Boogie-Woogie Rumble
HE WAS IN ATLANTA on April 12, 1962, playing the Rhythm Rink on yet another Henry Wynn Supersonic tour, when the idea for the song came to him. The billing for this “Spring Spectacular” was different from most of Henry’s previous shows, taking its cue from a thirty-day Supersonic tour the previous fall that had pitted Jackie Wilson against white rock ’n’ roll singer Jerry Lee Lewis (amidst a solid slate of r&b stars) in what was advertised as the “Battle of the Century.” This time it was Dion (formerly of Dion and the Belmonts) who was the lone white star in a sea of r&b talent that included twenty-two-year-old Atlantic recording artist Solomon Burke, a warm, charismatic singer just beginning to make a name for himself, the Drifters, Dee Clark, and B.B. King. For Dion, who had embarked upon a solo career in the fall of 1960 with his appearance on the Biggest Show of Stars tour that briefly included Sam, “it was kind of tense at times,” stemming not just from the situation in the South but from the racial attitudes that a number of the r&b musicians had by now, understandably, developed on their own. “Sam was a kind of champion for . . . cooling everybody out,” said Dion, and, as on the earlier tour, some of Dion’s most treasured memories were of singing with Sam backstage—“he was full of music.”
The idea for the song had been simmering for some time. Its original inspiration had come from hearing blues stylist Charles Brown sing his original composition “I Want to Go Home” every time Sam played syndicate boss Screw Andrews’ Copa Club in Newport, Kentucky, a wide-open town across the river from Cincinnati. Charles, perhaps the most influential blues singer of the late forties and early fifties, with a delicate but distinctive piano style and the soft confidential vocal approach that had stamped such numbers as “Drifting Blues,” “Black Night,” and the perennial “Merry Christmas Baby” as instant blues classics, was an individual of considerable charm, prodigious intelligence, and an equally prodigious attraction to gambling—which was what had landed him in Newport, “a no-man’s land,” as Charles described it, where they killed people who didn’t live up to their end of the bargain. Whenever at one time or another he tried to leave, Screw Andrews (né Frank Andriola), to whom his debt kept on accruing, would raise the question of who loved Charles best, tip the singer $100, express his appreciation for all that Charles had done for business, and point out, “You know, I bought you that limousine Cadillac with the gold wheels.” To which Charles could only gratefully assent. Then Screw would say, “You wouldn’t want to find a bullet in your head down the road, would you?” and Charles, who viewed Screw as a kind of second father, would declare, “Oh no, Papa, I don’t want to go. I’m not going.” And he didn’t. At least not until the Kennedy administration Justice Department came in and closed down the town in mid-1961, Screw got sick with cancer, and Charles took off for Los Angeles, where his grandfather had fallen ill.
Sam and Luigi.
Michael Ochs Archives.com
Sam told Charles he was going to record his song from the moment he first heard it. It was based on the old spiritual “Thank God It’s Real,” and, like the “sorrow songs” of the slaves, had its own secret and subversive message. “I want to go home, I want to go home, ’cause I feel so all alone,” Charles sang, and he really meant it—but Screw Andrews, oblivious to the underlying text, pronounced it his favorite song and asked Charles to sing it over and over again. Charles even recorded it, first for Johnny Vincent’s Ace label, then for King Records in Cincinnati, both times with one of his most popular disciples, fellow Texan Amos Milburn, who had had number-one r&b hits himself with “Chicken Shack Boogie” and “Bad, Bad Whiskey.” In fact, when Charles came out to Los Angeles and played the Club Intime all through January and February, Sam went to see him and talked to him about playing piano on a session that would include his song. When Charles’ grandfather died, Sam offered to help with the funeral expenses. But Charles told him, “No, Sam, my papa was insured good. He was a Mason and everything.” And rather than pursue the idea of playing on Sam’s session, Charles maintained his own priorities. “I went to the races [instead].”
Sam and Johnnie Morisette.
Courtesy of ABKCO
Sam and L.C. with SAR recording artist Jackie Ross, Chicago, March 2, 1962.
Courtesy of ABKCO
Sam stayed busy at home. He focused primarily on SAR business, with time for an album session of his own with Luigi in mid-February to capitalize on the success of “Twistin’ the Night Away,” which was rapidly closing in on number one on the r&b charts. Sam contributed such unlikely originals as “Twistin’ in the Kitchen with Dinah” and “Camptown Twist,” along with a sprightly duet with Lou Rawls on “Soothe Me,” now that the Sims Twins hit had run its course. He produced sessions on Patience Valentine and Clif White, but mostly he was concentrating on trying to get Johnnie “Two Voice” Morisette and Johnnie Taylor the kind of hit the Sims Twins had already enjoyed.
He cut Johnnie “Two Voice” in early January with a song Alex thought he should have kept for himself. It was called “Meet Me at the Twistin’ Place,” and what made the record was the audible party atmosphere created by studio visitors like Ricky Nelson, local chanteuse Toni Harper, and René Hall’s wife, Sugar, all of whom contributed to the chorus, and Johnnie’s typically manic falsetto ad lib at the fade. “Oh meet me, meet me, baby,” he screamed in that strangled half cry that fell somewhere in between gospel intensity and unintentional parody:
I’ll be looking for you, and I know you can’t miss me
’Cause I’ll have my red suit on
And Caldonia will be there
And Paul will be there
You know, Della will be there
And Uncle Remus will be there
And don’t forget Ol’ Man Mose
He’ll be there
Oh, come on, you better meet me
(Meet me at the twistin’ place)
Alex remained dubious about Johnnie (“He’s got to make up his mind whether he’s a singer or a pimp,” he told Sam, “they’re both full-time jobs”), but he loved the song. He thought it was better produced than “Twistin’ the Night Away,” and it got plenty of airplay when it was released two months later, even if the distributors laid down on it after it entered the pop and r&b charts in April.
The record that he and Sam both had their hopes set on, though, was Johnnie Taylor’s “Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day.” It was a song, like “Wonderful World,” with a history. This time it was the Prudhomme twins, Betty and Beverly, the ones with the striking (and not entirely unintentional) resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor, who had written the original, not long after meeting Sam in the summer of 1957. They took it to producer Fabor Robinson, who wanted them to record it themselves on his Malibu-based Radio label, but when Beverly told him she was pregnant, he gave it to country singer Johnny Russell, an eighteen-year-old Mississippian whose family had recently moved to Fresno and who recorded it as the B-side of his first single. In Russell’s version it was little more than a dour ballad in B-minor whose chorus, repeated three times with minimal variation and no discrete, individual verses, was the centerpiece of the song: “It takes time / Give me time / And the world will be yours and mine,” it went, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
The Prudhommes were always pitching songs to Sam with little encouragement from Alex (“J.W. told us, ‘I can hardly get him to do my tunes—how can you expect him to do yours?’”). They maintained a flirtatious relationship with Sam, which they knew Barbara didn’t like and Zelda clearly resented, too, but “we loved him as a friend, we loved music together, he was a really cute guy with a beautiful personality, he was always a gentleman with us, and if you went somewhere with him, he’d have you laughing half the evening.”
Sam heard something in their song that they didn’t and asked if he could fool with it. They told him he would have to deal with Fabor Robinson on the publishing, but it was certainly okay with them, so he added two verses, recast it as a more up-tempo number, flav
ored it with his characteristic sixth chords and a hint of a Latin beat, and changed the message from one of dogged persistence to a more adroit tone of his own. “Give me time, give me time,” the singer now urges his reluctant lover, “And I’ll make your love as strong as mine.” Betty and Beverly loved what he had done to their song. But then, without telling them, he brought it to Johnnie Taylor.
Johnnie was still debating whether or not he had made the right decision in signing with SAR in the first place. A tight, suspicious man by nature, Johnnie had listened to friends tell him over and over that Sam had only added him to the SAR roster to ward off direct competition, that he would never promote a rival who sounded so much like him—and the sales of his one SAR release to date only went to prove those friends right.
This was a better session from the start. It was better prepared, Sam had brought in better material, René had assembled a solid ten-piece ensemble anchored by Clif on guitar and Earl Palmer on drums, and Lou Rawls was available for background singing—it was just like one of Sam’s own sessions. Sam worked everybody hard, but no one harder than Johnnie. He stayed on Johnnie about his pronunciation, his emphasis, and his meaning. He was very particular with the backup singers on how to swing the chorus without holding on to their notes and getting in the way of the lead vocal. And he kept checking with Johnnie to make sure he understood, showing him exactly how he wanted it done but urging everyone, always, to keep it funky.
Beverly and Betty Prudhomme, with Art Lebow, Los Angeles County Fair, September 1957 (note Sam in booth).
Courtesy of Betty and Beverly Prudhomme
Johnnie got his vocal down on the Prudhommes’ song almost immediately. His voice broke in a couple of places, but that wasn’t really a problem—he got the phrasing and the feeling right, nearly identical, in fact, to Sam’s, down to the humming that Sam would so often interpolate into his vocals. The band, too, helped convey the world-weary sense of determination that Sam had written into the song (“Don’t, honey, don’t go away / Do you hear, do you hear / what I say?”), that peculiar combination of hope and despair that provided the underpinning for so many of his songs. Earl Palmer’s drumming was impeccable, the horns extended Johnnie’s clipped phrasing, and poor Clif just about wore his wrist out as they went through take after take (“You had that roll effect rather than chunka-chunka-chunka—it went on forever, and, man, I was damn near dead!”) but getting it right every time with his unfailing gift for metronomic precision. In the end, only the background singing left Sam less than completely satisfied—he had a precise idea of how he wanted it to sound, concluding each “ha cha ra” with a “huh!” so that it rolled off the singers’ tongues in a way that even Lou Rawls at first couldn’t quite grasp. Eventually they got it with Sam and Alex, too, pitching in, and the song came together without losing any of its freshness or originality. To Alex, who had gotten a little frustrated trying to clear the publishing on a composition he wasn’t sure was worth the effort, it was further proof of his partner’s vision. Johnnie felt for the first time like he really had a hit. And Lou Rawls, who just enjoyed being around Sam (“Sometimes he’d call and say, ‘Hey, Lou Lou, what you doing?’ and we’d ride around, maybe even go to the beach”), soaked up an atmosphere that he felt for every one of them represented a rare break from the day-to-day rounds. It wasn’t a matter of how much you got paid—though generally everyone did get paid. But there was a sense of progress, of pride, of limits being challenged and ambition being achieved, there was a positive energy that infused the situation in a way that transcended the mere circumstances of a session. “Everybody just wanted to be there to see what was happening.”
Only the Prudhomme sisters were upset. They felt as if a trick had been played on them. When Sam first let them hear a dub, they thought it was him, and when he told them it wasn’t, they felt hurt and even put up some halfhearted resistance to the record coming out. They couldn’t understand why he would record another singer who sounded just like him doing their song. But after he promised them that he would do the song himself someday, after Johnnie’s version had played itself out, they abandoned all opposition. With all of his bubbling enthusiasm, all of the manifest delight he so evidently took in every aspect of his life, how could anyone, they wondered, stay mad at him for long?
To Barbara it sometimes seemed that the whole world saw a different Sam than the one she knew. She could dress up to go out with him and still feel like his “sophisticated doll”—but it was an image, not a reality, and no one was more aware of the gulf between the two than her. She had never seen a man take more pride in his new home—he seemed so consumed with every detail of its furnishing, answering the questions of her two lady decorators as to his vision for each room with voluble pleasure. He got a grand piano for the music room, leather-bound volumes for the library, a new Jaguar XKE sports car, and he brought home paintings from his frequent forays to the Beverly Hills galleries. He hired a gardener, a pool attendant, and two maids for Barbara to supervise in one full-time position—at first she thought he was putting her in a position of genuine responsibility because she had finally earned his trust. But then she realized it was all strictly superficial; there was little room for her, or anyone else, in the picture.
He was a different person at home than he was out in the world, brooding, solitary, lounging around in the silk pajamas she bought him, smoking cigarettes and drinking his Scotch. He might be reading one of his books or listening to his music, something might capture his attention and he would pick up his guitar and start working out a song, but as far as he was concerned, she might as well not have been there. He could be stubborn over the smallest things. She begged him to put a fence around the pool, or at least to get a pool cover, but he adamantly refused, despite the advice of his friends, because, he said, with the pool in front, it would disfigure the appearance of the property. She didn’t think it was a question of money; Sam wasn’t like that. But one time early in the new year, she tried to get him to give her sister Beverly $300 for a down payment on a little Renault, and he blew up and started yelling at her and saying that he wasn’t going to take care of her whole damn family, and then he actually hit her and disappeared for days. The next time she heard from him, it was as if nothing had happened. He called and told her to cook him up a steak, and when he came home, there was nothing more said. It was like they were playacting, and the only way she could get through her role was to stay stoned.
He didn’t like her to invite her friends over, and when he had his friends over, it was as if he were ashamed of her, staying with them in the bar or the music room, limiting any contact they might have had with her. He was indulgent with Tracey, who at sixteen months showed no signs of speaking, but Linda was the only one who could really get his attention. He could sit and talk with her by the hour, read to her and make up songs in a way that both warmed and broke Barbara’s heart. He had relented a little with Vincent, especially after his mother had pronounced that the little boy looked just like Sammy as a baby, but there remained that obstinate withholding of himself, he never accepted or gave his heart to the chubby little boy. She didn’t have anyone to talk to except her sister, and she didn’t know who to trust. The presence of any other woman in the room put her on immediate alert, it was like a switch got turned on in Sam and she could watch him go to work, practically making an assignation right then and there under her very nose. He was out every night with his friends, he and Alex were always talking “business”—they kept plotting how they were going to break this or that SAR artist, and they were just as involved with Lou Rawls’ career as they were with their own. It seemed sometimes like there was no division between work and play, and she didn’t fit into either.
HE HAD BEEN HOME for the better part of three months when he flew to Chicago at the end of February for a series of SAR sessions. Alex stayed in Los Angeles to promote the new Johnnie Morisette release (they had decided to hold back Johnnie Taylor’s single until the beginning of May to
give “Meet Me at the Twistin’ Place” some breathing space), so Sam was on his own, focusing his attention on the first day on R.H. Harris, his one-time mentor, now forty-five years old but still in possession of one of the most thrilling voices in gospel. The former Soul Stirrers lead had formed his new group, the Gospel Paraders, a couple of years earlier, with the explicit idea of developing the most advanced contemporary harmonies in gospel or any other kind of music, but Sam and Crain appear to be in the thick of the background singing on this session, and Sam worked Harris with no evident trace of self-consciousness for up to thirty or forty takes of each song. The result was a masterpiece of “gospel blues” expression, and though neither Sam nor Alex had signed Harris with any expectation of commercial success (it was as much as anything, J.W. said, a matter of keeping faith), they believed in Harris, they believed in the music, and they were determined to use their label, at least in part, as a vehicle for expressing that belief. It was the session on the day after Harris’, though, that was the real reason for the trip.
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 51
