Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (6 page)

Their older sister Hattie still hadn’t gone to the movies herself. “I wanted to go so bad, but I was scared of a whipping. Everyone in our group was going to the show, and I had to tell them I couldn’t. They even offered to pay for me, ’cause I was too embarrassed to say, ‘My daddy won’t let me.’ But then I finally do go, and who do I see first thing in there? Sam and L.C. And they said, ‘Girl, we was wondering when you was going to wake up!’”

Sam, as L.C. saw it, “said just what he thought, whether you liked it or not. If Sam thought something, he would tell you, it didn’t make no difference. One time we was going to the movies at the Oakland, on Thirty-ninth and Drexel, and we stopped to get some caramel corn. We come out of the store, and here are these three fellows, and one of them says, ‘Hey, man, give me a quarter.’ And Sam just looks at him and says, ‘Hey, man, you too old to be out here mooching. Why don’t you get a job?’ He say, ‘Hey, man, what you say?’ Well, Sam and I put our popcorn on the ground and get ready to fight. But then one of the other boys say, ‘Hey, man, don’t mess with them. Don’t you know they’re Charlie Cook’s brothers?’ Said, ‘Charles’ll come down here and kill everybody.’ So that’s what made the boys back up. But Sam didn’t care. He said, ‘I got a quarter, and I’m going to the show with my quarter. You need a job!’”

His imagination was inflamed by the cowboys-and-Indians movies that ran at the Louis and at the Oakland Theater, too, and when they got home, he and L.C. played at all that “cowboy jazz,” which, of course, inevitably led to yet another brotherly fight. There was no question that Sam lived in the world as much or more than any other member of his family: he was bright, he was daring, he was driven by ambition. But at the same time, much of the vision that fueled that ambition came from an interior view, a life of the mind, that was very different from his brothers’ and sisters’, that was almost entirely his own. Radio, like the movies, offered a vehicle of escape; he was completely caught up in the comedies, dramas, and ongoing serials. But books were his principal refuge from the humdrum reality of everyday life. He and Hattie (and later Agnes) were the readers in the family, each one taking out five books at a time, the maximum you were allowed, from the Lincoln Library on Thirty-ninth. They read everything—adventure books, mysteries, the classics (Sam’s favorite was
Huckleberry Finn
)—and they swapped the books around, so that in one week, by Hattie and Agnes’ account, they might read as many as ten books apiece. “We would all sit down and read,” said Hattie, “we would take turns. Our parents didn’t go far in school, but they [valued] education.” “But Sam was really the bookworm,” said Agnes. “He was a history buff, but he would read just about anything.”

H
E STARTED HIGH SCHOOL
at Wendell Phillips, just a ten- or fifteen-minute walk from home, over on Pershing near the library, in the fall of 1944. His big sister Mary had recently graduated, Charles was entering his senior year, and Hattie was a junior, but Sam, despite his slight stature and some initial reserve, quickly made his mark. It was impossible, his classmates would later acknowledge in the
Phillipsite,
the high school yearbook, to imagine Sam Cook “not being able to make a person laugh.” His teachers described Sam as “personable and aggressive,” which might charitably be taken as a stab at summoning up something of his bubbling good nature, his vast appreciation of life in all of its dimensions. But whatever his schoolmates’ or teachers’ opinions of him, however much or however little he may have impressed them, he was probably better known as big Charlie Cook’s brother than for any accomplishments of his own. And although he sang in the glee club, where sufficient notice was taken of him that he was given a solo at the Christmas show in his junior year, few of his classmates seem even to have been aware of the existence of the Singing Children, let alone their celebrity in certain circles.

He took over his brother’s job at the Blue Goose when Charles started driving for a fruit-and-vegetable vendor. According to his little sister, Agnes, “Sam always drew a crowd, the kids would go in the grocery store just to talk to him.” And he joined one of the local “gangs,” the Junior Destroyers—more like a teenage social club, according to his brother L.C., which served as a badge of neighborhood identification and mutual protection. “We had to belong to a club to go to school,“ according to Sam, but he enjoyed the growing sense of independence, the thrill of confrontation not infrequently followed by unarmed combat, above all the camaraderie of belonging to a group that was not defined by his father’s church. Everyone’s memories of Sam at this time come back to his laugh, its warmth, its inclusiveness, the way he would indicate, simply by timbre, that for him there was no such thing as a private joke. There was another boy in the gang, Leroy Hoskins, known to everyone as “Duck,” whose laugh was so infectious that Sam vowed he would one day capture it on record.

For all of his social skills, he continued to insist on his own idiosyncratic way of doing things, no matter how trivial, no matter how foolish this might sometimes make him seem. Charles had by now started working the 3:45 to 11:45
P.M.
shift out at Reynolds (“I lied about my age. I got the job because I loved clothes; I was always the best dresser in the family”), and L.C. was working as Charles’ assistant on the fruit-and-vegetable truck and pestering Charles to teach him to drive. “I was eleven, but Charles taught me, put me on two telephone books in my daddy’s car so I could see. He was gonna teach Sam at the same time, but Sam said, ‘No, man, I’ll learn myself.’ You couldn’t tell Sam nothing—he had to do it on his own. He tried to put the car in gear with his feet on the brakes instead of the clutch, almost stripped the gears in my daddy’s car. Charles said, ‘Sam, you gonna strip the gears.’ He said, ‘No, man, don’t disturb me now.’ You know, sometimes I think he thought he was the smartest person in the world.”

T
HE WAR IMPINGED
in various ways. Most directly because Willie was in the Army Corps of Engineers overseas—he was in one of the first units to cross the Rhine, and they eagerly followed the news of his division’s movements and looked forward to his letters home. Sam and L.C. explored the city, roaming far beyond the confines of the neighborhood, sometimes walking along the lake all the way to the Loop and back, a distance of some three miles, and observing a hub of activity, a sense of entitlement and economic well-being, from which they knew black people were systematically excluded. They read the
Chicago Defender,
too, the pioneering Chicago journal that served as a kind of Negro national newspaper, and took a job selling the weekend edition of the paper on the street every Thursday night when it came out. Their growing interest in girls took them to the skating rink up by the Regal Theater on Forty-seventh Street, where all the big stars of the day appeared—but, true to the strictures of their father, while they may have gazed longingly at the marquee, they never ventured inside to see the show.

They continued to sing every chance they got, going from apartment to apartment in the Lenox Building, with Sam performing pop numbers by the Ink Spots he had learned off the radio and L.C. taking care of the business end. “Sam would do the singing. I just get the money.”

The Singing Children continued to perform all around town, wherever their father was preaching or their manager could get them bookings. For all of his reluctance, Charles was a more and more compelling performer who was not about to be distracted from his song. One time when he was little, L.C. watched in amazement as “this lady got happy and jumped up and grabbed Charles—I mean, she was shaking and wiggling him all around—but he never stopped singing. She wouldn’t have had to shake me but one time, brother, and I’d be gone, but Charles was bad.” At the same time, Sam’s gift was increasingly apparent to Charles, who couldn’t help but recognize the gulf that existed between a God-given but unwanted talent like his own and the wholehearted commitment that Sam brought to his music. But each of the children, with the possible exception of Hattie, was at this point disaffected in his or her own way. Charles at eighteen couldn’t wait to get out of the house and out from under his father’s rule. Mary, a year and a half older and working at Reynolds now, too, was going with a young minister at Westpoint Baptist across the street whom she would soon marry, and simply felt that she was “too old to be getting up there singing”: it was, in a sense, embarrassing to her.

Even Sam seemed tired of living so much in his father’s shadow. “This Little Light of Mine” was the Reverend Cook’s favorite song, the one he would sing almost every Sunday before he would preach, and one day, when he was around fifteen, Sam announced, “Papa, I can beat you singing that song.” Reverend Cook, never one to take a challenge lying down, said, “Son, I beg to differ. That’s my song.” But he agreed to let Sam test his theory.

When Sunday came, Reverend Cook announced that his son was going to sing with him, and Sam strode confidently to the pulpit in front of the whole congregation. “All right, Papa,” he said, “you start.” No, Reverend Cook replied, it was his song, and Sam could start. Then, just as Sam got the people right where he wanted, his father held up a hand and said, “Okay, boy, you can back up now.” Bewildered, Sam said, “What you talking about, Papa?” But his father just said, “You can stop singing, it’s my song, and it’s time for me to sing.” And so he did, according to L.C. “Papa took that song, and he wore Sam out with it. Afterwards, Sam said, ‘You know I was getting ready to turn it out.’ And Papa said, ‘Yeah, you was getting ready, but I turned it out. Like I told you, it’s my song.’ And Sam laughed and said, ‘Yeah, Papa, it’s your song.’”

To his brothers and sisters it was one more example of Sam’s stubborn belief in himself, perhaps the closest that any of them could come to their father’s sense of divine mission. And while they chuckled among themselves on those rare occasions when Sam got his comeuppance, no one ever thought to question his good intentions, merely his common sense.

The one time they saw his confidence falter was when the whole family went to hear the Soul Stirrers at a program at Christ Temple Cathedral, the Church of Christ (Holiness)’s mother church at Forty-fourth and Lawrence. It was the first time that any of the Singing Children had seen the Stirrers in person, and they were expecting to get up and do a number themselves. But when they heard R.H. Harris’ soaring falsetto lead, and upon its conclusion second lead James Medlock just matched him note for note, they looked at one another with a combination of astonishment and fear. “I mean, we thought we were
bad,
” said L.C., “but that was the greatest sound we ever heard in our lives.” They were mesmerized by the intricate patterns of the music, the way in which Harris employed his patented “yodel” (a falsetto break that provided dramatic counterpoint to the carefully worked-out harmonies of the group), the way that he interjected his ad libs to visibly raise the spirit of the congregation, then came down hard on the last bar of each verse without ever losing the thread of the song. That baldheaded old man just stood up there flat-footed and delivered his pure gospel message, with the women falling out like the Singing Children had never seen. After a couple of numbers, Sam shook his head sorrowfully and turned to his younger brother. “Man, we ain’t got no business being up there today,” he said. And though the others all tried to persuade him otherwise, Sam remained resolute in his refusal to sing.

I
T WAS DURING THE WAR
that they first heard their parents talking openly about segregation, about what you could and couldn’t do both inside and outside the neighborhood. Their father was growing increasingly impatient with the lack of visible racial progress, and he was beginning to grow impatient with his own little ministry as well. More and more he was drawn to the traveling evangelism with which he had started out in Mississippi and which he had never entirely given up. “He was just kind of a freelance fellow,” Church of Christ (Holiness) bishop M.R. Conic told writer David Tenenbaum, and soon Charles Cook started traveling again in ever-widening circles, shifting his exclusive focus away from his little flock. He thought he could do better for himself and his family.

The Cooks by now had moved around the corner to 724 East Thirty-sixth, and David, the baby of the family, who was born in 1941, would never forget his fifteen-year-old brother Sam getting in trouble with the neighbors, not long after they moved in, when the couple downstairs became involved in a noisy altercation. “We was all up there having fun, and [heard] this commotion on the floor below, so Sam goes out and leans over the bannister and calls out, ‘What’s all this noise out here?’ The guy shot upstairs—I mean, he was serious—but we all went back inside, and Sam said, ‘Well, that’s all right, he won’t make any more noise.’”

With the war over, Willie went back to work at the chicken market, Mary settled into married life, and Charles enlisted in the air force at the age of nineteen. He was stationed in Columbus, Ohio, and despite his unwavering determination to quit singing altogether the moment he turned twenty-one, he joined a chorus that traveled widely with a service show called Operation Happiness.

But that was the end of the Singing Children, and the extension of another phase of Sam’s singing career. Just as he and L.C. had gone from apartment to apartment in the Lenox Building, serenading the various tenants with one of the Ink Spots’ recent hits, they had begun in the last year or so to greet passengers alighting from the streetcar at Thirty-fifth and Cottage Grove, the end of the line, in similar fashion. Sam’s specialties continued for the most part to derive from the sweet-voiced falsetto crooning of Bill Kenny, the breathy lead tenor for the group that had dominated black secular quartet singing (and in the process enjoyed a remarkable string of number-one pop hits) for the last seven years. Among Sam’s favorites were Kenny’s original 1939 signature tune, “If I Didn’t Care,” the group’s almost equally influential “I Don’t Want to Set the World On Fire,” and their latest, one of 1946’s biggest hits, “To Each His Own.” As in the apartment building, Sam would sing, and L.C. would pass the hat. “People would stop because Sam had this voice. It seemed like he just drew people to him—he sang the
hell
out of ‘South of the Border.’ The girls would stop, and they would give me dimes, quarters, and dollars. Man, we was cleaning up.”