Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (87 page)

Joe D’Imperio was the new man in charge. Smooth and urbane, he was, proudly, the son of an Ocean City, New Jersey, barber, who had attended the University of Pennsylvania on the GI Bill. He started out as a trademark attorney at RCA, graduated to General Counsel, and then on July 1 had been promoted to management status with the title of Division Vice President and Operations Manager of Business Affairs. This might have meant little had he simply acquired the normal responsibilities of Business Affairs and overseen the a&r department’s budget, but, in a highly unorthodox lateral move, he was put in charge of a&r, with Bob Yorke now required to report to him, and George Marek, the president of the company, his only direct overseer. Which undoubtedly would have set off more waves (it amounted to business superseding creative) if Yorke had been more popular within the company or if D’Imperio had not been so personally magnetic. But he was the kind of guy, RCA engineer Al Schmitt said, who was so likeable “that people just enjoyed being around him. He had a way of making you feel—he did this to me—he had so much confidence in you that you wound up having confidence in yourself. And he thought Sam could be a major, major talent, [maybe] the biggest talent RCA had. And he wanted to do everything he could to make that happen.”

Sam came into New York after a week at the Regal and was playing the Town Hill Club in Brooklyn when he and J.W. met with Allen at his new offices in the Time-Life Building on August 13. They had finally worked out the formal mechanism by which Allen would be involved with the company, as exclusive administrator for Kags Music Corporation, SAR Records, and their affiliated companies. For a fee of 10 percent of the companies’ gross receipts, he would handle all bookkeeping, accounting, sales, deal making, and administrative chores for a period of five years, with his term, and fees, backdated to March 1 of the current year (approximately the time that he first met Sam) and all expenses to be paid by the company off the top. In addition, Allen’s lawyer, Marty Machat, would become Kags’ lawyer for a $500 monthly retainer, and J.W., who up till now had been at best on a very informal salary draw, would, as president of the corporation, be guaranteed $300 a week, with two weeks’ vacation, for a period of five years. It was a modest, if necessary, financial arrangement for Allen, unlikely at the outset to yield more than an $8,000 or $10,000 annual commission, but it enabled him to get his foot in the door. And it enabled Kags for the first time to be set up on a businesslike basis, with tax returns that properly reflected assets and liabilities rather than the loose reassignment of publishing funds to record company expenses that had been the well-intentioned norm over the years. Allen noticed that Crain’s name, which was in the original incorporation papers, never came up, but it wasn’t his business to raise the issue, and he assumed that if there was any problem, Sam would take care of it. He was well aware by now that Sam kept his worlds separate and that if he wanted you to know something, he would let you know. So he just brought Sam and Alex up to date on the latest developments at RCA and the next day produced a contract in the form of a letter to him from Kags Music Corporation that J.W., as president of all three divisions of the corporation, signed.

That weekend Joe D’Imperio came down to see Sam at the Hurricane Room in Wildwood, New Jersey, a beach resort that had showcased Fats Domino, LaVern Baker, and Dinah Washington at different clubs the week before. Sam’s genial supper-club version of “Frankie and Johnny” had just entered the Top 20 pop charts, and D’Imperio was knocked out by the show. There was no trouble this time about getting backstage, and when D’Imperio asked Sam if Allen was really authorized to negotiate for him, Sam just flashed that brilliant smile that could disarm both knaves and kings and said, “He’s the guy I want.” Allen heard from D’Imperio at the beginning of the following week, and with that, the real negotiations finally began.

A
LL SUMMER
, preparations for the massive civil rights March on Washington had been under way. It represented the fruition of a dream first envisioned in 1941 by A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a coming together of all the voices of peaceful protest against the forces of racial prejudice and economic oppression that had denied true emancipation to the Negro at that point for three quarters of a century. When the idea of a massive demonstration was first revived in the winter of 1962-1963, by Randolph and longtime peace activist Bayard Rustin, it was originally conceived as a “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” but with the entry of Martin Luther King and the rise in racial tension in Birmingham and throughout the South, the emphasis shifted to civil rights legislation, and for the first time, all six of the major civil rights leaders (Randolph, the Urban League’s Whitney Young, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins, John Lewis of the upstart Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality’s James Farmer, and King) were united under a single national banner. There was a profusion of public events preceding the March, and, as usual, such stalwarts as Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier, and Lena Horne had been in the forefront of fund-raising and publicity drives, but by the summer, Nat “King” Cole and Johnny Mathis, too, had pledged the proceeds of Hollywood and Chicago concerts to the Movement, and on August 5, Mathis, who had previously avoided any identification with the cause, participated in a Birmingham benefit for the March, stating, “These are not the days for anonymous and quiet approval. . . . The time has come to take a stand.” The benefit, which took place while Sam was playing the Regal, also included Ray Charles, Clyde McPhatter, Nina Simone, the Shirelles, boxing champion Joe Louis, and author James Baldwin and was transferred at the last minute from Birmingham’s Municipal Auditorium to the football stadium of all-black Miles College when civic authorities suddenly discovered that the auditorium urgently needed painting.

There was another benefit, at the Apollo on August 23, that raised $30,000 with a lineup that included Tony Bennett, comedian Red Buttons, actors Sidney Poitier, Ossie Davis, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and jazz headliners Thelonious Monk and Ahmad Jamal. That same weekend, Sam and Barbara threw a party for NARA, the organization of black radio announcers, which was holding its annual convention in Los Angeles. It was a catered affair, and “[Sam’s] Los Feliz area manse buzzed with a multitude of show folks and those in related businesses,” the
Los Angeles Sentinel
reported. “It was like old home week when guests began to loosen up and swing—from the gaily colored umbrella tables in the patio to the exquisitely furnished music room. J.W. Alexander flew in for the bash.” It was, said Carol Ann Crawford, the young woman Alex had been seeing for the last few months, a sophisticated, glittery affair. “I was terrified!” said Crawford, just twenty-one years old and a recent graduate of the Patricia Stevens modeling school in Hollywood after having been turned down by the segregated franchise in her home town of Houston. “I was just practicing being comfortable in a world I had never entered before.” But Sam and Barbara couldn’t have been nicer to her. “They thought I was this cute little girl that Alex should hold on to. And I looked at them as a couple. I didn’t see no evil. I didn’t know nothing. I was just looking at the picture.” There were colored lights, and there was barbecue, and Sam, as always, picked up his guitar at some point in the evening and started singing little story songs about different friends and party guests, just plucking the guitar and making up words as he went along.

The March took place four days later, on August 28. Close to half a million people converged on Washington and rallied at the Lincoln Memorial in what was widely referred to as the largest political demonstration to date in American history. The Brooklyn chapter of CORE walked 230 miles, and three teenage members of the Gadsden, Alabama, Student Movement walked and hitchhiked all the way. Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, and director Billy Wilder were all a prominent part of the Hollywood contingent, with SNCC’s Freedom Singers, Josh White, Odetta, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul and Mary (singing Dylan’s new civil rights song, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” currently number two on the pop charts) providing entertainment in a free morning concert at the Washington Monument emceed by Sammy Davis Jr. Introduced at the rally itself later in the day by A. Philip Randolph, Mahalia Jackson was the last “entertainer” scheduled to perform before Martin Luther King’s climactic speech, and, at Dr. King’s request, she began with the old spiritual “I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned.”

“The button-down men in front and the old women in back came to their feet screaming and shouting,” wrote journalist Lerone Bennett of the reaction to Mahalia’s performance. “They had not known that this thing was in them, and that they wanted it touched. From different places, in different ways, with different dreams, they had come and now, hearing this sung, they were one.” With the crowd’s response ringing in her ears, Mahalia delivered perhaps her most enduring and uplifting “hit,” W.H. Brewster’s classic composition “How I Got Over,” and then Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a German refugee, briefly took the stage before, at twenty minutes to four, A. Philip Randolph introduced Martin Luther King as “the moral leader of our nation.”

King spoke of freedom and justice. He delivered, as historian Taylor Branch wrote, “a formal speech, as demanded by the occasion and the nature of the audience,” not just the several hundred thousand who had brought all their hopes and dreams to Washington but a national television audience that could watch his speech “live” on any of the three major networks. They had come to the nation’s capital, they had come to this historic site, King declared, to collect on a promise, a promise made one hundred years earlier with the Emancipation Proclamation. They had also come “to remind America of the fierce urgency of
now.
” This was no time for empty rhetoric. This was no time for delay. Now was the time “to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”

It would be a terrible mistake, he said, for the country to ignore that imperative. There could at this point be no turning back, he insisted, enumerating the everyday brutalities and indiscriminate burdens of discrimination. “We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities . . . as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating ‘For Whites Only.’”

It was a moving speech, it was a speech that touched every base and raised the crowd to a height of emotion that “carried every ear and every heart,” wrote William Robert Miller, a pacifist colleague of Bayard Rustin, “along that rise of intensity and into the emotional heights as well.” But then as he got to the end of his allotted seven minutes and the conclusion of the prepared text, King seemed to be lifted up by the crowd, and, rather than stick to his prosaic written summation, he began to preach.

“Tell them about the dream, Martin,” Mahalia Jackson was heard to call out, recollecting the speech he had given at a massive civil rights rally organized by the Reverend C.L. Franklin in Detroit just two months earlier. “I have a dream,” he declared, “that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” He had a dream, he said, that his children would come to see a world in which men and women were measured by their character, not their color. He went on to detail every aspect of his dream, morally, thematically, spiritually, geographically, with each segment ending “I have a dream today.” It was, wrote King biographer David Levering Lewis, “rhetoric almost without content, but this was, after all, a day of heroic fantasy. And so it continued with increasing effect [until] the antiphonal response of the multitude was almost deafening.”

If America was ever to fulfill its promise and become a truly great nation, King declared, quoting and echoing the song “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” then freedom must ring all across America, from every hill and valley, from every city and town, from every mountainside. When that day came, then
all
of God’s children, black and white, could come together “and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!’”

I
T IS IMPOSSIBLE TO CALCULATE
the full effect that watching this on television, listening on the radio must have had on Sam. These were people that he knew. This was the world from which he came. Mahalia had called the Highway QCs “her boys” when Sam was just starting out, at the age of seventeen, and the Soul Stirrers had cut a new version of “Free At Last” for SAR no more than six months ago. He and Alex had been talking with student sit-in leaders in North Carolina on the spring tour. And when he first heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” on the new
Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
album J.W. had just given him, he was so carried away with the message, and the fact that a white boy had written it, that, he told Alex, he was almost ashamed not to have written something like that himself. It wasn’t the way Dylan sang, he told Bobby Womack. It was
what he had to say.
His daughter was always telling him he should be less worried about pleasing everyone else and more concerned with pleasing himself—and maybe she was right. But like any black entertainer with a substantial white constituency, he couldn’t help but worry about bringing his audience along.

It was a dilemma for them all. Julian Bond, the young SNCC Communications Director, was one of the few black activists who had made the connection between the music and the Movement explicit. “I, too, hear America singing,” Bond had written in the June 1960 edition of
The Student Voice,
the first issue of the SNCC newsletter.