed since I was twelve or thirteen,” Johnnie unrepentantly told the other Stirrers when they bailed him out, but before they got a chance to fully register their disapproval, he announced that he was quitting the group for the ministry. Almost without missing a beat, he preached his first sermon at Fellowship Baptist and then hit the road as “The Reverend Johnnie Taylor (Formerly with the Soul Stirrers).”

They tried carrying on without him. Paul Foster took over the lead once again for a brief time, but it was a strain for him, and the audience missed Johnnie’s “Sam Cooke” sound and the unique vocal interplay it had come to expect from the Stirrers. So they picked up a little Holiness guy in New Orleans. J.J. Farley, who had been managing the group since Crain left, liked the way the guy sang, but no one else in the group did. Then Sam called Crume and told him he had a guy out in L.A. “Sam said, ‘He’s a mix between me and June Cheeks.’ And I was so glad to hear that, because Sam and June was about the baddest dudes on the road, and I just didn’t like this Holiness guy—his singing, not him personally. Well, we get to Newark, and the promoter, Ronnie Williams, tells us, ‘I know a guy that would really fit you guys good. I’ll have him come to the auditorium in Philadelphia, and you can listen to him.’ So after the concert, Ronnie introduces us to Jimmie Outler, and right away we went to my room in the Carlisle and rehearsed with him, and he didn’t sound like anybody we had ever had, didn’t sound like Sam, didn’t sound like Paul, he had a different sound and he had soul. Then he left out of the room so we could talk, and I said, ‘Guys, this is the fellow we need right here.’ He had kind of a raspy voice, he talked like he was hoarse all the time, and J.J. Farley said, ‘How long do you think he’ll last at the Apollo?’ I said, ‘How many times do we [play] the Apollo? Maybe once a year?’ And J.J. said, ‘No, we better wait till we get to California. Sam said he had a guy out there.’ I said, ‘Jesse, this is the guy we need right here.’”

The upshot was that they carried Jimmie Outler to California, where Sam had an audition set up for his singer, seventeen-year-old Willie Joe Ligon, of the Los Angeles-based Mighty Clouds of Joy, who were just on the verge of their own breakthrough. Crume tried to cancel the audition. “I told Sam, ‘I got a guy, he’s
dangerous.
’ Sam said, ‘Yeah, but he can’t be as bad as this guy I got for you.’”

Sam arranged to meet Crume and the other Stirrers at the hotel to go out to the Mighty Clouds program together, but as usual he was late, so they went out with J.W. alone. Sam’s singer did just one song, “and I said to J.W., ‘Let’s get out of here.’ He said, ‘Crume, you haven’t even heard him yet.’ I said, ‘My guy can chew him up and spit him out. Let’s go.’ By the time we got back to the Dunbar, Sam was there, and he was all excited, because he knew [we’d] gone to see Joe. He said, ‘Did you hear him?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I heard him.’ He said, ‘Didn’t I tell you? Isn’t he bad?’ I said, ‘Hell, no.’ Well, that disappointed Sam, and he said, ‘You’re a damn fool.’ Well, we was at the Shrine the next day, and Sam said, ‘I’m going to be there tomorrow, and I’m going to be there on time.’ He said, ‘I want to hear this guy [of yours].’ I said, ‘You be there. I’ll show you something.’”

The next day Crume was as nervous as a cat. “Because I had done all this talk. I was in the dressing room, and Jimmie Outler’s new on the road, so he didn’t have no friends, and he was a low-key type guy. So I was trying to get him excited. I said, ‘Jimmie, there’s going to be some important people coming to hear us.’ I said, ‘How do you feel?’ I was used to doing him like I did Sam. ‘How do you feel?’ And he‘s picking at his fingers, looking down. He said, ‘I feel okay.’ I said, ‘But Jimmie, we got to have this one today.’ He said, ‘Okay.’ Just like that. No excitement or anything. Now I’m worried: he might be off today. And we went out there, Sam hadn’t shown up till we were doing ‘Nearer to Thee,’ and the people was really excited, the crowd was yelling and screaming, and all of a sudden, the crowd went up another decibel or two, they
really
started yelling now. And I’m looking around to see what Jimmie’s doing, and I look down the aisle, and there’s Sam waving his hands and saying, ‘Yeah, Crume, you’re right.’ And he come up onstage and put his arm around my shoulder, yelling in my ear, ‘He’s bad.’ And I said, ‘I told you, fucker.’ And afterward in the dressing room, Sam said, ‘All right, the fucker can do it one time, but it could be luck.’ He said, ‘When is your next date?’ I told him, and he said, ‘I’ll meet your ass at the hotel.’ I said, ‘Now, Sam, I can’t wait on you.’ ‘I’ll be there, fucker. I’ll be on time.’ And he was.”

Sam was so impressed, according to J.W., that he went home and wrote a song for Outler that very night. Before Jimmie got to record it, though, they cut a session on L.C., whose career had never ignited on Checker, and for whom Sam had written three new songs (two with J.W) to add to the number L.C. had brought in himself. The first song they tried was L.C.’s own “Sufferin’,” and it took fifteen takes to get it down, with Sam cheerfully spelling out tempo, instrumental voicing, and phrasing every step of the way. His enthusiasm never faltered, though, even as he declared, “Yeah, we sufferin’ with this song. Sufferin’ through it all!”

“Sam tell you what he wanted,” said his brother, “and that was it. Sam knew everything he wanted before he got to the studio. He had it all in his head. He told me, ‘C., now the only thing wrong with your singing, you’re holding your words too long.’ He said, ‘Don’t hold your words as long as you do. Say your words quick.’ Said, ‘I wouldn’t tell nobody else that.’ I said, ‘Thank you, brother.’”

“Sufferin’” sounded very much like a Sam Cooke song, with that patented vocal delivery, a bright Latin beat, Clif’s ringing guitar chords, and René delivering a burbling bass lead on his Danelectro. The other three songs mixed blues, gospel, and pop in equal measure, with Sam’s “The Lover” offering up a sly blues boast that Sam might have let slip in a club but never for his record-buying audience. Throughout it all Sam is wheedling, cajoling, trying to bring something out in L.C. that L.C. doesn’t always seem prepared to offer. “We gonna do this in one take,” he announces, before going on to any number of additional efforts. “You feel like doing one more for me?” he asks L.C., always positive, always encouraging, but unwavering in his determination to help his brother reach the goal.

Four days later, on September 6, Barbara gave birth by caesarean section to their second child, another daughter, whom they named Tracey Samia. Sam scarcely had time to acknowledge her arrival, caught up as he was in the whirl of business to be taken care of before his departure for another New York album session in three days and the tour that would be starting up two days after that. Hugo and Luigi had sent out a new conductor/arranger, Sammy Lowe, a former Erskine Hawkins sideman and old friend of René’s, to work with Sam on the Coast. They had little choice in their selection of location for this presession conference, the producers wrote in the liner notes for the resulting album, because “the recording schedule we had set up for Sam did not allow for such personal interruptions [as having a baby]. Both Sams paced the hospital corridor firming up arrangement ideas until Mrs. Cooke presented Sam with a fine baby girl.”

That night, Sam was in the studio for the Stirrers session. They started out with a couple of beautifully modulated Paul Foster leads, and then Sam guided the new arrival through a relaxed version of Crume’s latest composition, which mixed a convincing invocation of Jehovah with an equally convincing cha-cha beat. It wasn’t until the end of the evening that they finally got around to the song Sam had written for Jimmie, “Jesus Be a Fence Around Me.”

Like all of Sam’s best compositions, it was both simple and profound, and Jimmie sings it from the start with the kind of conviction that Sam had heard in his voice that first night at the Shrine. There are just two verses, and they mix, like so many of Sam’s gospel numbers, an overt message of faith with an almost inadvertent revelation of despair. “I wonder / Is there anybody here / Who late at midnight sheds briny tears / All because you didn’t have no one to help you along the way?” the song opens with that same note of confessional urgency that elevates “Nearer to Thee,” for example, to the status of some of Thomas A. Dorsey’s greatest gospel compositions. One wishes the Stirrers had had the same opportunity that Sam seized in live performance to expand on the premise of the earlier song, but “Jesus Be a Fence Around Me” is as perfect a cameo as any of his pop hits, and while you can easily imagine Sam taking the lead (the articulation, the phrasing, the emphasis are all Sam’s), the voice is Jimmie’s, “raggedier” than Sam’s, as J.W. observed, more declamatory, full of the kind of individual fervor that they both took as the only gauge of a true gospel performance.

It is as if Sam has found a new way to express himself, and, like a film director or writer who has discovered his subject, he is determined to explore it however he can. The Soul Stirrers in any case provide impeccable support. And when they swing into the chorus (augmented by Crain, and probably Sam, too), an underlying sense of salvation comes through, as much in the gathering of the voices as in the simple prayer that the song enunciates: “Jesus, be a fence all around me every day / Jesus, I want you to protect me as I travel on my way.”

At the end of the evening, they overdubbed background vocals on a couple of the songs from L.C.’s session, and the next day the Soul Stirrers came back into the studio and cut four more songs, evenly split between Paul and Jimmie, with Paul seemingly challenged to rise to greater heights by the presence of this dynamic new lead. But “Jesus Be a Fence Around Me” was clearly the number on which Sam and J.W. were pinning their hopes.