Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (47 page)

The band was onstage playing behind a makeshift Travelers trio, who were running through their limited repertoire with increasing concern. Jesse Whitaker hadn’t wanted to go on without their lead singer, but J.W. insisted they had no choice, with Kansas City Bell’s Hollywood Band rapidly running out of tunes. The crowd was growing more and more restive, and Jesse said to Alex, not for the first time, “Something’s wrong,” when a couple of white Highway Patrol officers appeared at the door and confirmed Whitaker’s worst fears. There had been an accident outside Marion, Arkansas, and it sounded bad.

The way they all later came to understand it, it happened just like it could have happened any number of times before. Sam was having too good a time with his girl to leave, and he kept putting off and putting off his time of departure until, finally, it was late afternoon before he and Clif and Lou and Eddie got on the road. They ran into heavy traffic on the two-lane highway between St. Louis and Memphis, and Eddie was putting on speed when he came up over a big hill on U.S. 61 a little after 8:00
P.M.
, with 150 miles still to go. By the time he saw the big cottonseed truck that had stopped to come to the aid of another truck with a load of soybeans, it was too late, he had no room to pull around, and with a sickening screech of metal, he ended up going under the first truck. Sam was asleep in the front passenger seat, with Clif sitting behind him and Lou behind the driver. When Clif woke up, the truck was in the front seat, and Eddie was moaning, practically cut in half by the bullet steering wheel. Lou was out cold, his head flattened by the bar that held the convertible top in place, and Clif was all wracked up inside, with his shoulder and collarbone feeling like they were broke. Fearfully he glanced over at Sam, who by all odds should have been dead, but it looked like all that had happened to Sam were a few minor scratches and some glass slivers in his eye.

They were all taken to the nearest colored hospital, Crittenden Memorial in West Memphis, where Eddie died. Then Lou was transferred to Kennedy Veterans’ Hospital in Memphis, still in a coma, after Crain and Alex arrived and loudly insisted that as an ex-paratrooper, the man was eligible for better treatment. At their urging, Sam and Clif were moved to Memphis, to E. H. Crump, another colored hospital but one with better facilities than Crittenden. The band remained out on the road, doing its best to fulfill all its bookings with an acrobatic blues singer named Guitar Shorty that Tate had picked up in New Orleans. J.W., Crain, and the two remaining Travelers, meanwhile camped out at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, waiting to see how things would turn out.

J.W. went out to Kennedy every day to check on Lou’s condition, which remained the same until Sunday, when he awoke but failed to recognize his stepfather, Keg, who had flown in from Los Angeles. Sam was scheduled to be released from the hospital the following day and was feeling good enough to give an interview to the
Memphis World.
He was getting “good service [at Crump],” he told the
World
reporter. “I don’t believe it could be better anywhere else.” The vision in his left eye was still somewhat impaired, he said, and he was in a fair amount of pain, but he considered himself lucky not to have been killed, and, he said, “I’m going back to work as soon as they release me. . . . I’m going to catch up with the band right away.”

As it turned out, he joined Crain and J.W. first at the Lorraine, where they waited for Lou to get better. J.W. continued to go out to the hospital every day, but now it was to prod Lou with song lyrics and melodies, which seemed to be the one way of bringing his memory back. When the doctors saw the salutary effect, they agreed with J.W. that maybe the best thing for him was to get back on the road, big bandage on his head, confused state of mind and all.

The news of the accident traveled throughout the black community. It was carried in virtually every black newspaper in the country and taken as a sign by many of what the preachers had been warning about all along: this was what happened when a man turned his back on God. Some said it out loud, others just thought it, but the sentiment was impossible to avoid in any social stratum.

Charles Cook brought Crain’s new Oldsmobile down from Chicago, and Sam asked him if he would stay on at least for the duration of the tour. Charles didn’t mind. He wasn’t doing much anyway, he was just getting over a bullet wound that he had sustained in a fight over a woman after a party in the old neighborhood. So he agreed to stay out with his brother. He would see how he liked it, and they could go on from there.

One morning, just after he got out of the hospital, Sam and J.W. were having breakfast at the Lorraine. Sam was getting more and more anxious to catch up with the band. They had a weekend date coming up in Orlando, another show in Fort Lauderdale, and a one-week booking at the Palms of Jacksonville starting on December 1. To anyone else Sam might have seemed unshaken, but Alex could tell the future was very much on his mind. Somehow the subject turned to publishing, and Sam asked once again about Alex’s company, Kags. “Man, I keep telling you, you ought to get
you
a publishing company,” Alex said. “Well, who’s in your company?” asked Sam. Alex just looked at him. Sam knew it wasn’t nobody but him, he said. And with that, for no reason other than that he seemed to have finally made up his mind on the subject, Sam said, “How about us being partners?” Alex didn’t hesitate for even one second. With a big grin he reached across the table and grasped Sam’s hand.

“I said, ‘Okay, partner, I’ll build us the biggest fucking publishing company in the world.’”

Sam, Barbara, and Linda

L
OU RAWLS’ MOTHER
, Evie, and her husband, Keg, threw a big welcome-home Christmas party at their place on 3011 LaSalle just off Western near the Watkins Hotel. Lou was still recovering from the accident and taking it easy, and Keg was, as usual, busy behind the bar. The whole gang was there, not just René and his wife, Sugar, and Alex and Oopie but all of Evie and Keg’s friends and their friends’ kids, too, including Sam’s little girl, Linda, all dressed up in a brightly colored party dress. At one point in the evening everyone was out on the dance floor doing the cha-cha, even the children, and Sam was standing on the sidelines watching Linda, when all of a sudden at the turnaround, one of the kids called out, “Everybody, cha cha cha!” It just caught his attention, the festive holiday spirit, everybody dancing, his little baby out there on the floor, and almost without thinking the song arrived full-blown in his mind: “Everybody loves to cha cha cha.” It took him all of five minutes to write it down—he grabbed a piece of paper and scratched out the lyrics while everyone else continued with their laughing and carrying on—and when he went into the studio the week after New Year’s, he laid it down just like that.

Like all of Sam’s best songs, it told a simple story in elegantly concise fashion. The singer and his girlfriend go to a dance, and, as they walk in, the band is playing a cha-cha, skillfully invoked by the sprightly combination of congas, bongo drums, and percussion. The singer’s girlfriend doesn’t know how to do the cha-cha, but the singer tells her not to worry, the band will soon be playing another type of song. Except they don’t. For an hour and a half “every song they played was the cha cha cha,” emphasized now by the cowbell that enters the instrumental picture. To save the day the singer wisely offers to teach his girl how to cha cha cha, but then as they keep dancing, “Was I surprised / For, you see / After we practiced for a little while / She was doing it better than me.” And so it ends, with Sam first offering instruction and then perhaps being
given
instruction, only to tail off with his characteristically graceful “Whoa-oa-oh,” with a “La-ta-ta-ta” thrown in for good measure at the fade.

Sam and Barbara.

Courtesy of the Estate of Clif White

It is a piece of such pure, irresistible froth that it’s easy to overlook the craft: the way in which, as J.W. admiringly noted with all the envy of a fellow craftsman who more often than not created a generic product, Sam always told a particular story, the way that Sam was somehow able to project himself
into
the story and thereby invite every teenage girl or grown woman who heard the song to imagine that she was the one teaching Sam (who really didn’t know how to do the cha-cha!).

“It was all I could do to concentrate on the music,” recalled Darlene Love, a high school senior at the time who was in the studio with her group, the Blossoms, to sing backup on the song. Sam was eating breakfast in his hotel room when she and the other girls in the group first met him, “wearing only a silk robe and cute little briefs . . . there was no escaping the man’s beauty.” Even
he
couldn’t seem to get around his own beauty, she observed, sneaking frequent and approving looks at himself in the mirror. But that didn’t make them like him any less. Here in the studio, she and the other girls were all but mesmerized by his presence. “He had this way of biting his lower lip that made the walls come tumbling down. Gloria [Jones, another member of the group] saw it, too, and we got to the point where we could anticipate the glorious overbite. ‘Look, look,’ Gloria would whisper, ‘he’s gonna do it again. Lord save us.’”

Everyone was knocked out by the way the song came together, and they rushed the record out, with “Little Things You Do,” the ballad J.W. had written for Sam, on the B-side. Both songs were registered to Kags Music, and, just as Alex had promised, John Siamas agreed to split the publishing with them on the record, with half going to Kags, half to Keen’s new publishing arm, Hermosa. Which was more, Sam noted, than Bumps had been able to accomplish in a year and a half, and he began to take more and more seriously what by now nearly everyone was telling him: Bumps was out for Bumps first and foremost, he really didn’t have Sam’s interests at heart. Alex was even pissed off about the record. He thought Bumps had deliberately left the bottom off his song, and no matter how much he protested that you couldn’t hear the fucking bass, the sound never improved. Sam wasn’t so sure about that, he didn’t think Bumps would deliberately sabotage Alex’s number—but he
was
convinced that Bumps, for whatever reason, simply wasn’t up to the job.

The week after the “Cha Cha” session, he went back into the studio to begin work on his most ambitious project yet. Together with René Hall he had conceived of an album that would pay tribute to forty-three-year-old jazz legend Billie Holiday, whose sinuous, sophisticated vocal style had served as an inspiration to a generation of singers, from Frank Sinatra to Sarah Vaughan. With her intimate, behind-the-beat conversational approach, hornlike phrasing, and transformational way with a lyric, she was not the first person who would have come to mind as an influence on the composer of “You Send Me” and “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha.” For Sam, though, Holiday’s strengths—the tart transparency, the unfailing interpretive skills, above all the deep-seated melancholy at the heart of her music, no matter what the actual words might be—clearly served as an inspiration in the development of a style that, like Holiday’s, in the words of black novelist Leon Forrest, could itself be seen as “simple on the surface yet rich with colorations, illusions, nuances, and contradictions when you commenced to unveil the layers.”

Unfortunately, the arrangements that Sam and René Hall worked out at René’s Selma Avenue office reflected neither the spare astringency of Holiday’s music nor the underlying subtlety of Sam’s. With Sam establishing the basic guidelines, René wrote out the parts for such classic songs as “God Bless the Child,” Duke Ellington’s “Solitude,” and “Lover Come Back to Me” in much the same way that he had arranged the standards at the heart of Sam’s nightclub act and his two Keen albums to date. That same insistence on radical reinterpretation that had so shocked both René and Clif White when they first encountered Sam’s approach to “Summertime,” that same sense of unassailable confidence, even cockiness, with which he had previously tackled work by Billy Eckstine, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Nat “King” Cole were still present in abundance. What was missing was a sense of the songs themselves.

The first session, and each of the succeeding three, had an orchestra of no less than fifteen or sixteen musicians, and while the lineup featured a number of prominent L.A. jazz players, the arrangements are stuffed with harps, cellos, violas, clavinets, and overblown vocal choruses. The effect, not infrequently, is disconcerting, as Sam seems unable to subordinate the easy fluency of his voice to the deeper meaning of the song. “This is a sincere album,” veteran saxophonist Benny Carter (who had first played and arranged for Holiday twenty years earlier) would write in his liner notes—and indeed it is. And yet, like so many well-intentioned stabs at upward social and musical mobility, it is a mistaken one, a rare instance in which Sam’s innate capacity to assess a situation clearly, then bring his skills to bear upon it, is overwhelmed by the impatient need, bred in him since childhood, to take his place at the table.