Christmas was coming, and everyone was in a good mood. Barbara was in and out of the studio in the midst of her Christmas shopping, with Linda frequently in tow. Aretha Franklin was playing the Alexandria Hotel; Lou Rawls was at the Memory Lane on Santa Barbara at Twenty-third; and Johnnie Morisette was appearing at Los Angeles Sentinel columnist Gert Gipson’s Nite Life. On December 19, word started to get out, in an orchestrated wave of publicity picked up by both the trades and the Negro press and clearly directed by Kags Music Corp., that “Sam (Mr. Feeling) Cooke, who left the gospel field when he was its number one star, will return to that form of entertainment as guest star of a star-studded gospel show in Newark, New Jersey, New Year’s Eve.” It would be, the Los Angeles Sentinel reported, “an entirely new program of song [for which] Cooke has composed several modern gospel songs” as well as such “generation-old heart touchers” as “Wonderful,” “Touch the Hem of His Garment,” “Nearer to Thee,” and “Were You There [When They Crucified My Lord]?” It would be, promised the St. Louis Argus, “undoubtedly the most sensational gospel show ever to hit the Newark Armory.”
On the final day of sessions, Sam scheduled Johnnie Morisette in the afternoon and the Sims Twins at night. For Morisette he got his old Keen label-mate Johnny “Guitar” Watson to play lead on a pair of blues, while the Sims Twins came back to redo two songs they had cut at their earlier session, plus a new one that Sam had written especially for them.
“That’s Where It’s At” was one of Sam’s prettiest songs, its chorus built almost entirely around the catchphrase that he and J.W. had come up with, the verses registering a broader mix of wistfulness, celebration, and specificity of observation. Bobbie and Kenny attacked it with wholehearted verve, while Sam seemed only halfheartedly to be trying to restrain the irrepressible bounciness of their enthusiasm. He focused instead on the lyric, which was supposed to start off “Lights turned way down low / Music soft and slow / With someone you love so,” except that the twins always left out the preposition. “Don’t forget that ‘with,’” Sam reminded them gently, “’cause it’s very, very important.” And when, by dint of much repetition, they finally got it, “Oh, that’s good,” he genuinely enthused. “Oh, that was cookin’. That’s cookin’, Kenny, Bob, that’s it!”
The musicians were packing up to leave when Barbara gave Zelda her birthday gift, an elaborate perfume set with a mirror and tray. Zelda was surprised, because Barbara had already given her a gift several days earlier, a hair dryer from Sam and her that she doubted Sam even knew about, but he picked up on it now, raising an eyebrow and saying, “Oh, it’s your birthday, ZZ?” When she indicated that it was, he pushed the call button and told the rhythm section, Earl Palmer and Ray Johnson, the piano player, and bassist Ray Pohlman, to stay out there. “Then he walked in the studio,” said Zelda, “we could hear it, because Bones kept the [pots] open, and he says, ‘Guys, give me this,’ you know, just snapping his fingers and singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ and [the musicians] just followed.” It was undoubtedly the musical high point of the evening, proving once and for all what anyone who had ever listened to Sam should have known all along: that Sam could enthrall an audience by the sound of his voice alone. “I wish a lot of joy to you,” he bubbles with the rhythm section swinging along behind him, “Ohh, a whole lotta joy to you / I wish you no sadness / A lot of joy to you.” And when, after declaring, “Happy birthday once again, dear ZZ,” he draws out the ending with a magnificently melismatic effect, you feel as if you are caught up in a happy family drama in which Sam for once feels at home, beset by neither doubt nor conflict about his role.
Then he and Alex were in New York for an assortment of business between Christmas and the New Year. The gospel program, with an all-star lineup that included the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Swanees, the Caravans, and, of course, the Soul Stirrers, was coming up in a few days, but in the meantime, the two of them put together a song for the Shirelles session they were about to produce for the Scepter label. The session had come about through an improbable set of circumstances, which began with Florence Greenberg, the middle-aged New Jersey housewife who had started Scepter in 1958 in order to record four of her daughter Mary Jane’s classmates at Passaic High School, a black girl group who won the school talent contest as the Shirelles. Mrs. Greenberg had in the past four years assembled a stellar r&b roster that included Chuck Jackson, ex-Flamingo Tommy Hunt, the Isley Brothers, and a newcomer named Dionne Warwick, but she had had her eye on Sam for some time. Several months earlier her longtime partner and a&r head, Luther Dixon, left the label in what amounted to both a personal and professional split, and she offered Sam the job of producing her “top disk team,” the Shirelles, who had had two number-one pop hits in the last two years. He would start, Billboard reported on December 1, “on a sort of freelance basis, and if things work out will become a regular a&r man for the firm. He will continue, however, for RCA Victor as an artist.” What she really intended, though, said J.W., was apparent even before they entered the studio. “She had in mind that she could get Sam to come on Scepter.” The success of the session (“Sam took us to a different area [with] that gospel vein,” said Shirelle Beverly Lee, “and it was brilliant, that song he [wrote], ‘Only Time Will Tell,’ using our song titles [for lyrics]”) only reinforced her resolve, and when Sam balked, that was the end of the deal—before it ever had a chance to get off the ground.
Sam saw King Curtis, too, whom he had finally persuaded to come out on the upcoming tour. It was going to take more money than the bookings—clubs and auditoriums in Texas, Louisiana, and Florida—could sustain, but once Sam made up his mind that the Kingpins had the sound he was looking for, he was no more to be deterred from his goal than he had been with the Upsetters six months earlier. In the end, money wasn’t the determining factor anyway. There wasn’t money enough to pay him what he could make at home, King Curtis told Sam, but he had one rule of thumb: “I only ever travel with those I like. I never work with them I don’t.” And after the way Sam had tipped his hat to him in “Having a Party” (“Play that song called ‘Soul Twist,’” he had sung, plugging King Curtis’ first big hit)—well, he didn’t see how he could do anything but return the favor. They were in certain respects kindred spirits. Each was dedicated in his own way to professionalism, organization, and self-advancement (what he tried to do with his studio work, Curtis said, was to negotiate a business arrangement that allowed him to “completely fit the vernacular of the record,” thereby ensuring not only financial and musical growth but an increased share of the market as well). What seemed to have brought them together in this instance, however, was a particular delight in seizing the moment, their willingness to trust to instinct (bred of well-earned experience) that they were going to have a good time together—and make good music, besides.
Sam felt similarly drawn to the prominent r&b DJ Magnificent Montague—but in a more conventional personal and business alliance. Montague, born Nathaniel Montague in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1928, had helped break “You Send Me” and championed L.C.’s career from the start. He had moved to the New York area just two and one-half months earlier, where he was broadcasting from Woodside, Long Island, on WWRL. Well known as a rhyming jock, he had taken his cue initially from romantic poetry and then from the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, distinguishing himself from his peers not just by his verbal dexterity but by the formal introduction of black history lessons into his programs (he had a regular segment called “Can I Get a Witness?” dedicated to that purpose). A determinedly free spirit who refused to be categorized in any way (he had converted to Judaism in 1960 and considered himself a “landsman”), he alternated his own seemingly extemporaneous verse with lines from poets like Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes and took great pride in “swooning” his predominantly female audience whom he addressed as “My darlings” and for whom he created introductions to some of the more romantic songs that often exceeded the passion and seductiveness of the songs themselves.
&n
bsp; But Montague had a secret that few of his listeners (and few of the stars whose records he played) were aware of. A bristling little cockatoo of a man (“He was one of the most pure hustlers I’ve ever seen,” said a fellow black jock, no mean hustler himself), Montague was a collector, a pursuit he had stumbled upon by accident when he wandered into a secondhand bookstore in 1956 and discovered a book of pioneering black writer Paul Laurence Dunbar’s dialect poems. “Never had I read words that sounded so real, so raw, so different,” Montague declared, particularly struck by Dunbar’s seminal statement of the plight of the Negro in the twentieth century, “We Wear the Mask.” He was hooked and started his collection of Africana almost immediately thereafter. That was when he was working in Chicago and put together the Magnificents, the group that L.C. joined after their hit “Up On the Mountain” was already on the charts. That was how he had met the Cook family, and that was how he first met Sam.
Over the years, his collection had grown, as he moved from city to city with his wife and son; he had added sheet music and old 78s and cylinder recordings by historic black “minstrel” entertainers like Bert Williams to his search for manuscripts as rare as a first edition by eighteenth-century poet Phyllis Wheatley, but he kept his passion secret from virtually all of the black r&b singers he helped make into stars. “I wanted to be a businessman. I didn’t go to the nightclubs [except for business]. I didn’t hang out. I was busy with another career as a collector.” Of all the artists with whom he interacted Sam was virtually the only one who exhibited a strong independent interest in black history. “He read. He wanted to read. He would come over to my place, and I’d have to hide my books! I couldn’t get him away from Dunbar’s [1895 collection], Majors and Minors. He’d sit there and read about [how Dunbar] was an elevator operator and put out his first book himself. That fascinated him.” Sometimes Sam would set Dunbar’s poems to music, singing the words from memory to the accompaniment of his guitar.
Montague was busy promoting himself and his first big show in the area, “Magnificent Montague’s Down Home Soul Show & Dance Featuring Ben E. King, Jimmy Reed, Gene McDaniel, the Shirelles,” and a host of at least twenty other advertised stars, including Dionne Warwick and Otis Redding, whose debut Stax single, “These Arms of Mine,” the disc jockey was doing his best to break. He was calling in favors from all the record companies, putting every name he could plausibly suggest on posters and handbills that in many cases he was distributing himself (some of the advertised stars, like Ben E. King, seemed unlikely to show due to previously advertised bookings in other parts of the country)—and in general doing all in his power to promote the January 4 date. Conducting an on-air interview with Sam at this point could do nothing to hurt the show, and if his listeners came away with the impression that Sam might make an unscheduled appearance at Rockland Palace (despite the unadvertised fact that he would be on tour with King Curtis in Texas at the time), well, then, caveat emptor, as Montague himself might impressively intone.
The interview took on the aspect of a refined version of the Dozens, as Sam and Montague traded lighthearted barbs in the form of elaborate repartée. “Good afternoon, darling,” Montague began, “here in the studio we have a man who calls himself Mister Soul. He claims he is a singer, and he claims he has a background that makes him eligible to be a part of your show.” “Well, that’s very simple to do,” replied Sam laughingly. “Believe me, very easy to do. I want to say that knowing you as long as I have, I’ve had a chance to even sit back and observe you, you understand?” “Mmm, I see. In other words, you’ve been trying to gather some material for your soul through mine.” To which Sam could only respond, amid much laughter, “I have no retort, no retort.”
They went on from there, touching briefly on topics from Sam’s origins in gospel music to the changes that take place in all of us over the years. “You look a little older,” said Montague. “A little thinner.” “Well, no, I haven’t changed that much, Montague,” Sam hastened to reply. “[But] I would say as a singer grows older, his conception grows a little deeper, and . . . it gives him a better insight on telling the story of the song he’s trying to sing.” All of it was only prelude, though, to the poetry contest that Montague clearly had in mind from the start.
Which of his records was his favorite? Montague asked his guest, and Sam picked out one of his very earliest compositions, “You Were Made for Me.” “Now, what is the first line, Sam?” says Montague, upon which Sam delivers the opening stanza of the song with feeling.
A fish was made to swim in the ocean
A boat was made to sail on the sea
But sure as there are stars above
You were made for me.
“And I can recap that,” Montague jumps in, reciting his own elaboration on the song, which once you get past the initial fish-and-ocean part, enters into neo-Shakespearean waters. “We must get together and collaborate at least once on a song,” declares Sam good-humoredly. To which Montague suggests a second improvisation, this time on Sam’s “second-best record.”
“My second-best record? My current one—I love this very, very much—called ‘Nothing Can Change This Love.’” He then recites the opening lines: “If I go / A million miles away / I’d write a letter each and every day / ’Cause nothing can change the love I have for you.”
“If I should go beyond the clouds,” Montague comes back:
Beyond the world renown
If I should in my sleep stumble out loud
Darling, I am not afraid to write your name a thousand times
For nothing in this crazy world can change my love
I know, thank God, that nothing can change my love for you.
There is, once again, much laughter, and Sam says, “You know, I can’t cap that.” “No, no, no,” says Montague, “I wasn’t trying to get you to cap that. I was merely looking at you, trying to observe. And I think that to close the show up very nicely, Sam, I would like for you to hum something for my darlings. In other words, every day I try to describe ‘soul.’ Maybe you could hum eight bars of what soul represents.” And indeed Sam does. “And when the humming’s over,” Montague declares, with a sincerity that does indeed cap the interview, “and time finds its soul / All I can say to you, darling, is: ‘Sam Cooke’s yours, he’ll never grow old.’”
On a more explicitly political note, Sam gave an interview to a reporter for the ANP (the Associated Negro Press, the black newspapers’ wire service) in which “he urged all tan performers to pay more attention to the Negro press. ‘This is the bridge over which 99% of us must cross,’ he said. . . . In New York for a concert at the turn of the year, he told this writer that wherein the liberal ‘white press’ will write a Negro up, it will not tell his story. ‘All of us would be in grave danger if through lack of interest we let “our papers” down. More advertising dollars should be spent by both the artists and the promoters throughout the country.’ He further pointed out that [most Negro] performers . . . make the bulk of their money off Negro fans. Only a handful of them can balance their books by working the plush supper clubs in Hollywood, Las Vegas, Miami, and New York. Even those few must look to the followers of the Negro press for that extra profit dollar.” And, the story concluded, “he pledged himself to greater recognition of such papers.”
It was a time, as Montague might have pointed out in one of his more apocalyptic moods, in which everything seemed to be coming to a head. James Baldwin had just published a book-length essay in the New Yorker a month before that led with a quote from the old spiritual, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water / The fire next time,” and Sam undoubtedly pored over Baldwin’s message, couched in language no less ornate than Montague’s but richer, more ironic, and suggestive of deeper meanings by far. “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended you to perish,” Baldwin wrote in the portion of the essay that was couched as a letter to his namesake nephew “on the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation.<
br />
Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. . . . You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this . . . [but] please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people, and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. . . . You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.
THE GOSPEL CONCERT lived up to its billing in every respect but one. The below-zero weather kept attendance to advance ticket sales (it was the “coldest New Year’s Eve in history,” reported the St. Louis Argus), but the audience of six thousand was rewarded with a show in which each group seemed to go to extra lengths to get the house. Sam couldn’t have been happier, not just to be singing once again for a gospel crowd but to be reunited for the first time in a long time with the Soul Stirrers. It seemed almost as if he had been neglecting them, with recent sessions by nearly every other SAR act and a second album from the Stirrers long overdue. He had never given up on the idea of breaking them in the pop market, though, and Jerry Brandt, whom Sam had invited to the program with his fiancée at the last minute (“He calls me and says, ‘I want to show you something you never saw before in your life’”), couldn’t get over what a powerful singer Jimmie Outler was. His voice was rougher than Sam’s, but he possessed that same uncommon gift of communication, and Brandt had visions of signing him to a pop contract.
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 57
