Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (110 page)

They registered at the Evans Hotel, where Sam had always stayed, and Charles called and seemed surprised to hear Bobby’s voice. “Man, you a bold nigger,” he said. But Bobby replied, “No, I just want to do what’s right.” Charles said that he and his brother David were going to come by the hotel, and Bobby said that was fine. He was still trying to persuade Barbara that if she would just give the family some money, things would be better for them all, most of all for her and the girls. But she was adamant, she’d be damned if she’d give those Cooks any money after the disrespect they had shown her. “She told me, ‘Honey, I’m gonna put on a robe.’ And I knew she had a gun under the pillow—I told her not to bring it but I knew she did—and when she went in the bathroom, I took all the bullets out and put it back under the pillow. Then they came up, and Charles said, ‘How you doing, Bobby?’ And I said, ‘I’m doing fine. I just come to try to straighten this thing out if we can’—and then he hit me. And he hit me again. And after that I don’t remember nothing else. I mean, I remember hearing stuff, but I didn’t feel nothing. I ain’t talking about no easy beating—they broke my jaw, and my head must have been this big. And Barbara was saying, ‘Stop hitting him, you’re gonna kill him.’ That’s when she reached under the pillow. And I remember her pulling the gun out and firing, firing, firing. And she said, ‘This motherfucker took the goddamn bullets out.’ Then Charles took the gun from her and hit her in the jaw and knocked her down. And going out, he ran into the door and busted his head wide open.”

There were headlines in the papers about “Cooke Family Feuds,” and charges were filed against Charles for his pistol whipping of his brother’s widow. The official story was that Charles had come to demand his royalties for “Chain Gang,” on which he was still listed as coauthor, and that when Barbara found out what he was there for, “she became indignant [and] pulled a gun.” Within a month, at Barbara’s request, the charges were dropped, and Bobby turned out to be right; though he never actually won Charles over, he never had any trouble from him again. Bobby’s brothers wanted to go to Chicago and make it a war, “but I said, ‘I jumped in this by myself, and I’m going to deal with it by myself.’ Sooner or later everything gets old.”

He had confidence in his talent. He knew that before too long he was going to make it. After all, Sam had believed in him, why shouldn’t he believe in himself? Barbara was hot and cold about his ambitions. Sometimes she was tender with him. “She said, ‘Why do you want to go on the road? Why don’t I just build you a club, and you can sing there every weekend?’ I said, ‘Aw, baby, that won’t be no challenge. I got to travel and all that. I got to make my own.’ She said, ‘Well, I’m not going to risk losing you like Sam. Sam used to be just like you. Square and clean, till he got out there on that road, and he just couldn’t resist.’”

He would awaken to find her crying. Sometimes she would be screaming and hitting her head against the wall. He knew how much she thought about Vincent, he knew all about the little boy, Eric, she had tried to adopt. One day he said to her, “Why don’t you just have another baby? We’ll name him Vincent.” He didn’t really want a baby at this point, but he was willing to do it for her. So she went to the doctor and started taking hormone shots, and six months later she did get pregnant, and they did have a boy, and she named him Vincent.

In the meantime, against all of Allen’s and everyone else’s advice, she withdrew all of the money from the Tracey account, converted Sam’s tax-free bonds into cash, and in July sued to dissolve the Kags Music Corporation. Bobby tried to tell her that she was going to undo everything Sam had worked for, “but at that point I was back in school again, and she was the boss.” As he saw it, Barbara simply didn’t know who to trust, and with Alexander and Allen off together in England to sign up the Rolling Stones and some of those other English groups, she had no idea, as Bobby said, who was “on her team.”

In the end her lawsuit against J.W. succeeded only in creating a deadlocked corporation, and, faced with the tax bill that resulted from her conversion of all of her assets into cash, she sold her half of the company to Hugo and Luigi in June 1966 for the bargain-basement price of $75,000. Little more than six months later, when they found themselves deadlocked in much the same way as Barbara, primarily, they came to believe, due to the actions of the company’s administrator, they sold their half to the administrator, Allen Klein, for what amounted to double the price they had paid. By the time that Allen bought out J.W. for $350,000 two years later, RCA had run out of new Sam Cooke tracks to issue, but his presence never ceased to be felt not just on the pop charts (where everyone from the Animals and Herman’s Hermits to Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, and Aretha Franklin continued to interpret his songs) but as a symbol of an era that glowed with racial pride, ambition, and promise. When Martin Luther King was killed, Rosa Parks, the woman who had galvanized the Movement in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on the bus, was sitting at home with her mother, and in the midst of their tears, holding each other and rocking back and forth, they played Sam’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Sam’s “smooth voice,” she said, “was like medicine to the soul. It was as if Dr. King was speaking directly to me.”

For those closest to Sam, his words, his sayings, his drive and determination, that almost invincible optimism and beguiling good humor remained a beacon illuminating their way. His death was something with which many of them were unable to contend, but his life—and his spirit—were a rare glimpse of the kind of enlightenment to which each, in his or her own way, might momentarily aspire. Other than his brother L.C., he found his greatest disciple in Bobby, who did go on to the success that Sam had predicted for him, though not without the pitfalls that sometimes, in his more sentimental moments, he thought Sam might have helped him to avoid. As Bobby noted, Sam’s greatest lesson was to cherish each moment. “I knew I loved it, but I didn’t know I loved it that much. I couldn’t even appreciate it [at the time]. You know, you get caught up in it till you’re on a merry-go-round, but if I could say one thing to anybody in this business, it would be, ‘Don’t pass up a day when you could make something count. Do it to your fullest ability.’ ’Cause you never go back to [those days] again.”

For Barbara, after all the bitterness and recriminations, even today in the midst of her ongoing argument with Sam, it is the beginning that she always returns to, when snowflakes fell like crystals and diamonds as the two of them huddled together in Ellis Park. “That was our spot. It was so quiet and serene, with those beautiful lights [shining] on all that clean, soft snow. We’d walk around the park for hours and fantasize. We didn’t have a dime between us, but you’d have thought I was the princess, and he was the prince. Every time a Cadillac went by, I’d say, ‘That’s our chauffeur. He’s coming to take us [home] to our mansion.’ Sam said, ‘You’re my love. I’ll always love you—forever.’ And I believed that till he died. Do you know that’s everybody’s ending? Everybody wants a happy ending. That’s the way I see it.”

Courtesy of Carol Ann Woods

Notes

THE MAJORITY OF THE INTERVIEW MATERIAL
is my own, but I am indebted to John Broven, Rick Coleman, Ray Funk, Lee Hildebrand, Cilla Huggins, Dred Scott Keyes, David Kunian, Joe McEwen, Bill Millar, Opal Louis Nations, Michael Ochs, Ed Pearl, Lee Poole, Steve Propes, Ben Sandmel, and Doug Seroff for sharing their raw, and in many cases unpublished, tapes and transcripts, which are specifically acknowledged in the notes themselves.

At BMG (RCA) Glenn Korman, Jeff Walker, Rob Santos, and Vicky Sarro all went out of their way to help.

I can’t imagine writing about Sam’s years with the Soul Stirrers without having had the kind of access to the Specialty Records archives that Bill Belmont provided, along with the insightful commentary and interpretation supplied by both Bill and Billy Vera.

Allen Klein opened up the most extraordinary source of insight and information of all when he made available to me the complete archive of newspaper clippings, filmed television performances, AFM session sheets, original tape boxes and session tapes (interpreted by Teri Landi), legal documents, photographs, and contractual and booking information (the whole curated by Cheri Wild) that he has assembled over the years.

Many others contributed their time and resources, and I have tried to indicate my thanks and indebtedness in both these notes and the acknowledgments that follow.

What I have
not
done is to provide source notes for my own interviews, simply because in many cases I have interviewed people fifteen or twenty times (and frequently more) over the course sometimes of nearly as many years, and to attempt to separate out each strand of conversation would amount to a deconstruction of text, and an accumulation of source notes, that might equal the length of the book itself. So, where a quotation is not sourced, it can be assumed to come from one of my own interviews.

PROLOGUE: “THE QCS ARE IN THE HOUSE”

3
“There is no music like that music”: James Baldwin,
The Fire Next Time,
p. 47.

4
“Mayor of Bronzeville”: Albert G. Barnett, “R. H. Harris Elected Mayor of Bronzeville,”
Chicago Defender,
November 10, 1945. Harris won by 87,800 votes “in the most bitterly contested election in Bronzeville history.” The election was, in fact, a contest sponsored by the
Defender
“in an effort to have a Negro member of the community take an active part in neighborhood affairs,” with each sixty-cent ticket purchased to the election “frolic” at the Club DeLisa (which doubled as party site and polling place) worth one hundred votes.

4
“a new song”: W. E. B. DuBois quoted in Mike Marqusee,
Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties,
pp. 93-94.

4
“a freedom . . . close to love”: Baldwin,
The Fire Next Time,
p. 55.

5
It is at his signal: The specific description comes primarily from my interviews with Marvin Jones, augmented by Dred Scott Keyes’ interview with Leroy Crume.

6
“He was just singing from his heart”: Interview with Ann Thompson Taylor.

THE SINGING CHILDREN

9
the church split in two: The schism is delineated in Edith L. Blumhofer,
Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture,
pp. 77-78.

10
Mound Bayou, a self-sufficient all-black township: Information on Mound Bayou is derived from Neil R. McMillen,
Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow,
pp. 186-187, and
Mississippi: The WPA Guide to the Magnolia State
(originally published 1938).

11
Christ Temple Cathedral: Otho B. Cobbins, ed.,
History of Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A. 1895-1965,
pp. 175-176.

13
“I worked up to one hundred and twenty-five”: Daniel Wolff with S. R. Crain, Clifton White, and G. David Tenenbaum,
You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke,
pp. 26-27.

14
“When they’d come back, the people would tell me”: Reverend Charles Cook, at a press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria on his son’s induction into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, 1986.

14
“Brother, I made my money!”: Wolff,
You Send Me,
p. 32.

21
He established his
own
business: The fence slat-selling business was also related by Sam, “with sparkling eyes and laughing,” in the first part of a two-part profile by Ernestine Cofield, “Close Look at Sam Cooke: From ‘Rags to Riches’ Story of Young Chi Club Singer,”
Chicago Defender,
October 18, 1958.

22
His teachers described Sam as “personable and aggressive”: “Friends Doubt Singer’s Death Story,”
Chicago Defender,
December 14, 1964.

23
he was given a solo at the Christmas show: Don Nelsen, “A Successful Cooke,”
New York Sunday Daily News,
July 16, 1961.

23
“We had to belong to a club to go to school”: Ernestine Cofield, “Close Look at Sam Cooke,”
Chicago Defender,
October 18, 1958.

25
“too old to be getting up there singing”: Wolff,
You Send Me,
p. 39.