Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (26 page)

C
RUME NEVER REALLY
got to know Dolores. In fact, he was no more able to understand why Sam had gotten married than anyone else. But maybe that was what R.B. meant when he called Sam “The Great Pretender”: from Crume’s point of view, Sam was almost flawless in his portrayal of this “happy-go-lucky, free-spirit type of guy,” but maybe he just never chose to fully reveal himself to any of them.

If that was the case, it would have been hard to say who Sam did reveal himself to. In many respects it seemed as if even without all of his reading and all of his restless exploration of worlds that were otherwise foreclosed to him, he would have had every reason to feel displaced. The church that had been the center of his childhood was long gone, and his parents, after two years in Cleveland, were once again traveling the evangelical trail. His brother Charles was in jail. The hollow shell of his marriage and his wife’s consequent isolation and depression were evident to everyone around him, and his daughter by his childhood sweetheart was growing up without a real father, just as his other children elsewhere saw him only when his travels happened to bring him to their town.

The rest of the Soul Stirrers, for all of their own “happy-go-lucky” ways, owned property and had settled families of their own, while Sam had just moved out of R.B. Robinson’s basement apartment for a flat around the corner from Crain’s spacious new home on Woodlawn Avenue. And, while there was no question, even within the group, that he was the principal drawing card and “star,” he had to share his income equally with all of the others, even his songwriting royalties, which, while they belonged to him by contract and by law, according to a long-established Soul Stirrer principle were treated as just another by-product of the group’s shared labor.

There was a distinct feeling of dissatisfaction on every front. He had joined Clay Evans’ Fellowship Baptist Church the previous fall both because he knew Clay from his days as a spiritual singer and because all the other Stirrers except Paul belonged. It appeared to his brother L.C., though, to be more of a social obligation than a source of spiritual solace. In fact, while few in the gospel world doubted his
sincerity,
many might have questioned the depth of his faith, and clearly it was not salvation that was on his mind so much as the disparity between what he had and what he wanted—and his own inability, for all of the strength of his rational impulse, to define exactly what that was. His wit, his charm, his instinctive kindness and shining intellectual gifts were qualities lost on no one, and he was well aware of his capacity to draw upon vast reservoirs of trust and love, but it was his own ability to give love back that weighed on him, it was his own ability to bestow the kind of unqualified love that some gave to a woman, some gave to God, that was of increasing concern to him as he continued to ponder the future course of his life.

F
OR THE TIME BEING
it was the road that would have to serve as his only refuge and the strangers that he met along the road as his closest friends. To Bobby Womack, the twelve-year-old middle child of the Womack Brothers, a family group consisting of five siblings managed by their father, Friendly, and largely confined to the Cleveland area by their father’s job in the steel mills, “Sam brought a whole new element to gospel. He started bringing young people into the church to the point where it was like a rock ’n’ roll show, chicks pulling up their dresses, and he’s going out in the crowd and rubbing some girl’s leg while he’s singing, and she jump straight up in the air!

“And the preachers all
hated
it. I mean, the preacher’s sitting up there, [preacher] has a limousine, he’s got all the mothers and he’s hitting on their daughters, and he’s saying, ‘It’s disgusting. Who do [this gospel singer] think he is?’ But
I’m
saying, ‘Damn, this is great. That cat right there is cold. Yeah, that’s what I want to do.’ I didn’t think Sam was putting on no show. He was just enjoying himself.”

He always got them with his new song, “Wonderful,” which the Stirrers had recorded at their February session, just before Crume joined the group. Composed by Chicago gospel pioneers Virginia Davis and Theodore Frye and well known from a raw 1952 treatment by Sister Jessie Mae Renfro accompanied by the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, “Wonderful” was transformed in Sam’s velvety version into a love song whose divine subject, while unmistakably referenced, could understandably be mistaken by the girls to whom Sam directed his seductive reading. “Whoa-oa-o, He’s so wonderful,” Sam crooned, returning again and again to the vocal mannerism that had become his signature and evoking again and again sighs, screams, and ululations of their own from his new teenage fans and their mothers. From the perspective of seventeen-year-old Mavis Staples, whose family gospel group, the Staple Singers, had just signed with the Vee Jay label, “He had an air about him, you know, just a little slick young man. I loved to see him because he was so handsome. And I loved to hear him laugh. That was all the talk with the ladies, how good-looking this man was. And when the time came for the Soul Stirrers to sing, the people would just go wild.” The new song became his calling card, and Dorothy Love, whose group, the Gospel Harmonettes, always gave the Stirrers stiff competition, took to calling him “Mr. Wonderful” in joking recognition of the effect that it had predominantly on his female audience.

There was a humid air of sexual excitement almost everywhere that he appeared. Whatever form of sublimation had previously served as its disguise was gone now, replaced by the kind of naked avidity that might have been more threatening had Sam not been, as Dorothy Love suggested, “so good-looking and charming,” so undeniably
boyish
in his appeal. Perhaps that was what allowed him to skitter back from the edge of outright vulgarity, to get away with things that would have simply seemed coarse in the presentations of others. What he couldn’t get away from were the feelings that he aroused, the kind of pansexual hysteria that future r&b star Sam Moore witnessed as a member of a gospel quartet called the Mellonaires in Miami and, like Bobby Womack, compared to a rock ’n’ roll show. “This man was so smooth, so good, and such class,” Moore told writer Daniel Wolff, “I’ve seen women just pass out trying to get to him.” Even the gospel promoter in Miami, “an open gay” in a field in which homosexuality, while not uncommon, was mostly hidden, was so inflamed by Sam’s “pretty-boy” appeal, according to Moore, that he was affected in exactly the same way as the women. “I know,” Moore said of the promoter’s reaction, while stipulating that he was certainly not aware of any reciprocity of feeling on Sam’s part, “[he] loved himself some Sam Cook.”

It was not just the preachers who disapproved of the erotic atmosphere, either. Some of the other singers tut-tutted about Sammy getting the “big head.” “I think it was mainly that the young ladies was just crazy about him,” said Five Blind Boys bass singer Johnny Fields, “because I’ve never known Sam to willfully do something to somebody that would cause a conflict. But they drew their own impression.” Even his sisters looked somewhat askance at Sam’s new “jitterbug” image, while his brother L.C. took it as his model. Sam had started wearing his hair in a high pompadour that was processed to the bone, “and we didn’t like it at all,” said his older sister Hattie, “and we told him. He had too good hair to be having any process on it. We thought it was terrible.”

Sam, on the other hand, couldn’t tear his gaze away from the exploding crossover success of some of the new r&b rages. Thirteen-year-old Frankie Lymon, whose “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” had just gone to number six on the pop charts. Former Drifters and Dominoes lead singer Clyde McPhatter, out of the army now and on his own, whose ethereal gospel-laced falsetto was just crashing the pop charts with “Treasure of Love.” Eighteen-year-old Little Willie John, whom Sam had known as a pre-teen with his family gospel group in Detroit, was now knocking out audiences all over the country with his seductive “Fever.” Ray Charles had just had his third number-one r&b hit with a gospel sound no less pronounced than the Soul Stirrers’. Fats Domino was pulling in up to $2,500 a night playing to audiences of predominantly white teens. The Platters were well on their way to their second number-one pop hit of the year with the Ink Spots’ 1939 standard, “My Prayer,” propelled by Tony Williams’ spectacular lead tenor. And Bumps’ new protégé, Little Richard, had sold nearly two million records in just eight months and was in the midst of his third straight hit in a row (his second number one r&b) with a sound straight out of Alex Bradford and the Clara Ward Singers’ Marion Williams.

He ran into them everywhere he went, at the diners and hotels in the “colored” section of town to which they were all consigned, driving their Cadillacs, flashing their wads, surrounded by all the emblems and appurtenances of success. These were his colleagues, these were his peers, young men his own age or younger, on their way to the kind of success he had dreamt about since he was a child. He was not the sort to be jealous, but he
knew
he could compete with them in everything but material reward—and there was no question in his mind that he was equally deserving of that.

“R
ETURNED BY POPULAR DEMAND,”
announced the nearly one-quarter-page advertisement for the Soul Stirrers’ July 22, 1956, program in Atlanta, just three months since their last. “This concert will bring two stylists of lead singing together for the first time,” declared the
Atlanta Daily World.
“Years ago the Christland Singers [led by an unnamed R.H. Harris] were the Soul Stirrers. Then the group reorganized. From the revitalized group came Sam Cook, who sings the lead in ‘It’s Wonderful,’ ‘Nearer My God to Thee [
sic
],’ and other hits.” In separate squibs two and five days later, the paper cited Sam as “the inimitable lead singer” of the “No. 1 [group] in the nation’s gospel song popularity polls” and pointed out that the Christland Singers had “originated the lead singer technique used so effectively” by Sam. The program, put on by veteran gospel promoter Herman Nash, would mark the two groups’ “first battle of song.”

For Crume, “all that father against son business” was just to build up the box office. “People still fall for it, they always come out if they think there’s bad blood between two groups, in sports or anything else. But R.H. Harris was strong. And Sam was strong. I remember Crain was worried, because he was always afraid of R.H. Harris. He said, ‘That’s the singingest man in the business.’ But I checked with Sam. I said, ‘Do you feel all right?’ He said, ‘Hey, man, don’t worry.’ And I didn’t.”

It was just exciting to be back in Atlanta, where Nash and his promotion partner, B.B. Beamon, a former Pullman car porter who had started putting on rhythm and blues shows in the late forties, had most of the popular black entertainment business, both gospel and secular, to themselves. The last time the Stirrers had come to town, in April, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, and a new group called the Flames (whose uncredited lead singer, James Brown, was rapidly becoming known for crawling the floor and crying out the one essential word of their hit song, “Please Please Please,” over and over again) had all recently appeared under B.B. Beamon’s auspices at the Magnolia Ballroom on the West Side, while Little Willie John played the Magnolia just three days before their City Auditorium appearance this time. With the Royal Peacock, the brand-new Auburn Avenue Casino, Henry Wynn’s Stairway to the Stars, and all the little after-hours joints and nightspots that dotted “Sweet Auburn,” the temptation was to be on the go every night of the week, and it was Crain’s understandable intention to make sure that his “inimitable lead singer” did not do just that on their brief sojourns in town. As a result, Crain always booked the group into Herman Nash and B.B. Beamon’s hotel, the Savoy, where someone could keep an eye on Sam, and where his clear instructions were: “Check in. I don’t want you guys to go out on the street. Just send out for anything you want.”

Naturally that didn’t sit too well with Sam. They were free agents, Sam declared with some spirit to Crume, his designated “running buddy.” “He told me, ‘There’s another hotel, the Forrest Arms, not too far from here. Let’s go down there, ’cause we got to have our freedom!’” The Forrest Arms, Sam explained to Crume, was “where all the action was,” all the show-business people stayed there—and, indeed, it lived up to its reputation.

The program itself may well have been something of an anticlimax. Crume simply didn’t want to see Sam or his mentor, Harris, embarrassed, and he would have thought that Sam, for all of his bold proclamations, would have felt some misgivings, but he never saw him waver. Both groups acquitted themselves well, but, Paul Foster said afterward, “all them tricks that Harris was making, Sam made every bit of ’em, that’s what tricked it all.” The way Paul saw it, Harris was lacking an effective second lead to set him off. “He didn’t have nobody to top him out. Me and Sam was stronger than he was, and that was too bad. The booking agent, Nash, said, ‘Y’all shouldn’t have done the old man like that.’ I said, ‘Pops ought to stay in his place.’ And Harris was standing right there, and he said, ‘Boy . . . ’” Then the next night, they went on to do it all over again in Birmingham.

Barely one month later they returned to Atlanta top-billed over both sets of Blind Boys, June Cheeks’ Sensational Nightingales, the Swanee Quintet, Edna Gallmon Cook and her Singing Son, and even Mahalia Jackson’s near-rival in popularity, Clara Ward, in an event “celebrating Herman Nash’s six years of Gospel Promoting.” Because they were scheduled to be in New York the following day, Nash flew them in, while R.B. Robinson, who was afraid to fly, skipped the program and drove straight from Chicago to New York. For Crume it was an eye-opening experience. They had never played this big a show in Atlanta before, and the crowd was so huge they opened up the small auditorium as well as the big one and there still wasn’t room for everyone to get in. Crume had been needling Sam since the beginning of the summer that the only reason he was getting all the attention was that he was always introduced last. “I said, ‘That’s why people have been clapping their hands. Really, they’re yelling for me.’ Sam said, ‘Man, you must be crazy!’ I said, ‘No, you let me go last, and I’ll show you that that hand is for me.’”