Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (64 page)

T
HEY ARRIVED IN MEMPHIS
on the evening of Friday, May 12, at about 6:00
P.M.
, a couple of hours before the show was scheduled to start. There was a telegram waiting when they checked into the Lorraine Motel, just a few blocks from the auditorium. It was addressed to Clyde and had been sent by Jesse Turner, the president of the local NAACP, who would have been there himself, he explained, except that he was attending a testimonial dinner in his honor. The purpose of the telegram was to inform the entire troupe that in spite of all of the NAACP’s efforts, seating for the show that night would be even more heavily segregated than usual, with Negroes restricted to the left side of the first, second, and third balconies, thus limiting not only sight lines and participation (there would be no coloreds dancing on the floor) but keeping their numbers to less than a thousand in a crowd of four thousand.

There was no doubt about where Clyde stood on the issue. He and Sam had had any number of discussions on the subject, both as it applied to the Movement and as it applied to what Clyde saw as their own status of indentured servitude in a business that was dominated by whites and governed by greed. But refusing to play a show to which you were contractually committed had any number of potential consequences, from the obvious legal and financial pitfalls to the one result no entertainer ever wants to contemplate, the alienation of a substantial portion of his audience.

Sam didn’t hesitate in his reaction. If what the telegram said was true, the fuckers could do whatever they wanted, he said, he wasn’t going to play. Shit like this was always happening to him in Memphis. The last time he had been in town, they had run out of gas, and he had sent Charlie to get some. While he was waiting for Charles to come back, a white policeman pulled up and told him to move the car. Sam explained the situation, but the policeman had no interest. “Well, push it, then,” he said. Sam drew himself up to his full height. He was a singer, he told the policeman. His name was Sam Cooke, and he didn’t push cars. If Frank Sinatra was there, he said, “you wouldn’t ask him to push no car.” Charles was back by now, trying to get his brother’s attention, but Sam just shook him off. If it was all that important, he suggested to the policeman, “You push the fucking car. You may not know who I am,” he said, “but your wife does. Go home and ask your wife about me.”

Just like his father had taught him, he didn’t ever take a backseat in his personal affairs; if he felt that he had been injured or wronged, you might just as well wait for hell to freeze over before he would back down from a direct confrontation. But public stands, his brothers were well aware, were another matter. Ordinarily Sam knew “just how far to push the buttons,” said L.C. “And he knew what buttons not to push because it might hinder his career.” This time he didn’t give a fuck about his career, because, as Charles said, “we was right in the middle of it. Sam told me to go check it out, and when I came back and told him yes, [the auditorium] was segregated and all the blacks was up in the balcony, Sam said, ‘Shit, forget it. Cancel it.’”

L. C. Bates, the publisher of the
Arkansas State Gazette,
who with his wife, Daisy, had bought the black weekly in 1941 “to carry on the fight for Negro rights” and had helped organize the 1957 school integration drive in Little Rock, arrived at just about this time to confer with Sam and Clyde in his official capacity as NAACP regional field secretary, which only solidified their resolve. Sam called Henry Wynn in Atlanta to let him know they would not be going on, then spoke to the local promoter, popular WHBQ DJ Ray Brown, “the Round Mound of Sound,” who explained that the show had been advertised as part of Memphis’ annual Cotton Carnival week, which by definition made it a predominantly white event. That was the reason for the seating policy, Brown said; it wasn’t his personal decision. Sam had to be aware that there had never been a fully integrated concert at Ellis Auditorium. Sam was unmoved by the argument. If there hadn’t been one before, there ought to be one now.

L. C. Bates, Aretha Franklin, and Sam, Lorraine Motel, May 12, 1961.

© Ernest Withers. Courtesy of Panopticon Gallery, Waltham, Mass.

Then he and Clyde hastily convened a meeting of as many of the other acts as they could assemble on short notice and tried to persuade them not to go on, either. “Sam asked everybody to come back to his room,” said Midnighters guitarist Billy Davis. “He was explaining the seating, he said everyone was paying the same money and should have equal seats. Even if they wasn’t together, even if one side was white and one side was black. But he said they wouldn’t do it. So he [wasn’t going to] go.” Everyone listened politely, and Billy even hung around afterward to have a drink with Sam, but in the end no one else joined the two-man boycott, and Bill Murray, the show’s MC, announced from the stage that Sam and Clyde had missed their flight connections. Meanwhile, at Jesse Turner’s testimonial dinner in the recreation room of the Universal Life Insurance Company, the local NAACP president let the room know “that Sam Cooke, singer and idol of thousands of teenagers, had just refused to fill an engagement before a segregated audience,” the
Memphis World
reported, “[an announcement that] brought thunderous applause.”

There was one more attempt at persuasion on the part of a by now infuriated white establishment. The police showed up at the motel. “Man, they locked us all in,” said Charles indignantly, “because Sam wouldn’t go on. They told Sam they was gonna confiscate his cars—we had the limousine and the station wagon. He said, ‘Shit, you may lock me up, but you ain’t gonna touch my goddamn cars.’ He said, ‘You let everybody enjoy the concert, and I’ll gladly sing.’ But he didn’t back down. And they didn’t take the cars, either.”

The city’s two white newspapers reported on the news with some bewilderment. “2 Negro Singers Fail to Appear,” declared the
Press-Scimitar,
while the
Commercial Appeal,
describing the contretemps with somewhat more accuracy, ran a sub-headline that conceded, “Segregation Issues Cited by Performers.” The show lost money, the
Press-Scimitar
was told, with only eleven hundred in the four-thousand-seat hall, “includ[ing] about 300 negroes.”

Sam released his own statement to the Negro press, declaring that it was “against his policy and the policy of his promoter to play to a forced segregated audience. He added, ‘This is the first time that I have refused to perform at show time simply because I have not been faced with a situation similar to this one.’ He went on to say to a representative of the NAACP, ‘I hope by refusing to play to a segregated audience it will help to break down racial segregation here and if I am ever booked here again it won’t be necessary to do a similar thing.’”

T
HE NEWS FROM MEMPHIS
was all over the Negro press as they finished the tour. “Singers Say No to Jim Crow Seats,” was the headline in the
Amsterdam News.
“Top Singers Spurn Segregated Audience,” “Singing Stars Balk at Memphis Jim Crow,” “Clyde McPhatter, Sam Cooke Clip Memphis Bias” were some of the other headlines, as Sam submitted himself one last time, in a recording session in New York on May 19 and 20, to Hugo and Luigi’s vision of crossover success.

The session was prompted by Ray Charles’ first number-one pop hit the previous fall with a heavily orchestrated version of the 1931 Hoagy Carmichael standard, “Georgia on My Mind.” This was a far cry from Charles’ own groundbreaking “I Got a Woman,” and it gave Hugo and Luigi a new sense of a pop marketplace they had originally exploited by covering black records with a white sound. “You listen to [‘Georgia’],” said Luigi, “they’re playing eggs in the background, everything is very vanilla, very white, and Charles is doing a soul thing [over it]. He captured the country with that, because he’s doing their stuff his way. I thought, if we could get Sam accepted doing that, it would [add] another dimension to his career.”

There was just one “little, knotty problem,” though, as even Luigi recognized, and that was Sam’s style, “which was so distinctive that you couldn’t easily do [a standard like] ‘Stardust’ nice and plain, ’cause if you did, it wasn’t Sam Cooke, and if he put his yodel into it, it interfered with what you thought ‘Stardust’ was.” The further complication was that if you pushed Sam in a direction that went in any way against the tack that he had selected, you were faced with a quiet but insurmountable core of resistance. “One song he was singing—it was a legit song, with the strings and all that, and he very prettily sang, ‘And I axe you.’ I said, ‘Hold it.’ He said, ‘What’s the matter?’ I said: ‘I
ask
you.’ He said, ‘What did I say?’ ‘You said “axe.”’ And he was very obliging, and we came to the same part, and, ‘I axe you.’ I said, ‘Hold it.’ I went out and said, ‘Sam, you said it again.’ He says, ‘You’re taking away my heritage.’ I said, ‘Bullshit. This record is going out with your name
and
our name on it, and it’s not going out with “axe”.’ And the third time he did it.” But even Luigi knew it was a Pyrrhic victory.

The result in any case was not satisfactory from anybody’s point of view, with the album that emerged,
My Kind of Blues,
no more Sam’s kind of blues than the previous albums had been Sam’s kind of folk, spirituals, or even travel songs. The paradox was not so much in the choice of material (“Sam Cooke has found the blues in the most unexpected of places,” wrote Hugo and Luigi in the liner notes, explaining that it was Sam who had insisted on drawing from the songbooks of Gershwin, Ellington, and Irving Berlin) as in the happy-beat treatment that was given them. It was as if every song ended with a big smile, a flourish of horns, and an underlying message of accommodation, the opposite of Sam’s own compositions, which, for all of their seemingly innocent charm, conveyed more of a sense of melancholy and regret than anything recorded under the catch-all of “blues” at this New York session.

The failure seemed predicated on the same misunderstanding that had plagued every other session that had taken place in RCA’s New York studios, that Sam was like Hugo and Luigi’s other artists, that the moving parts of a Sam Cooke hit were somehow or other interchangeable. Even the cousins were now willing to concede the point. “I guess we started listening closer,” said Luigi, “and we came to the conclusion, This is what he feels. That’s going to be the best direction. Not to impose a song that may or may not be a pop song but to know enough to smile and shut up.”

T
WO WEEKS LATER
, Sam was producing a Sims Twins session in the United Recording Studio in Hollywood. He and Alex had decided to take “Soothe Me” at a brisker clip after playing a demo for Imperial Records owner Lew Chudd, whose offices were across the hall from SAR’s. Chudd, who artificially speeded up many of Fats Domino’s releases as a matter of course, felt the song needed more of a push, and Sam and Alex agreed—though, as it turned out, Kenny and Bobbie Sims didn’t need a push so much as a restraining hand, so great was their enthusiasm at finally being in the studio on their own. Sam coached them on their articulation, phrasing, harmony, dynamics, and pronunciation. He was in and out of the control booth, on the floor more often than not, coaxing, wheedling, correcting, guiding the singers and rhythm section to a performance that reflected the laid-back deliberate feel he was looking for and the perhaps not-so-deliberate echo of its author’s own style. The twins didn’t object. Twenty-three years old, the youngest of eleven children who had moved from Elba, Louisiana, to Los Angeles with their family when they were eleven, they were so attuned to each other’s moods that they frequently finished each other’s sentences, but their talent was not accompanied by a strong personal vision or direction. “That’s a good job, a very good job, Kenny,” said Sam enthusiastically as they neared the master take. “Do it just like that. Soothe me, baby!”

They had more trouble with the second number, “(Don’t Fight It) Feel It,” another of Sam’s “situational” story songs with a repeated punch line, which he had been thinking of recording himself. Bobbie and Kenny kept messing up both phrasing and emphasis, and Sam’s impatience becomes all too evident. “They won’t understand you,” he says in frustration as he coaches them on line scansion (“Don’t fight it,
feel
it, you understand, Twins?”), and he kept after them about their articulation (“Fellas, give me those words plain, don’t give me those slurs”) until they finally got a master take. Sam could console himself that this was only the B-side anyway. “Soothe Me” was the hit.

Sam and Alex threw a release party for Johnnie Taylor and all their other SAR artists at the California Club that same week. It was, according to reports in the Negro press, “one continuous floor show, featuring many top-flight performers,” but it was Sam who brought the party to a climax when he “loosened his tie . . . and gave the crowd a show they will talk about for a long time to come. From the time Cooke took up the mike until the employees had to literally sweep the customers out at closing time, the entire audience was swept up in tune with the beat set by the dynamic singer.” He sang the Brook Benton-Dinah Washington hit “A Rockin’ Good Way” with the “exotic,” light-skinned (and very blond) Mickey Lynn, performed an impromptu duet with Beverly and Betty Prudhomme, the white singing and songwriting team he had first met in the summer of 1957 (he sang “Exactly Like You,” and first one glamorous twin, then the other, posed the question, “Exactly like me?,” leaving Sam in an enviable quandary), and finished out the show with a medley of his biggest hits. There was a sense of almost palpable expectation as Sam crooned “Wonderful World” to an audience made up of his closest musical protégés and friends. RCA had a full-page ad for “Cupid” in
Cash Box
that week, it seemed clear from the assembled collection of talent alone that SAR Records was on its way, and Sam was going to be the focus of a brand-new television show scheduled to debut on the Westinghouse network in a few days.