Chicago, December 17, 1964.
© Ernest Withers. Courtesy of Panopticon Gallery, Waltham, Mass.
Comedian Dick Gregory, singers Dee Clark and Major Lance, Motown stars Marv Johnson and Smokey Robinson, the Soul Stirrers, and the Upsetters were just some of the prominent figures scattered among the ordinary citizens who stood in line. Muhammad Ali, who had flown in specially for the ceremony, arrived at midafternoon with his omnipresent manager and personal adviser, Herbert Muhammad, and expressed the feelings of almost everyone in the crowd when he declared loudly and repeatedly that if Sam had been a white singer, “if he had been someone like Elvis Presley or one of the Beatles, the FBI would still be investigating and someone would be in jail.” Philadelphia DJ and civil rights activist Georgie Woods, who stood in the cold for hours, vowed that he and other DJs would hire private investigators to make sure that “certain facts about this case [that] are being withheld from the public . . . are brought to light.” As for the fans, they were there simply to be with Sam, and many were disappointed, the Chicago Defender reported, when they discovered that the coffin was covered with glass. “A blind woman who came to pay her respects and perhaps ‘touch’ her singing idol, was rammed against a door frame and had to be pulled over the entrance by funeral parlor employees. . . . The urgency of many to ‘get a last look at Sam’ resulted in near chaos with the young and old being crushed in the process. When the plate glass in a front door of Leak’s Chapel gave way under the pressure of the crowd,” the report went on, “Spencer Leak, a son of A.R. Leak Sr., shouted, ‘There are just too many of them!’” An eleven-year-old girl set up a wailing that could not be stilled, and when reporters pressed for her identity, her mother volunteered that this was Denise Cooke, Sam’s oldest daughter, and that she was Marine Somerville of Cleveland.
The funeral that evening was scheduled for eight o’clock, but a swelling number of mourners who had been unable to gain admission to the funeral home started lining up in front of the cavernous Tabernacle Baptist Church at Forty-first and Indiana by midafternoon. “It was the coldest night ever,” said Soul Stirrer Leroy Crume, as policemen in earmuffs tried to control the huge crowd with bullhorns and ropes. Barbara and her daughters had to be lifted over the crowd to get in, while Allen Klein stood outside for a few moments but then couldn’t bring himself to enter. L.C. was late, and when he told the police that he was Sam’s brother, he was turned away at first because Charles had just talked his way in with the same explanation. L.C. was prepared to fight any number of policemen and die in the attempt, but finally a lieutenant who knew him from the neighborhood said, “Naw, that’s L.C.,” and they let him through. Once the family was assembled inside, it took almost forty minutes for attendants to show them to their seats. Annie Mae Cook, looking pale, almost ghostly in her black hat and veil, with an unutterable expression of despair on her face, could barely stand, as her sons and daughters surrounded her and her husband stood unbendingly erect at her side. Close to two thousand people crowded inside the overflowing church, with at least twice as many standing outside in the frigid cold, as Professor Willie Webb played the processional, “Precious Lord,” over and over again and the congregation faced the giant mural dwarfing the pulpit and framed by vaulting arches on either side.
After greetings, brief Scripture readings, and prayer from various prominent ministers, including Reverend Clarence Cobbs of the twenty-thousand-member First Church of the Deliverance, the choir in alternating robes of black and white sang “Never Alone,” and “nurses” dressed in white fanned through the crowd to attend to the inevitable faintings and emotional disruptions that were bound to occur.
“The world is better because Sam Cooke lived. He inspired many youths of all races and creeds,” said Dr. Louis Rawls, no relation to the singer, who had just celebrated his twenty-third anniversary at Tabernacle Baptist and had lent his church to Reverend Clay Evans of Fellowship Baptist to accommodate the magnitude of the occasion. Like the other ministers, he had known Sam from childhood on, and, like the others, he alluded not just to the Highway QCs, listed in the program as honorary pallbearers, but to the family gospel group with which Sam had first begun, the Singing Children.
The Staple Singers sang the traditional “Old Rugged Cross,” and Mavis Staples started crying at the outset and cried all the way through. The Soul Stirrers sang Crume’s composition “His Precious Love,” one of Sam’s favorites, but only after Crume borrowed Pop Staples’ guitar because he had forgotten his own. The congregation for the most part behaved with tearful decorum, although fistfights broke out from time to time outside the church.
“We must strive in the midst of our grief to build a world where men will not need to perish with their mature songs still unsung,” preached Clay Evans, a young quartet singer himself when the QCs were starting out, whose small congregation Sam had joined while still with the Soul Stirrers almost ten years earlier. “We need not be afraid of anyone dying before his hour,” Evans comfortingly intoned. “Some men have lived long, yet they’ve lived a short life.” Sam, he implied, had packed a great deal into his few short years, into what must be considered a transitory experience at best, a “Great Park [in which] we are very much like children, privileged to spend a day.”
After the eulogy the family took one last look at the body and was escorted out, leaving the mourning to the public, who lined up once again for a final viewing of their own. Barbara went back to her hotel on the north side by herself—her mother took the girls, and she had no interest in being around anybody else, not the Cooks, not old friends looking to recall happier times, not even Crain and his wife, Maude, who had been looking out for her ever since her arrival in town. She knew what it was like after a funeral, people getting drunk and speaking sentimentally about the deceased—and then all of a sudden the dead person was forgotten. Just gone. She wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. She just felt so—alone. When she got back to her fancy hotel room, she took all the bedding off the bed and curled up in a corner on the floor and tried not to think of what was going to happen to her. She had a record company and a publishing company, and a partner and a business manager she didn’t trust. She had all these people who were looking to her to save them, and she couldn’t do a damn thing. Their leader was dead. And now she had to try to get some sleep before carrying the body back to Los Angeles in the morning.
THE FUNERAL DIRECTOR at People’s told her he would do all he could to keep Sam’s color, but the body was getting darker by the day—it was lucky the funeral and final interment were going to take place on Saturday. Barbara’s old friend, the Reverend H.B. Charles, who by his own eagerness to take care of her and her baby when she first moved to Los Angeles had been unwittingly instrumental in finally getting Sam to marry her, had prevailed upon Barbara to allow him to perform the obsequies at his fashionable Mount Sinai Baptist Church. She wasn’t sure why she agreed to it, she told a friend, she knew he just wanted the publicity, but he begged and begged her, and he did have one of the biggest churches in town.
The funeral was scheduled to begin at 2 P.M., but just the crush of people outside would have delayed its start, and Barbara’s late arrival in the Rolls only extended the delay all the more. People began showing up at 9 a.m., and by noon, there were close to five thousand standing outside in the rain, as local residents flung open their windows and the sound of Sam Cooke’s music eerily echoed from turntables and radios throughout the neat, well-kept-up neighborhood. “Long lines of convertible Cadillacs, Rivieras, and Thunderbirds,” the Afro-American newspaper chain reported, “ladies in more mink and men in more silk than the Internal Revenue allows [arrived to give Sam] a regal send-off highlighted by brouhahas, rhubarbs, and enough wrinkled fenders to make any blues singer cry a new kind of blues.”
It was yet another celebration from which Sam alone had been strangely excluded. All his friends were there, everyone he had known from the start, Alex and Crain, Bumps, René and Sugar, Oopie, Lou Rawls, Lou Adler, Paul Foster from the St
irrers, Jesse Whitaker from the Pilgrim Travelers, Johnny Thunder, Jess Rand, Al Schmitt and his wife, Joan, nearly every one of Sam’s SAR artists, Ray Charles, and B.B. King. There were television crews invited by the Reverend Charles and loudspeakers set up to pipe the sound to the crowd outside. A lot of people were taken aback when the Womack brothers arrived, each dressed in an identical dark suit of Sam’s, but Barbara had given them the suits, she explained to Sugar Hall, because they had nothing else to wear. Barbara herself arrived in a diamond-mink coat, with Crain, the kids, a uniformed nurse, and a white man she identified as her new financial adviser. He was, in fact, a vice president at the Wilshire-Robertson Bank of America, and Barbara needed his help to gain access to the Tracey account, which would otherwise have been frozen with Sam’s death. A photographer who had been banned from the funeral home for snapping a picture of Sam in his casket was selling prints outside for twenty-five cents apiece.
Inside the church, after an organ prelude by Billy Preston, the Womack brothers, billed as “Sam Cooke’s Musicians [with] René Hall Conductor, Clif White, Dir.,” struggled tearfully to complete “Yield Not to Temptation,” their first SAR release. Then Lou Rawls, ordinarily the most controlled of performers, sang “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” with unrestrained emotion, barely able to contain his grief or mask the anger he felt at Elisa Boyer, the woman he blamed for Sam’s death. Zelda practically had to slug her way into the church in the middle of Lou’s performance. She couldn’t find a parking place, and when she arrived at the church door, she was met by some functionary who tried to block her entrance. She was not about to be denied, she told writer Daniel Wolff. “I had a fist,” she said, “and I just flung [it]. . . . I was screaming. I was kicking.” Nor did her efforts go unnoticed. “Every time things would get real solemn and quiet,” said René Hall, “she’d push back these guards and force the door open and they’d snatch her back.” It was, said René, a rare moment of comic relief, but when Johnnie Morisette started screaming, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Sam,” and then began to weep uncontrollably, it triggered an hysterical reaction all through the church.
After a Scripture reading by Reverend Charles and a brief prayer, Bumps’ longtime gospel protégé, Bessie Griffin, got up to sing, but she was barely able to get out of her seat before she was overcome with such intensity of emotion that she had to be carried out. There was momentary confusion, and then Ray Charles, sitting on the edge of the roped-off family section, stood up, the Los Angeles Sentinel reported, and “asked to ‘see’ the body of his slain friend for the last time.” Standing by Sam’s casket, he asked the crowd what they wanted him to do. “Sing!” the response came back. And he sat down at the piano and sang “Angels Keep Watching Over Me” as J.W. leaned over, gravely holding the mike. “I gave my heart to it,” said Ray, whose career almost perfectly mirrored Sam’s, each encountering bitter criticism when he “crossed over,” in Ray’s case by introducing gospel sounds to a pop setting, in Sam’s by embracing pop. “The song itself I loved, because it was so true. ‘All night and all day / All day and all night / The angels keep watching over me.’ You know, that says so much, and that’s what I felt about him. I tried to sing it in such a way that he would be proud. Sam had a uniqueness about him. Nobody sound like Sam Cooke. I mean nobody. He hit every note where it was supposed to be, and not only hit the note but hit the note with feeling. Everything that came out of me that day was truly genuine. There was nothing fake about it, and somehow in my heart I felt he was listening.”
“It was,” said René Hall, the consummate a&r man, “the greatest gospel rendition I ever heard in my entire life.” According to Ebony, “women fainted, tears rolled down men’s cheeks and onlookers shouted,” and the renditions of two more of Sam’s gospel favorites by Bobby “Blue” Bland and Arthur Lee Simpkins, a forty-nine-year-old classically trained baritone whom Sam had known from his early days in Chicago, only added to the “genuineness,” and genuine hysteria, of the moment.
After a lengthy sermon by Reverend Charles (“Sam Cooke has lived his life. He has made his contribution. If he had not died when he did, Sam Cooke would still have to die sometime”), the funeral ended as the skies grew even darker and the thousands of people lining both sides of West Adams Boulevard held up the two-hundred-car procession for a full forty minutes before it could get under way to Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, where Vincent, too, was buried. At the cemetery Barbara picked a rose from the casket, and four-year-old Tracey said loud enough for everyone to hear, “Oh, you’re going to wake my daddy up,” as they lowered the casket into the ground. “No,” said Linda, clasping her little sister’s hand and looking very hurt and very adult, “he’s not going to wake up anymore.” It was night, and the rain was still falling.
Afterward they all went back to the house, and Barbara met with Sam’s musicians and explained that, while Sam had made no provision for them, she was going to give each a few hundred dollars, which she hoped would help, because there wasn’t going to be any more. There was some grumbling, and some remonstrance about withholding taxes that hadn’t been paid, but eventually, said June Gardner, “we split, and that was it. It was a beautiful operation, but the patient died.”
It was the end of their world. For each of them it marked a bitter conclusion, but for no one more than Barbara. She was terrified of the future, and Sam had already begun to disappear. For all his faults, he had always taken care of her. Who was going to look out for her now?
Aftermath
WITHIN JUST A FEW DAYS of the funeral Barbara and Bobby Womack were in a full-blown relationship. As Barbara described it to her friend Gertrude Gipson for a headline story in the Los Angeles Sentinel one month later, “Bobby has been my constant escort for the last few weeks and has been seen with me at most of the functions I have recently attended.” Despite rumors to the contrary, she was not yet married, she said, but she showed off “a very large and beautiful ‘carat’ on her left finger . . . a gift from the musician-vocalist,” who, in an accompanying article, was described as bearing “a remarkable resemblance to the late Cooke as well as comparable mannerisms.”
Bobby’s first act even before entering into his new role was to throw Barbara’s boyfriend out of the house after the funeral. He had come by to pay his respects and found the man, the bartender from the Flying Fox, wearing Sam’s watch, ring, and robe. “I was like, ‘This motherfucker’s trying to fuck over my hero.’ I told him to take off the watch. I said, ‘Get the fuck out of here, and give me that robe, too, while you going.’ He was a big guy. He could have floored me, and I would have never known what hit me. But at that point it didn’t matter—it was the first time I really felt like a man. Barbara said, ‘I like a man who speaks up. I’m impressed.’ That was the quick move.”
Barbara and Bobby.
Courtesy of Barbara Cooke and ABKCO
The next move was not immediately apparent to Bobby, but he could tell she was impressed enough to encourage him to keep coming around. From Barbara’s point of view Bobby’s company was not only welcome, it was necessary. She felt abandoned. Nobody cared about her—nobody really approved of her. And even though René and Sugar Hall and Alex and Carol still came by all the time, she could tell they were looking at her funny, they were trying to watch out in case she went off or something. Sam had made a laughingstock of her in front of the whole damn world. She took the children out of school—she didn’t know when she would send them back—she just didn’t want them to have to suffer the kind of ridicule that she sensed all around her. If her husband was going to get himself killed, why did he have to get killed in some fleabag ghetto motel? Why couldn’t he have gone someplace with someone with a little more class? At least then he wouldn’t have left her looking so ridiculous in everyone’s eyes.
Then one night, right around Christmas, after René and Sugar Hall had left and the kids were asleep, Bobby started talking about how his brothers had decided to go back to Cleveland, but he wanted to stay o
ut here. She explained to him that she couldn’t do anything for him, she didn’t know how she was going to get by herself, but he said that he knew he had some songwriter’s royalties coming from Kags, she could just keep the money if she would let him stay and work with her. She reminded him that he was in a group with his bothers, but he said, “I don’t have to be with my brothers.” She gave him a long, assessing look, and then it hit her all of a sudden, how death and sexual attraction went hand in hand. He looked a little scared, but when she indicated her feelings, he didn’t turn her down, and that was the beginning.
Bobby remembered it a little differently. In his recollection: “She called and said, ‘Bob, I want you to come over here. Sam left something on a tape. It’s some songs, and I don’t want [anybody else] to hear what it is, and I don’t know how to work the tape recorder . . . ’ So—I’ll never forget. It was in the early evening, and René and his wife was there—I wanted to get out there early, because I’ve always been scared of dead people, like they’ll come back. Anyway, I’m trying to work the tape recorder [in Sam’s little workshop/studio], and she’s standing so close behind me I couldn’t even move my arms, and I said, ‘Damn, all you got to do is push right here, it’s easy.’ She said, ‘You never look at me when I’m talking. You afraid of women, but you ain’t that little boy no more. You got your chance now [to] be a big man.’ I said, ‘I just want to get this tape to work.’
“It was like The Graduate. She went back in the house and comes back in a red robe, full-length. She said, ‘You seem like you’re nervous to me.’ I said, ‘I’m not nervous. I think I might see Sam.’ She said, ‘Sam?’ She said, ‘Sam is dead.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but his spirit is all over the house.’
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 80
