Classic Pop Icons

When Bertha Franklin, a down and out motel manager and alleged madam, shot Sam Cooke to death on December 11, 1964, under still mysterious circumstances, the history of pop music was altered in ways we could never fully understand. Cooke, a fully-fledged national recording star for nearly a decade, was reaching the peak of his gifts as a performer and songwriter at the time of his death. Additionally, his work as a businessmen and cultural visionary was starting to blossom with several up and coming acts on his independent record label about to hit the big time.

In 1964, Sam Cooke may have been the only man in America equally at home with Malcolm X and white talk show host Mike Douglas. The massive divide between those figures represents how much Cooke could have accomplished. At a time when black and white popular music was starting to splinter after a period of integration, Cooke could have brought it all back together, and theoretically, helped usher in a new era of overall integration. It’s not too far-fetched. Look at the attitude changes in the decade or so since hip hop has been the mainstream American taste. With Sam Cooke, though, there is no need to dwell on what might have been. He accomplished more in his 33-plus years than most people achieve in lifetimes more than twice as long.

Cooke was a preacher’s son who relocated from Mississippi to Chicago when he was just a boy. Despite being a middle child in a large brood, he was always gifted with a preternatural sense of self. Friends and family remember him laying out his ambitions at an astonishingly young age; ambitions that the cultural and political apartheid of the era did nothing to diminish. His main ambition since boyhood was to be a singer. As a child, Sam would sneak into local taverns and make spare change singing popular hits of the era. The young Cooke also possessed an intellectual curiosity that allowed him to develop a plan that would help him realize his ambitions and become a first rate songwriter.

Gospel was the music that offered Cooke his first opportunity. As a teenager, he formed his own group the Highway QCs, which eventually became successful enough to appear on concert bills with major gospel stars. The QCs were heavily influenced by the Soul Stirrers, and it may have been that influence that prompted the Stirrers to consider Cooke as a replacement when R.H. Harris, their longtime leader, (temporarily) retired in 1951.

Sam Cooke and The Soul Stirrers

At first, gospel audiences were sceptical of Sam Cooke as leader of the Soul Stirrers. Some never did accept him as an equal to Harris, but a strange thing happened when the first single from the Cooke-led Stirrers (“Peace in the Valley”/ “Jesus Gave Me Water”) was released. It sold more than any Stirrers release to that point. The total was only about 65,000 copies, but that was huge in the tiny gospel world.

The success of Cooke’s record anticipated what would happen in the greater pop music scene half a decade later. A younger audience, responding to the jubilant tempo and personality of “Jesus Gave Me Water”, went and bought the record. They didn’t have the disposable income of what their white peers would have in a few years, but they had more than their parents and they made the young new singer a bigger hit, on record at least, than Harris had ever been.

Cooke was not content though to be just a star within the tiny confines of gospel. Despite driving audiences into ecstasy from coast to coast with his grainy tenor and wild on stage improvisations, Cooke started angling towards a pop career. While records like the agonizing “Touch the Hem of His Garment” showed that Cooke could testify as well as anyone in the business, only a few well placed words made records like “Wonderful” gospel. As Cooke pushed the gospel audience closer to an acceptance of pop, the success of Little Richard, Ray Charles and Elvis Presley showed that the secular audience had an appetite for gospel styled singing.

The owner of Cooke’s label Specialty, Art Rupe, opposed Cooke’s change to pop. He feared the singer would alienate his gospel base, who took their religion as seriously as they did their music. However, although Cooke was popular with the traditional gospel audience, he was more popular with their kids who did not have the same lines drawn in the sand, and Sam knew it. After an unsuccessful half-hearted experiment as Dale Cooke (a pseudonym that did not disguise Cooke’s singular singing style), Sam switched to Keen records, another independent. Using his own name, Cooke released an astoundingly simple tune called “You Send Me” that became a fabulous pop success, earning Cooke a gig on the prestigious Ed Sullivan show. In retrospect, save for Cooke’s trademark “whoa oh whoa ohs,” it was a pure pop record. Its fabulous success even quelled some of the concerns of critics of Cooke’s decision to leave gospel. This was one of their own who had made it.

Sam Cooke – “You Send Me”

As profitable as the new teen subculture was, Cooke was not content with that audience alone. He also wanted their parents. Being the biggest star in gospel or R&B wasn’t enough; he wanted to be the biggest star period. This was an amazing ambition for a black man in a country where blacks in the South were not even allowed to drink at the same water fountains as whites. The next few years were filled with traditional standards and appearances on shows like Arthur Murray’s Dance Party. Yet, despite a few hit records, Cooke was not able to achieve the kind of success he wanted. All his releases missed the Billboard Top Ten and an appearance at the prestigious Copacabana Club bombed.

In 1960, Cooke was successful enough that he was able to land a contract with RCA, then the most powerful label in the industry. At first, the RCA suits threatened to take him even further into the blandest reaches of pop. His first record there, “Teenage Sonata,” was a string-laden fiasco reminiscent of the lightweight material that Frankie Avalon and Paul Anka were recording at the time. According to Cooke biographer Daniel Wolff, Cooke got a chance to do things his way when his old label Keen released one of his old masters “Wonderful World” as a single. This was a real rock n’ roll record; it had an insistently strummed guitar, a strong beat and a clever lyric that matched young love with success in school. As Greil Marcus said, it sounded like it could have been written by Buddy Holly. It was Cooke’s biggest success since “You Send Me” and set the stage for an even bigger hit on RCA.

Jet Harris, Little Richard, Gene Vincent and Sam Cooke – Oct ’62

“Chain Gang” was also rock n’ roll despite Sam’s soothing tones and the presence of strings. There was the sound of clinking chains, a lyric that sympathized with the outsiders on a prison chain gang, and most significantly of all, a chorus chanting suggestively “Ugh, agh” over and over. The record made #2 on Billboard and set Sam Cooke on the final stage of his career.

Sam Cooke – “Chain Gang”

From 1961 to 1964, Cooke was RCA’s second most successful artist behind Elvis Presley, and one of the most successful artists in the business. The fabulous string of hit records he made – “Cupid,” “Twistin’ the Night Away,” “Havin’ a Party,” “Bring it On Home to Me,” “Another Saturday Night,” “Good Times,” “Shake,” and “A Change is Gonna Come,” among others – provided as effective a marriage between gospel and the teen pop market as his gospel songs. Some like “Bring it On Home to Me” went even further. It was probably the purest distillation of the gospel feeling in the Top 40 to that time. The move back actually provided Cooke with the mainstream success he so desired. He not only was a regular in the Top 40, but only a few months before his untimely death he even conquered the Copa. There was even talk of a break into movies. Unlike many performers of the first rock ‘n’ roll generation who saw their audiences diminish after the British Invasion, Cooke saw his expand.

Cooke not only consolidated his artistic vision in his final years, he expanded it. His 1963 album “Night Beat” was a masterful late night jazz/blues session, more Charles Brown than Ray Charles. He also incorporated the new ground being broken by white performers like Bob Dylan, who directly inspired the protest classic “A Change is Gonna Come,” which is arguably Cooke’s finest composition.

Sam Cooke – “A Change is Gonna Come”

Also slated for a 1963 release, but abandoned, was “One Night Stand,” which was to provide a record of Cooke’s stunning live performance at Harlem Square Club in Miami, Florida. He had debuted the act at the Apollo in November 1962, and this was the set that he presented at the Harlem Square two months later. The show was finally released in 1985 as “Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963” and has received great acclaim.

Sam was also a cultural pioneer in these final years. He started his own record label SAR. In addition to recording old favorites like R. H. Harris and a reconstituted Soul Stirrers, SAR also helped to midwife the careers of several future stars, including Bobby Womack, Billy Preston, and Johnnie Taylor. (Cooke was also a pivotal figure in the career of Lou Rawls.) The best SAR records, such as L.C. Cooke’s (Sam’s brother) “Put Me Down Easy” are amongst the most sublime pop-soul of the era.

That Sam Cooke had so much going for him at the time of his death makes “what ifs” even more natural with him than with other figures that passed away at a young age. Unlike Presley or Lennon, there was no question his gifts were peaking at his demise. Unlike Buddy Holly, there had been no commercial slump before his death. He really seemed poised for bigger and more revolutionary things.

That type of potential makes it easy to forget just how much Cooke did accomplish. His influence has been omnipresent since 1964. Think of Otis Redding, Rod Stewart, even Steve Perry. Think of the success of a Michael Jackson or a Prince. Or even think of a smaller moment like Kelly McGillis and Harrison Ford’s tentative dance to “Wonderful World” in Witness. It would be a different world, a lesser world, if he’d never been here.

Biographical sources:

You Send Me by Daniel Wolff, S.R. Crain, Clifton White, and G. David Tennenbaum
Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick