Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (16 page)

He would joke about it with the other Soul Stirrers while they were in the car traveling on to the next town. They were all married, of course, but, he quickly discovered, no one was married on the road. And no one was attached past the date of the program or, geographically, beyond the city limits. They rehearsed in the car as they drove; Crain would give them a pitch, and they would all chime in, working out new arrangements, perfecting their harmonies, trying out new material. They still weren’t able to take the program from the Blind Boys, but with J.W.’s encouragement and Crain’s coaching, Sam was able more and more to establish his own tone—it was a matter, as Alex said, of lowering the volume to the point where people almost had to pay attention. Sam studied the audience as much as they studied him; he fixed on a girl and tried to get her until he could feel the rest of them starting to come across, he could feel the thrum start to build in the church or auditorium as he took out a comb and ran it through his carefully processed hair or played with what he knew to be the seductive sound of his own voice.

In St. Petersburg, five-year-old Ann Thompson, whose father, Reverend Goldie Thompson, promoted all the gospel shows in the Tampa-St. Pete area, fell in love. All the gospel groups used to stay with the Thompsons in their public housing unit in Jordan Park, and she was used to the neighbors coming around and gawking at all these out-of-town “celebrities,” but Sam was different—and it wasn’t just that he was so much closer to her own age than all these men she had gotten used to calling “uncle.” He had a way of
communicating
that no one else had. It was like he himself said. “Now, listen, Cheese,” he told her, using her family nickname, “I’m not your uncle, I’m not your cousin. I’m your guardian angel.” And he was, too, protecting her from the imaginary monsters she was afraid of, taking her on his shoulders sometimes when he sang, reading to her so the familiar Bible stories came alive in a language that was both fresh and respectful and that developed the story line in a way that kept you in total suspense. She was a sickly child, but she felt safe around him, and as much as she loved to hear him sing, what she loved most about him was the way he took her
seriously,
the way it seemed he “could adapt to anything or anybody and make them feel comfortable.”

“W
E ARE VERY PROUD
of the group,” Art Rupe wrote to Crain in September. “As a matter of fact, we want to thank you for suggesting that we put out ‘Jesus Gave Me Water’ and keeping on us until we did.”

The single had sold thirty-five thousand copies by this time, eight thousand more than “By and By,” the Stirrers’ greatest success with Harris, though considerably less than the Pilgrim Travelers’ biggest sellers or Brother Joe May’s “Search Me Lord,” which had sold almost seventy thousand copies in 1950 alone. Gospel music was clearly making great strides in terms of both sales and public acceptance, though privately Rupe continued to doubt that the record-buying audience would ever “reward gospel singers the way popular stars were rewarded [because] the business had a quasi-religious tone and the public was not yet conditioned to financially support [it].” Still, as the
Chicago Defender
pointed out the same week that it advertised the Soul Stirrers’ annual fall program, with the Five Blind Boys, at DuSable, “gospel singing is not only popular but very lucrative.” As proof the article cited sales of over a million copies of the Blind Boys’ “Our Father” on the Peacock label, a mark that
Defender
columnist Charles Hopkins must surely have been aware was apocryphal but nonetheless was indicative of an accomplishment “the Blind Boys can be proud of, especially when you consider the limited market.”

It was a time of expansive plans and heady optimism, in which J.W. Alexander, less of a skeptic perhaps than Art, foresaw a day when gospel would be promoted just like pop. In fact, he felt, you could already see it beginning to happen, with Mahalia’s popularity reaching into new areas every day and the wedding that summer of flamboyant gospel shouter and guitar player Sister Rosetta Tharpe attracting a crowd of twenty thousand at Griffith Stadium, home of the American League Washington Senators, where tickets were sold at prices of up to $2.50 and the turnout far outdrew the Senators’ usual attendance.

It was, as many in the community saw it, part of a too-long-delayed recognition of Afro-American culture, with downhome blues emerging as a potent sales force, hailed self-consciously in another
Defender
article as “a part of our American heritage . . . that we should be proud, not ashamed, of,” and John Lee Hooker, one of the subjects of the story, “personif[ying] a way of life familiar to many of our older citizens who have migrated from the south.”

And yet even as that way of life was being recognized, it was being overtaken, too, by the arrival of a new kind of music that incorporated elements of both blues and gospel and that had only recently been dubbed “rhythm and blues” by
Billboard
correspondent Jerry Wexler, who introduced the new nomenclature as “more appropriate to more enlightened times” and would join Atlantic Records to produce some of the best new rhythm and blues records not long afterward. The music itself eschewed the sophisticated voicings of Lucky Millinder’s and Billy Eckstine’s big bands, while at the same time sidestepping both the sly hepness of Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five and the directness of John Lee Hooker’s and Muddy Waters’ blues. It was all about emotion, just like gospel music, but in the case of groups like the Orioles and the Dominoes, whose second single, “Sixty-Minute Man,” topped the rhythm and blues charts all that summer, it was a quivering kind of emotion that combined sexual explicitness with unabashed declarations of romantic love. Gospel-trained voices like those of the Orioles’ Sonny Til and the Dominoes’ arresting falsetto lead, Clyde McPhatter, suggested a different kind of ecstasy than anything they had sung about in church, one that the quartet singers might well identify with but could never publicly admit. More and more, the new music infiltrated their world, and the visible rewards which its more worldly practitioners so often enjoyed were all around them, mocking the meager “offerings” that they took from their programs.

T
HE SOUL STIRRERS’ SECOND SINGLE
from the March 1951 session, “Come, Let Us Go Back to God,” and “Joy, Joy to My Soul,” which Art issued at Crain’s recommendation at the beginning of October (“The public is crazy about them,” Crain wrote in advocating the release of the two titles), didn’t sell anywhere near as well as their unexpected hit, but it was a measure of Crain’s new standing with his employer that Art took the recommendation seriously, and it gave the Stirrers a nice point of contemporary reference in their programs.

By the time that Art saw the group again for their next session at the end of February 1952, he was astonished at the improvement the young man had made under Crain’s guidance in just one year. However confident he may now have been of Sam’s talent, though, not to mention the Stirrers’ surprising burst of popularity, he did not trust either one enough to allow the group to explore the intimate sound they had experimented with behind Sam’s quiet lead toward the end of their last session. In fact, in a bow to the kind of “modernization” that had contributed to the success of the Five Blind Boys and many of the other acts on black Houston nightclub owner Don Robey’s Peacock label, Art added drums after the first two takes of the first number, the chief effect being to coarsen the group’s careful harmonic blend along with an occasional rushing of the beat. Sam contributed one original, “Just Another Day,” a pretty melody on which he and Paul traded increasingly insistent verses, and then, after a couple of indifferent numbers, they revisited “How Far am I From Canaan?,” the W. H. Brewster composition with which Art had been so dissatisfied at their previous session. They got it down to two minutes and forty-seven seconds this time, ten seconds off the previous version, and Art was so enthusiastic about their rehearsal performance of the song that he noted, “Best number that we did today. Three As and a plus!” It probably
was
the best number they did, along with Sam’s original, but it somehow missed the mark—it missed the aching sense of loss, of
lostness,
that was the unique center of Sam’s voice. More to the point, it made clear that Art still did not have full confidence in the particular properties of his new lead singer’s appeal, the sinuous, almost sexual nature of his style.

None of the releases in the first six months of the new year sold especially well. Art rushed out “How Far Am I From Canaan?” within a couple of weeks of the session, but it sold only fourteen thousand copies by July, when sales began to dwindle. It was a matter of relative indifference to the group from a financial point of view. With royalties established contractually at two cents a record, the difference between fifteen thousand and thirty thousand total sales (representing the sum of all Soul Stirrers releases in a quarterly royalty period) was very little, and there was virtually no likelihood of ever having more than $600 to divide among five group members at any given time. Records, in fact, were little more than a means to keep the public’s interest alive—record
sales
were merely important in order to maintain the record company’s interest and thereby ensure money and promotion for personal appearances. By the end of 1952, the Soul Stirrers had five singles out with Sam singing lead (Art released Sam’s composition “Just Another Day” in late August, and it sold somewhat better than “How Far Am I From Canaan?”), but it was still “Jesus Gave Me Water” that audiences called for every time.

Art meanwhile had discovered a new market whose potential he had suspected from the day he first went into the music business but whose existence no one had ever been able to actually verify until now. With New Orleans-born Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” Specialty Records had the first bona fide industry-wide crossover hit.

R
UPE HAD SET OUT FOR NEW ORLEANS
in March of 1952, some two weeks after the Soul Stirrers’ session, not with the idea of crossover success but in hopes of discovering an artist who could match twenty-four-year-old New Orleans piano player Fats Domino’s notable record of commercial success—and thoroughly disarming musical charm—in the r&b market. He set up a series of auditions at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studio on North Rampart Street, where Fats had recorded all of his regional and national hits, but after a week in which nearly every one of the singers sounded to Rupe “amateurish and quite poor,” he was about to give up when this “young fellow showed up just as I was getting ready to leave.”

The young fellow was twenty-year-old Lloyd Price, and he had heard about the audition through Fats’ bandleader, Dave Bartholomew. He practically had to beg Rupe to listen to his song (“I thought he was going to cry when . . . I told him it was time for me to go”), but when Art heard it, he was knocked out by both the song, which the boy called “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” after a Maxwell House Coffee commercial that local DJ Okey Dokey had put together in his style of rhyming patter (“Lawdy, Miss Clawdy, drink Maxwell House Coffee and eat Mother’s homemade pies!”), and its delivery. “It was,” Rupe recalled, “very emotional, very fervent.” It also had a freshness, a kind of optimistic vulnerability that was reminiscent both of gospel music and of B.B. King’s new gospel-influenced blues. At the same time, though, it possessed a
flair
that, it seemed evident, no one but this kid, with his engaging manner and wide, open grin, could put across.

Art quickly organized a session, using Dave Bartholomew as the leader plus the core of the Fats Domino band, with Fats himself laying down those immediately recognizable rolling piano triplets that had established his style. They recorded three additional titles, but “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” was clearly the one, and Art released it without a lot of fanfare a month and a half after the New Orleans session. It entered the r&b charts on May 17 and stayed there for much of the remainder of the year, occupying the number-one spot for seven weeks in the summer of 1952 and becoming Specialty’s first bona fide million-seller without any official acknowledgment in the pop marketplace. But it was white under-the-counter sales that raised it from the status of just another “race records” hit.

“The white retail shops began to carry it because market demand dictates where the product goes,” Rupe summed up years later with the irrefutable logic of the financial analyst. In fact, one of the biggest obstacles to getting the kind of sales for a gospel or rhythm and blues hit that a pop record could achieve was the very absence of conventional retail outlets. Race records promotion was still based primarily on word of mouth within the community, and merchandise was sold at least as often at barbershops, shoe-shine parlors, and taxi stands as at the kind of record store where you might be able to find a wide variety of choices carefully set out in neatly ordered bins.

The widespread growth of radio, increased teenage buying power after the war, and changing social and racial mores were suddenly beginning to affect record-buying habits, particularly in the white community, something that was not lost on the independent labels that operated on the margins of the business. “As far as we can determine,” wrote Atlantic Records executives Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun in
Cash Box
in 1954, “the first area where the blues stepped out . . . was the South. Distributors there about two years ago began to report that white high school and college kids were picking up on the rhythm and blues records—primarily to dance to—[and] conservative old line . . . record stores in southern cities found themselves compelled to stock, display, and push rhythm and blues recordings.” They went on to cite numerous examples of this trend which had “swept the rhythm and blues markets and [gone] on to become favorites with many, many young white record fans,” and “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” appropriately—from the standpoint of both chronology and sales—led the list.