SAM OPENED AT THE FLAME in Detroit on June 16 for an extended ten-day run. The Cook family and Sam’s friend Duck all came in from Chicago and took over the top floor of Sunnie Wilson’s Mark Twain Hotel. No one missed Barbara. There remained a distinctly chilly feeling toward her among all the Cooks, along with deep suspicion of her motivation. Sam didn’t even bother to tell them that his wife was three months pregnant, with the baby, Tracey, just nine months old. He had told Barbara she could come out on the road with him anytime she liked, but it wasn’t easy for her now, obviously, since he had sent her Grandmother Beck home to Chicago. Maudie Beck, her mother’s mother, had come out to Los Angeles around Christmastime to help with the children, but Sam found out that she was a drinker and told her he couldn’t trust her with them. “Don’t make no difference to me, son,” she said. “You sent for me, I didn’t send for you.” Which gave Barbara a big laugh but left her stranded when it came to joining her husband on the road. Because packing up the kids was tough, and she knew she couldn’t expect any help from him.
On the weekend of June 23, the Womack Brothers, a teenage gospel group from Cleveland, arrived in Detroit in a 1957 Dodge driven by their father, Friendly, a steelworker and sometime barber who served as their manager. They had come to town to talk with Sam about the possibility of a recording contract. The group was made up of nineteen-year-old Friendly Jr. and Curtis, Bobby, Harry, and Cecil, ranging in descending order from age seventeen to thirteen. They had originally met Sam when the Soul Stirrers played Temple Baptist Church in Cleveland nine years earlier and Sam had insisted that they be included in the program over the objections not just of the Temple Baptist minister but of Soul Stirrers manager S.R. Crain as well. He had even taken up a collection for them at the conclusion of their performance, and, after the congregation came up with $72, he had thrown in $28 of his own to make it an even $100. The Womack Brothers had played on other Cleveland programs with the Soul Stirrers and Pilgrim Travelers over the years, but it was Sam’s old friend Roscoe Robinson, whom he had known ever since the Highway QCs’ first program in Gary, Indiana, in 1948, who tipped Sam to the idea of recording them.
Roscoe had taken over the lead for the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi when Archie Brownlee died the previous year. “The Blind Boys were like members of our family,” said Bobby Womack, the middle brother. “They used to stay with us. My mother would cook for them, and they would just lay around until it was time to do the gig. We were saying, ‘Roscoe, we trying to get a record. We been singing all these years, but we ain’t never gonna be established unless we start recording.’ So Roscoe says, ‘You remember Sam Cooke?’ And we say, ‘Remember Sam Cooke? Yeah.’ And he said, ‘He’s my partner. I should call him and see if he remembers you.’ We all thought he was jiving and we were listening in when he called. First thing he says, ‘Sport, this is Sco. I think I got something for you.’”
Sam told Roscoe he remembered the group well. “He said, ‘They was bad, them little boys. Can they still sing?’ I said, ‘Can they still sing? They worse than that, man. Now they want to holler at you!’” So he told Roscoe to put together a tape, and, after he heard it, he called Roscoe from the road. “‘You right,’ he said. ‘They really can sing. Just help them get some material together and meet me in Detroit. We gonna discuss this.’”
The Womack Brothers and their father. Left to right: Bobby, Friendly Sr. (father), Curtis, Friendly Jr., Harry, Cecil.
Michael Ochs Archives.com
The Womacks caught up with Sam in his suite at the Mark Twain on Saturday afternoon. They had been in town since the previous evening but didn’t know how to get in touch with him. They ran into Sensational Nightingales lead singer June Cheeks in the lobby of the shabby hotel where they were staying six to a room for $3, but he wouldn’t give them any information about Sam because, they concluded, he was looking to score some money for himself and was afraid they might get there first. Then, when they finally got a call from Sam, they had to sit around his hotel room for a while before he emerged with a friend named Duck and his brother L.C. He was friendly, but he kept writing down things in a spiral notepad as they sang the three songs that they had prepared with their father and one that Roscoe had given them. L.C. sidled up to Bobby while they anxiously awaited Sam’s verdict. “Y’all bad, man,” he said. “My brother gonna do you right.” They didn’t believe him, though, until Sam himself said he wanted to cut them: could they meet him in Chicago in four days?
It was a thrill, said Bobby, but at the same time, it was something of a disappointment, too. “We said, ‘Oh, man, we thought you was gonna bring us to California.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but it’ll be closer for me to cut you in Chicago. And it’ll be cheaper, too.’” Their father, who had seen Sam’s departure from the gospel world as betrayal, had reservations of his own, but there wasn’t much he could say. “Sam was just a likeable person,” said Bobby. “I mean, he made you like him without even trying. Because as big as he was, he made you feel like, Damn, he don’t seem standoffish. I feel like I been knowing this guy all my life.” And no matter what the preachers might say about how God was going to cut him down, you only had to look at him to see, “This guy ain’t going nowhere. He looks healthy to me!”
Sam gave them a contract on the spot. He told them to look it over if they wanted, but it was a fair deal, as good as anyone starting out in the business would ever get. They were hardly about to go out and hire themselves a lawyer, but Bobby and his brothers agreed they shouldn’t look too eager, so they took the contract back to Cleveland with them “and put marks on it to get it real dirty and funky” so it would appear to have been carefully reviewed. “Then our dad called Alex, because they was both high up in the Masons, and I remember, they made some secret signs, and he told Alex, ‘I don’t know about Sam, but I’m looking for you to be responsible for my boys.’ And we signed.”
Meanwhile, Sam quizzed his brother and Duck about the group they had just listened to. Which was the better singer, he asked them: Curtis, who took the majority of the leads, or his rougher-voiced younger brother Bobby? “Sam said, ‘Which brother do you like, C.?’ I said, ‘Shit, man, no contest. Curtis.’ And Duck said the same thing. Sam laughed, and he said, ‘You like Curtis, because he sings pretty, like me.’ I said, ‘You’re damn right.’ But Sam said, ‘Now let me show you something about Bobby. It’s different when you close your eyes and listen. When Bobby sings, he demands attention—whether you like him or not, you’re going to listen to him.’ He said, ‘Bobby is the star of the group, you just watch.’”
THE WOMACKS SHOWED UP in Chicago on Wednesday, June 28. Sam put them up at the Roberts Motel, where he stayed whenever he was in town. The session was booked at the Universal recording studio in the evening, after Sam had finished a full day of promotion work for “Cupid,” which had already outsold any of his previous RCA releases except for “Chain Gang.” They started off with “Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray,” a showcase for Bobby’s throaty, almost pinched lead vocal, then took up “Somewhere There’s a God,” the number Roscoe had written for them, which featured Curtis singing lead and sounding as close to Sam as an eighteen-year-old not fully in control of his voice could do. Sam coached him a little on his phrasing and diction, but after five takes, he pronounced himself satisfied and then asked if they would background him while he altered one word in the song. Clif chorded discreetly behind him, and the Womacks sang the same exact backup that they had for Curtis on “Somewhere There’s a God,” but the song was wholly transformed as Sam sang a romantic ballad called “Somewhere There’s a Girl.”
It was more than just a single word—but not much. There was a sense of yearning altogether different from the feeling of the gospel number, and the Womack brothers stood almost transfixed at the change. What gave it its special feel, Bobby thought, was that Sam was singing not about some real-life girl but about the perfect girl, an idealized girl. “You know, ‘Somewhere there’s a girl, and she’ll know everything about me.�
�� And he was talking about, ‘She knows when I’m right, she knows when I’m wrong’—this perfect girl, the one that’s gonna be the one.” He did just one take but appeared to be very moved by it, and when he got back in the booth, he announced excitedly to L.C., “I don’t have to hear that back. I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna release that.” Whether or not he was entirely serious, it was an object lesson to the Womack brothers, a simple demonstration of how easy it would be to switch over.
Whatever his vision of a perfect girl and a cloudless future, Sam got in trouble again when he played Dayton four days later. There had been a “bastardy” warrant out for his arrest in Cleveland since January 27, 1958. It was over the little girl, Denise, whom he had fathered in 1953 just two days before Linda was born, and for one reason or another, it had never been served. Now it was, when he played Wampler’s Arena on July 2—and, after pleading guilty through counsel and making a motion for a blood test to prove paternity, he was forced to put up a $1,000 appearance bond before he could move on to the next show.
They worked hard all through the summer, one-nighters mostly in the Northeast and Southeast but in the Midwest, too, stopping off in New York long enough for him to record “Feel It,” the song he had put out on the Sims Twins, once it became clear that their version, the B-side of the 45, was not going to get any airplay. “Soothe Me,” the A-side, was just beginning to break into the charts, so he set up a session for the twins to record “I’ll Never Come Running Back to You,” the Sam-and-Alex collaboration that had served as Johnnie Morisette’s debut on the label, as the substitute B-side on a reconstituted single.
Barbara had joined him on the road by now. She was almost five months pregnant and determined to give him a boy. She knew how much that would mean to Sam, and she thought maybe that could solidify her position with her husband once and for all. But she really didn’t know. He had been acting more and more strangely toward her since he had seen her leaving June Gardner’s room by herself on the last tour. She liked June, he was dear to her heart, but she and June and Sam’s brother Charles had only gotten together to smoke some good weed, and then Charles had to go and take care of something about the cars, and when she emerged from June’s room, Sam happened to be coming down the hall just at that moment. He blew up and as much as accused her of cheating right then and there. She drew herself up to her full height and said he was judging her by his own standards, did he think she was crazy, did he really think she was that low and immoral—but he sent her home on the spot and would probably have fired June, too, had it not been for Crain’s intervention. Ever since, he had muttered dark accusations about the paternity of her unborn child and made her feel like she was on some kind of damn twenty-four-hour watch on those rare occasions when she traveled with him.
Lithofayne Pridgon came to see him when he played Newark on August 12, because she had heard Barbara was out with the show. Never one to subscribe to the picture-postcard view of life, she was curious as to just what kind of woman a footloose man like Sam could be married to, but she didn’t get much of a chance to find out because she spent most of the evening running back and forth between the dressing rooms of the two stars. The show had been advertised as the “Big Rhythm Show of ’61,” and at the top of the bill, it pitted an elegantly tuxedoed, neatly afroed Sam against a drape-suited James Brown with his customary and spectacular processed pompadour. Brown was very much on the rise in the world of rhythm and blues (he was about to have his third straight Top 10 r&b hit in 1961), but it was his explosive stage show, his breathtaking dance routines and unmatchable theatrics, along with his tireless dedication to the road, that had long since earned him the sobriquet of “The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business.” There couldn’t have been a greater disparity of styles between the two performers, and there was real resentment on James’ part, not so much due to any overt action of Sam’s as to the combative view of someone who had come up the hard way and could only imagine that Sam, with his looks, education, and infuriating air of sophistication, must be looking down on him. He was not in any case going to surrender top billing—to anyone—and he made a big fuss about who was going to close the show, getting right up in Sam’s face and seemingly almost disappointed when Sam, who had evidently learned his lesson on the 1959 Jackie Wilson tour, said he’d be glad to go on first.
Lithofayne, who knew both men well (“James was a good friend, that’s all”), was drafted by Brown toward the end of the show after people started calling for Sam and he still hadn’t gone on. “James asked me to go over and feel the situation out, and when I hit the door, Sam said, ‘Hey, Chinese-y’—that was what he called me sometimes—but it didn’t seem like he was in any big hurry. So I played it off and went back and told James what was going on, and eventually Sam ambled out—but then he wouldn’t get off, he just kept singing and singing and tore that stadium up, and James could [hardly] go on.” She was neither shocked nor wholly unsurprised by Sam’s actions, but she did get her look at Barbara, and she got a big laugh out of the way Sam had outwitted James and landed, like Bre’r Rabbit, right in the briar patch.
This was how he earned his living, he told the New York Sunday News. He was gone two months out of every three, maybe more, but this wasn’t the way it was always going to be. He didn’t speak of civil rights or racial issues, though they were never far from his mind. He couched his ambition in business terms that anyone could understand. “I want to sing,” he told reporter Don Nelsen, “until I have enough money to invest in something else. I own two music publishing companies now. When I get a little older, I’d like to leave the singing to the younger fellows.”
For now, though, he was doing his best to improve his own situation. Jess Rand had been negotiating with his friend Bob Yorke, RCA’s new a&r head, for months now, but the tone had turned increasingly bitter. “I feel that we left our discussions in New York somewhat unresolved,” Yorke wrote in June, “[but] I cannot help but feel that you prefer it this way. . . . I have tried, Jess, to be fair, honest, and direct with you. I have to confess my uneasiness about the future; but I am virtually out of suggestions on how to proceed.”
What Sam wanted, Jess worried, was more than the market in which he found himself could bear. Sam wanted quarterly royalty statements, a greater amount of money upfront, higher monthly payments, a higher royalty rate, and a lump sum that would allow him to buy a house, since with the new baby the apartment was going to be too small. “Bob Yorke knew I wasn’t [necessarily] for the way Sam wanted to proceed. But Sam was my client, and I said, ‘Bob, I’m just doing what my client wants me to do. Bottom line, it’s Sam’s decision. That’s the way it has to be.’”
In the end, they came up against favored-nations clauses in other RCA recording artists’ contracts, particularly Elvis Presley’s: for that reason, Jess convinced Sam, there was no way they were going to get a royalty rate higher than 5 percent—and neither Capitol nor Atlantic, the only other companies even considered, were going to give them that. After a while, Jess began to worry that it was starting to feel like liar’s poker. “So finally I called Bob and said, ‘Let’s make a deal. We can trim some if you want, [but let’s] get it done.’ And I got a lot of things for Sam.”
What he got as of the middle of September was a cash advance of $30,000 (nonreturnable but recoupable against artist’s royalties) and monthly payments of $1,875, adding up to a recoupable sum of $22,500 a year for the two-year duration of the contract, with that amount doubled for the third year if the option was picked up. Sam’s songwriter’s royalty was increased from $.015 to $.02 per side, unless RCA opted to advertise the single with a color sleeve. And only LP recording session costs—not singles sessions—would be charged against Sam’s account. Plus Jess got an off-the-books commitment on RCA’s part to help with Sam’s house if and when he located one—if only with some of the furnishings, a color television and sound equipment that could come from the RCA line of products. Sam felt he should have gotten more, and Luigi agreed t
hat despite his track record as a consistent hitmaker, Sam was being taken for granted. Still, it was a reasonable resolution for both parties, and Sam directed RCA to send the $30,000 advance to his manager, because, Jess assumed, Sam didn’t want Barbara to know his business.
At the same time, unbeknownst to Jess, Sam and Alex were preparing once again to go to court. The lawsuit that they had filed against Keen eighteen months earlier for all royalties accrued (artist, songwriter, and publishing) since the settlement in December of 1959 had so far done little but prompt more filings and counterfilings. With the failure by Keen to pay anything toward the $13,000 cited in the March 1960 filing, Sam’s continued catalogue sales, and the enormous success of “Wonderful World,” there was now a good deal of money at stake, but Sam and Alex were no longer looking for money; their aim was nothing less than ownership of Sam’s Keen masters. Like the protracted battle with Specialty, it had to do with issues of fairness and artistic control, but equally important, J.W. felt, was that they be taken seriously as businessmen, that the music world understand that, nice guys or not, he and Sam were going to assert their rights, just like RCA or any other music manufacturer.
“Soothe Me,” by the Sims Twins, continued to build momentum. It hit first in New Orleans, and Cash Box reported that the record was breaking nationally in the same September 9 issue that included a full-page ad for Sam’s new RCA release, “Feel It.” Two weeks later, SAR Records ran its own tiny ad for the Sims Twins, with the single word “Tremendous” festooned with nine exclamation marks, while the record itself was listed at number twenty-eight on the “Looking Ahead” chart and was inching ahead of Sam’s single in actual sales. Alex put the twins with Sam’s agent, Dick Alen, at Universal Attractions, who took them on strictly as a favor and promptly booked them into the Regal with LaVern Baker. Bobbie and Kenny Sims took it all in stride. “Being on the road wasn’t about nothing but singing and making money,” they concluded. “That’s it.”
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 49
