Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke

by Peter Guralnick

  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.

  GORGEOUS 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.”

  Barbara joined the tour for a few days with Linda and the baby. It was all part of her plan to get next to Sam, and she brought plenty of weed for the musicians. The guys all loved it, especially June and Clif; they appreciated her presence, and even Crain started to see her as an asset. Little Willie John went around boasting to everyone that he had forced his tongue in her mouth when she went to give him a friendly kiss in greeting. “He would mess with people,” June observed. “I’ve seen big men cry, honest to god, rather than hit him, just say, ‘If I hit your little ass, I’ll—I’ll kill you.’” Marv Johnson and Willie got into a fight, and Willie said, “Come on outside, and I’ll kick your ass.” Marv was provoked enough to say, “All right, come on, you motherfucker,” but as he took off his coat, Willie pulled out a .38 and shot it in the air. Marv, said Billy Davis, almost died, “but Willie just fell out laughing. Marv was real dark, but he turned green. It was days before he got himself back together.”

  Barbara didn’t have time for foolishness like that. She was determined to tighten up her game. Sam was crazy about the new baby, whom he called “Fats,” and, of course, he couldn’t get enough of “Lindalena.” Barbara was the one who still had to play it cool. But she miscalculated. Sam got pissed off at the way the guys all responded to her, even his brother Charles. It wasn’t the reefer, though Sam did not smoke reefer, he was square as a brick. But he was just plain outright jealous. Finally he told her he was sending her home. “I’m the leader of this here,” he said. “Damnit, you are not the leader.” She talked back to him for once. She didn’t get in his business, she said, but what was the matter with him that he needed to control everything so much, he got rid of everyone and everything he couldn’t control? And then give you the shirt off his back if you approached him all humble with your hat in your hand. It was like he was a whore for the spotlight, she said, and no one was ever going to satisfy his insatiable need for approval, not these chicks with their skirts up over their heads or her or nobody. That seemed to bring him up short, and he quietened down and said she was the only one who understood him, she was the one person who had known him from the start. But that didn’t change the fact that she had to go home. Crain even tried to intervene. “Aw, Sammy, Sammy, Barbie does everything, son,” he said. “You don’t have to go up and tell her, she just get the whole thing done.” “Yeah, my wife is kind of smart,” Sam conceded, “but she’s my wife, and I want you to butt out.” For a man that smart, Barbara thought, he was so damn stubborn it was a crying shame.

  THE SHOW CAME to the Rockland Palace at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue in Harlem on October 21, where a young French jazz critic, François Postif, described with wonder the scene that he happened upon. It was midnight when he arrived, and the 2,211-capacity arena was jammed with what Postif estimated had to be twice that number. Sam was onstage, “so popular that everyone is singing along with him. His latest hit, ‘Chain Gang,’ speaks of the sound that the workers on the chain gang make, and its rhythm is so hypnotic that everyone dances—I really wonder how, since everyone is so pressed in. But everyone dances.”

  Sam stretched “Chain Gang” out, Postif wrote, for “a good quarter of an hour,” and then Hank Ballard and the Midnighters came on with a very different kind of act. They did an extended treatment of Hank’s original version of “The Twist,” and the crowd, Postif observed, seemed to go into a posthypnotic trance, with ecstasy replacing language or logic. The ecstasy took a different turn as the Midnighters started to disrobe, getting down to their underwear and miming sexual release in a manner that was assist
ed by a spray of milky water. At this point a number of black patrolmen arrived on the scene and put an end not only to the Midnighters’ self-display but to the Midnighters’ act.

  “The crowd howls and yells,” Postif continued, “but right away Sam Cooke returns to get the audience back under control, and I must admit that it is the handiwork of a master.” Once Sam got the crowd primed, he made way for LaVern Baker, who left them limp with an intense and varied program, including a very bawdy “Jim Dandy,” during which LaVern danced with her own touring Jim Dandy, a small, “very well-dressed” man with a derby and cane, who comported himself with LaVern in a manner that incited a “savage delirium.” The show was still going on when M. Postif reluctantly made his departure at 2:00 A.M., to go see pianist Les McCann at Small’s Paradise. For him it was a moment never to be forgotten.

  For the performers it was one more night on the chitlin circuit—and, in the case of Little Willie John, one that would end an hour later with a female fan emerging from the crowd to punch him savagely (“I never saw the woman before in my life,” said Willie. “She told me she was going to stick a knife in my back as soon as I left the Rockland”) and six policeman escorting him to his automobile.

  SAM DID NOT RETURN HOME for any extended length of time until just before Christmas. While he was still out on the road, a former gospel singer named Theola Kilgore, whom J.W. had discovered, recorded an “answer song” called “Chain Gang (The Sound of My Man),” with Kags getting the publishing on both sides of the record; Jess put out a press release announcing that Sam would soon be interviewed on network TV by hard-hitting newsman Mike Wallace; and John F. Kennedy was elected president. Kennedy’s election on November 1 had the support of Nat “King” Cole, Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., and Mahalia Jackson, among others, and encouraged Barbara to cast her first vote, but Sam was in Canada, playing Chautiers, an elegant Quebec supper club. He was reading more and more, books on race, politics, and history, many of which had been borrowed from Jess’ library, all of which whetted his appetite for more. The reading only reinforced his indignation at the social injustice he saw all around him and the need to address it in the manner he had advocated in his Dorothy Kilgallen guest column. But as he went from the Crossing Inn in Trenton to Sciolla’s in Philadelphia, from the Evans Grille in Forestville, Maryland, to the Twin Coaches in Belle Vernon, Pennyslvania, he wasn’t sure if he was ever going to get his chance.