Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (60 page)

My goal is to someday be in the same singing league with Harry Belafonte, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. But whether I achieve my goal or not, I have organized my career on a business-like basis and I know there will be well-paying jobs waiting for me, even if my records stop selling. . . . If, in the future, I can’t find anyone who will pay me to sing, I’ll still be in a position of getting paid when others sing.

— “Sam Cooke . . . Man With a Goal,” by Sam Cooke,
Pittsburgh Courier,
October 8, 1960

T
HE NEW YORK
recording session seems to have had only the vaguest point of focus, save for the somewhat rhetorical question posed to Sam by Hugo and Luigi: “How would you do ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,’ if it came in as a new song today?” They formulated that question, they wrote in their liner notes, “as we were looking over material for his new album. We had been going over new songs, old songs, standard songs, and then drifted into the early American songs of the Stephen Foster era.” As far as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” went, Sam thought about it in their account, then suggested an arrangement that would retain the spiritual quality of the song but pick up the tempo and add brass. “Sort of a swingin’ ‘Swing Low,’” he declared. “And so,” they wrote, “the theme of this album was decided. We would lean heavily on songs from another era [but] in addition we sprinkled in songs of a later period that fit the mood we were developing [including] Sam’s own hit of last year, ‘Chain Gang,’ which seemed to belong.”

They crammed in two four-hour sessions on Friday, September 9, and an afternoon session on the tenth, but despite the presence of Sammy Lowe’s more idiomatic arrangements, two originals by Sam and J.W., a beautifully polished version of Harry Belafonte’s faux folk song “I’m Just a Country Boy,” and “Pray,” a jubilee number that Johnnie Taylor had done with the Highway QCs, the tone was no less confused than Sam’s purported response to Hugo and Luigi—or than their original question.

A look at “Pray,” which Sam had originally attempted when he was with the Soul Stirrers, is instructive. In the QCs’ and Stirrers’ versions, it is a bright, finger-popping number, somewhere between the “Negro spiritual” presentations of the Golden Gate Quartet and modern-jazz vocal harmonies. In Sam’s new version, it is as if Perry Como has met the Negro spiritual with a peppy choral group from
Oklahoma!
thrown in for good measure. All of Sam’s most prominent vocal characteristics—his easy, relaxed manner and precise articulation (we hear, twice, of awakening to “a beauty-ful morning”), his elongation of syllables, even the free-ranging adlib with which he customarily stamps a song as his own—work against him here to produce an almost soporific effect. If someone else were singing, it might be taken as a painfully exaggerated parody, but when Sam himself concludes the song with the kind of self-parody that no producer has ever been able to get out of him before (“Pray, la da da da da da da / Pray, la da da da da da da”), with that big chorus chugging along behind him, arms figuratively outstretched, faces grinning, one can only speculate as to whose misreading of both the public and Sam has created such an all-out disaster. It is worse by far than Sam’s straightforwardly romantic “Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair” or even “My Grandfather’s Clock,” the sentimental children’s song that Jess had induced him to record, and the experience could only be made more painful not simply by a familiarity with Sam’s own past work but by an awareness of the session Sam has just produced on the Soul Stirrers. One might almost imagine that in Jimmie Outler he has, for the moment, found a truer voice than his own.

Whatever inner misgivings any of them may have had, Hugo and Luigi, and Sam, too, for that matter, never maintained anything less than a cheerfully positive demeanor. The atmosphere was at once “relaxed and hectic,” the
Michigan Chronicle
reported of the Saturday session. “Relaxed, in that all concerned had foregone their weekday business suits for slacks and Italian-style sports shirts, and Luigi had brought his wife and two young sons along; hectic, because Sam Cooke is capable of doing a good many things at once, which most other people are not.” Sam, according to the
Chronicle,
was engaged in complicated business discussions about his upcoming tour, carried on an interview with “a representative of RCA Victor’s press department, [and] besides all this several friends had come over to hear him sing. . . . One of the friends kept starting sentences that began, ‘You know, Sam, I think for this number you should —’ and never getting to finish them. Hugo and Luigi . . . just smiled and went on with their work [while] in the midst of it all Sam Cooke sang and sang—without the slightest indication of nervousness or irritation, [making] it seem as natural and as inevitable as breathing.”

The two cousins even rented striped prisoners’ jerseys and caps from a costume shop and took a picture with Sam to publicize the success of the current single, as though they were members of an integrated chain gang who had hung on to their expensive slacks. Sam was a good sport about it, though he looks decidedly less amused than the others as the three stand stiffly against a blank backdrop, each dapper and distant in his own way.

A
NEW DRUMMER JOINED THE GROUP
at the start of the new tour. Twenty-nine-year-old Albert “Gentleman June” Gardner, like Leo Morris, was from New Orleans and, in fact, had been recommended to Sam by the same Joe Jones who had promoted Leo in the first place. June got a call from Joe Jones out of the blue and was simply told that Leo hadn’t worked out: was he interested? Everyone knew that June was primarily a jazz musician, he had a regular gig with Harold Battiste and Red Tyler at Joy Tavern, but Joe Jones suggested that if he went with Sam, he and Leo could merely switch places. Then June got a call from Sam, whom he knew a little from Soul Stirrer days. Sam asked him if he could meet the tour in Richmond on the eleventh. “I said, ‘Just wire me the money. I’ll be there.’”

Leo, for his part, was crushed. The first he heard of it was when June called offering him his weekend gig. He never heard from Sam, he never heard from anyone in the organization—but he took the gig. He knew he was young and still finding his way, he knew Clif had never much liked him, but he couldn’t stop wondering where he had fucked up.

June fit in right away. Mild-mannered, easygoing, somewhat jug-eared in appearance, with a receding hairline, a mustache and soul patch, and a warm, inviting smile, he had been on the road with Lil Green, Roy Brown, and Lionel Hampton and was a keen observer of the scene. He got along well with Charles and Crain, and he and Clif could talk for hours about music, but perhaps most important, he was both experienced and patient enough to wait his turn. The band members were all riding together in Sam’s new red Buick station wagon with their equipment and clothes, and June wondered at first where everyone was going to sit—“but then Big Clif say, ‘I’m gonna sit here,’ and that ended that!”

It was Sam, though, whom he recognized from the first as the unquestioned boss. You didn’t necessarily have to agree with him on everything, but on certain issues, like the music, there was no room for dispute. He was concerned with “the diction, the feel, the flow of a song. But he could get right away from there and get on the floor. He knew people everywhere we went. All walks of life. He wasn’t one of those stars who [act like], ‘I pee Falstaff and shit ice cream.’ That was never his thing. He touched all bases. The police, the ushers, the stagehands. He was good [to] the people who worked for him, but he was a downfront person, say what he had to say and bam!”

June’s first tour was an abbreviated two-week edition of Irvin Feld’s Biggest Show of Stars. Eighteen-year-old teen idol Bobby Rydell, with three Top 10 pop hits since the beginning of the year, was the headliner, and twang guitarist Duane Eddy and Dion (late of Dion and the Belmonts, and out for the first time on his own) were the two other white teen-oriented acts who made this a “rock ’n’ roll” show. But Sam, Chubby Checker (whose version of Hank Ballard’s “The Twist” would that week hit the top of the pop and r&b charts), and Bo Diddley more often than not took the show. They played Louisville on the next-to-last night of the tour, and eighteen-year-old Louisville native Cassius Clay, just back from the Rome Olympics, where he had won a gold medal in the light-heavyweight boxing division, jumped up onstage and, with his inherent sense of theater, joined the singing Olympics in “Western Movies,” their original Fred Smith and Cliff Goldsmith-authored hit. He was a well-mannered, good-looking kid, and he came around afterward to the guesthouse where all the black performers were staying, his eyes big for the girls. He talked happily about Lloyd Price and some of the other stars he’d met, and Charles could see Sam was really getting a kick out of him, so he didn’t run him off. He was a big overgrown kid who wanted to be in show business just like everyone else. The rest of them were all drinking, but he was content to hang around and watch. He had the kind of personality, Charles thought, where people were just plain going to like him.

Sam was scheduled to begin another Henry Wynn Supersonic Attractions package show within a couple of weeks, but he managed to sandwich in an RCA session on the afternoon of a one-nighter in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He recut “Try a Little Love” (now retitled “Tenderness”), the ballad he and J.W. had written the previous year, along with a version of forties bandleader Buddy Johnson’s beautiful blues ballad, “Since I Fell For You.” The song with which he began the three-hour session was “Sad Mood,” the number he had attempted with Hugo on organ back in April, but even with strings, an all-star rhythm section, an assured vocal, and a Sammy Lowe arrangement that was not all that different from many of René’s, the song did not come alive. Perhaps sensing that the feel still was not right, Sam picked up the tempo a little, but that only went to undercut the reflectiveness of the mood and lyrics. “Sam was in and out of the booth,” wrote Washington, D.C.,
Sunday Star
reporter Harry Bacas. “You just sing, and we do everything else,” Hugo told him, and then, perhaps to take the sting out of it, kidded, “If we could sing, who would need you? We’d do it all ourselves.” Sam’s response was not recorded, but, even though his producers pronounced themselves satisfied, announcing their intention to mix the track the next day and put it out as the follow-up to “Chain Gang,” it seemed evident that neither the song nor Sam was fully satisfied. “Sad Mood” simply did not lift off in the manner of so many of the gospel sides, it did not say
Sam Cooke
in the same way that “Chain Gang” or “Wonderful World,” or even “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha” or “Win Your Love For Me” so clearly did; it was not stamped through and through with his indelible and impermeable presence.

G
ORGEOUS GEORGE
, Hank Ballard’s colorful valet, entertained everyone on the Henry Wynn show with his stories about Castro’s visit to Harlem the previous week. The stars of the show were all familiar to Sam: Little Willie John and the Upsetters, LaVern Baker, Motown artist Marv Johnson, pioneering vocal group the “5” Royales, whose guitarist, Lowman Pauling (author of “Think,” “Dedicated to the One I Love,” and “Tell the Truth”) was one of the most influential r&b songwriters around, Jerry Butler, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, with Sam’s protégé Billy Davis on guitar. The way that Gorgeous George told it, Castro had spotted George “and these three fine chicks I had” while peering out the window of his ninth-floor suite at the Hotel Theresa across from the Apollo. He was in town to deliver a speech to the UN and had moved uptown from his luxury midtown hotel with the explicit intention of showing his solidarity with some of the chief victims of American oppression (“All people are alike to us in Cuba,” he declared in a joint interview with Black Muslim spokesman Malcolm X). The reason the Cuban leader happened to be looking out his hotel window, according to George, was that “there were thousands of folks lined up on the streets shouting, ‘We want Castro,’ and we was hollering, too, me and Billy Davis, and the fine chicks with us. I told him, ‘Come on down.’ Told him our room number. And twelve minutes later he shows up, thick black beard, green dress fatigue suit with the big pockets and big flap, about six cats had on black suits, and his brother, I think, came in with him. Then Billy started playing, and we sung to him, and he gave us an invitation to come to Cuba.”

According to Billy, Lithofayne Pridgon was there, too, although Lithofayne said, “By the time I found out about it, it was something that was [already] fully in motion.” Her girlfriends definitely got in on the action, though, and there were more than three of them. “He came down because of the girls,” Billy agreed. “In fact, he invited one girl to Cuba, and she asked me, ‘You think I should go?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘I’m scared. They might get me down there and [not] let me come back.’ I said, ‘Well, you’re missing a hell of an opportunity.’ But he told us he would come to the show at the Apollo Theater, and he did. Hank Ballard should remember that.”

“Man, we had a ball,” was Hank’s typically irreverent memory of the experience. “I remember all those goddamn women Castro had. Had them lined up three deep. Beautiful girls, goddamn, you could smell dope [all over] the goddamn hotel. If I went to Cuba, I bet Castro would recall being at the Theresa Hotel and going to the Apollo Theater to see Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. Those were the good old fucking days!”

It made for great conversation anyway, as the bus rolled down the highway, through the South and the West and then back into the Northeast. In Denver Billy met a sixteen-year-old girl through Gorgeous George. She had a little lounge area in her house that her parents gave her all for herself, and George had sex with her there, and then Billy did, too. Eventually they all did. “She was the most beautiful young lady,” said Billy, “but she loved to have sex with entertainers. There was certain girls I saw, that’s just the way they was. She wanted me to be her regular boyfriend, but she wanted me to give her permission to have sex with other stars. She said, ‘If I do, will you still like me?’ I said, ‘Yeah, baby,’ ’cause it’s what she wanted. Sam loved partying with us and partying in general. He’d always get what he wanted, [then] I’d get what I wanted. He always had the cream of the crop.”