THE VOICE: Sam Cooke..remember?

[Guest guest]

The Case for Sam Cooke, Soul Pioneer

 

One of the sweetest voices in American pop music emerged from a

gospel group named the Soul Stirrers. Within a year, Sam Cooke, the

owner of that voice, had released the lilting ballad " You Send Me, "

beginning his uncomfortable, yet unstoppable, climb to fame.

 

The story of how Cooke became a musical success story -- and how that

story often took tragic turns -- is the subject of a new book by

music historian Peter Guralnick, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam

Cooke.

 

In his account, Guralnick details how Cooke struggled against a music

industry that often devalued black artists -- even as he laid the

foundations of modern soul music.

 

As he navigated copyright and contractual issues -- which often

tangled the careers of fellow singers, like Jimmy Scott -- Cook

acquired his own record label, a music publishing company, and worked

in both production and management.

 

But his cultural influence can hardly be overstated. From the

infectious " Another Saturday Night " and " Twistin' the Night Away " to

the anthemic " A Change Is Gonna Come, " Cooke's impact on American

popular music is lasting. His singing style has been connected to

everyone from Otis Redding to Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye.

 

Dream Boogie also details the personal problems Cooke faced, and his

surprising death. At just 33 years old, he died after being shot

three times by a hotel manager. Cooke reportedly had been chasing a

young woman who had stolen his wallet and clothes while he was in the

shower.

 

Previously, Guralnick wrote several books examining the history of a

broad range of music, from blues to country to rock and soul. The

writer's epic biography of Elvis Presley, published in two

installments and totaling over 1,000 pages, is considered the

definitive account of the singer's life.

 

Excerpt: 'Dream Boogie, the Triumph of Sam Cooke'

by Peter Guralnick

 

Let me tell you a story on Sam. Sam was always ambitious. He always

knew exactly what he wanted to do. When we was very little boys, we

were playing, and he had these popsicle sticks -- you know them

little wooden sticks? He had about twenty of them, and he lined them

sticks up, stuck 'em in the ground, and said, " This is my audience,

see? I'm gonna sing to these sticks. " He said, " This prepare me for

my future. " Another time he said, " Hey, C., you know what? " I

said, " What? " He said, " I figured out my life, man. " He said, " I'm

never gonna have a nine-to-five job. " I said, " What you mean, Sam? "

He said, " Man, I figured out the whole system. " He said, " It's

designed, if you work, to keep you working, all you do is live from

payday to payday -- at the end of the week you broke again. " He

said, " The system is designed like that. " And I'm listening. I'm

seven and he's nine, and he's talking about " the system " ! I

said, " What are you gonna do, then, if you ain't gonna work, Sam? " He

said, " I'm gonna sing, and I'm going to make me a lot of money. " And

that's just what he did.

 

-- L.C. Cooke, on his brother's early ambitions

 

[Note: Cooke added the 'e' at the end of his name later in life, as

did his brother.]

 

Sam Cook was a golden child around whom a family mythology was

constructed, long before he achieved fame or added the e to his last

name.

 

There are all the stories about Sam as a child: how he was endowed

with second sight; how he sang to the sticks; how he convinced his

neighborhood " gang " to tear the slats off backyard fences, then sold

them to their previous owners for firewood; how he was marked with a

gift from earliest childhood on and never wavered from its

fulfillment.

 

He was the adored middle child of a Church of Christ (Holiness)

minister with untrammeled ambitions for his children.

 

Movies were strictly forbidden. So were sports, considered gambling

because the outcome inevitably determined a winner and a loser.

Church took up all day Sunday, with preparations starting on Saturday

night.

 

They were respectable, upwardly mobile, proud members of a proudly

striving community, but they didn't shrink from a fight. Their daddy

told them to stand up for themselves and their principles, no matter

what the situation was. Respect your elders, respect authority -- but

if you were in the right, don't back down for anyone, not the police,

not the white man, not anyone. One time neighborhood bullies tried to

block Sam's way to school, and he told them he didn't care if he had

to fight them every day, he was going to school. He lived in a world

in which he was told hard work would be rewarded, but he could see

evidence to the contrary all around him. Their father told them that

their true reward would come in heaven, but Sam was unwilling to

wait. He was unwilling to live in a world of superstition and fear,

and even his father's strictures and homilies were subject to the

same rational skepticism, the same unwavering gaze with which he

seemed to have been born. He was determined to live his life by his

own lights and no one else's.

 

He was born January 22, 1931, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the fifth

of the Reverend Charles Cook and his wife Annie Mae's eight children

(the oldest, Willie, was Annie Mae's first cousin, whom they took in

at three upon his mother's death). Charles and Annie Mae met at a

Church of Christ (Holiness) convention at which he was preaching, and

they started going to church together. He was a young widower of

twenty-three with a child that was being raised by his late wife's

family. Born to sharecroppers in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1897, he

had been baptized into the Holiness church at the age of eight, and

when the church split in two a couple of years later (its founders,

Charles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason, differed over the

importance of speaking in tongues as certain confirmation of " spirit

baptism, " with Mason declaring this surrender to a force that

overcomes recognizable human speech to be a sure sign of grace), the

Cooks remained with the Jackson-based Reverend Jones, while Reverend

Mason's followers became the better-known, more populous (and more

prosperous) Memphis-based Church of God in Christ.

 

Just fourteen when she met Charles, Annie Mae was fair-skinned, round-

faced, with hair she could sit on. She was sixteen when they married

in November of 1923. She had grown up in Mound Bayou, a self-

sufficient all-black township founded in 1887 and known as " the negro

capital of Mississippi. " The granddaughter of a businessman reputed,

according to family legend, to be " the second-wealthiest man in Mound

Bayou, " she was raised by an aunt after her mother died in

childbirth. She was working as a cook when she met her future husband

and by her husband's account won him over with her culinary skills,

inviting him home from church one day and producing a four-course

meal in the forty-five minutes between services.

 

They had three children (Mary, Charles Jr., and Hattie), spaced

eighteen months to two years apart, before Sam was born in January of

1931, with his brother L.C. ( " it don't stand for nothing " ) following

twenty-three months later.

 

Within weeks of L.C.'s birth Charles Cook was on the road,

hitchhiking to Chicago with a fellow preacher with thirty-five cents

in his pocket. It was the Lord who had convinced him he couldn't

fail, but it was his children's education, and the opportunity he was

determined to give them to get ahead, that provided the burning

motivation. He had sharecropped, worked on the railroad, and most

recently been a houseboy in one of Clarksdale's wealthiest homes

while continuing to do the Lord's work as a Holiness circuit

preacher -- but he was not prepared to consign his children to the

same fate. He was thirty-five years old at the time, and as certain

of his reasons sixty-three years later. " It was to educate my

children. It was a better chance up here. In Mississipi they didn't

even furnish you with the schoolbooks. But I didn't put nothing ahead

of God. "

 

Charles Cook preached his way to Chicago, " mostly for white folks,

they give me food and money, " he said, for a sermon that

satisfactorily answered the " riddle " of salvation, " proving that man

could pray his self out of hell. " Within weeks of his arrival, he had

found work and sent for his wife and children, who arrived on a

Greyhound bus at the Twelfth Street station, the gateway to Chicago's

teeming South Side.

 

It was a whole different world in Chicago, a separate self-contained

world in which the middle class mingled with the lowest down, in

which black doctors and lawyers and preachers and schoolteachers

strove to establish standards and set realistic expectations for a

community that included every type of individual engaged in every

type of human endeavor, from numbers kings to domestics, from street

players to steel workers, from race heroes to self-made millionaires.

It was a society which, despite a form of segregation as cruel and

pernicious as the Southern kind, could not be confined or defined, a

society of which almost all of its variegated members, nearly every

one of them an immigrant from what was commonly referred to as South

America, felt an integral part. It was a society into which the Cook

family immediately fit.

 

From the moment of his arrival, Reverend Cook found his way to Christ

Temple Cathedral, an imposing edifice which the Church of Christ

(Holiness) had purchased for $55,000 six years earlier, just ten

years after its modest prayer-meeting beginnings in the Federal

Street home of Brother Holloway. He preached an occasional sermon and

served as a faithful congregant and assistant pastor while working a

number of jobs, including for a brief time selling burial insurance,

before he found steady employment at the Reynolds Metals plant in

McCook, Illinois, some fifteen miles out of town, where he would

eventually rise to a position as union shop steward.

 

The family lived briefly in a kitchenette apartment on Thirty-third

and State but soon moved into more comfortable surroundings on the

fourth floor of the four-story Lenox Building, at 3527 Cottage Grove

Avenue (there were five separately numbered entrances to the Lenox

Building, with the back porches all interconnected), in the midst of

a busy neighborhood not far from the lake. There was a drugstore on

the corner, the Blue Goose grocery store was just up the street, and

directly across from the Blue Goose was a chicken market where you

could select your own live chicken and have it killed and dressed on

the spot. Westpoint Baptist Church was on the other side of the

street, all the players hung out at the poolroom on Thirty-sixth, and

Ellis Park, an elegant enclave of privately owned row houses

surrounding a park with two swimming pools in the middle, ran between

Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh across Cottage Grove.

 

The new baby, Agnes, was almost two years old when Reverend Cook,

through the intervention of one of his original Jackson mentors,

Bishop J. L. I. Conic, finally got his own congregation at Christ

Temple Church in Chicago Heights, some thirty miles out of town. This

quickly became the focus of the Cooks' family life.

 

We was in church every time that church door was open. That was a

must, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Saturday night Mama would cook

our dinner. Then we'd all get up about 6:30 Sunday morning, 'cause

everyone had to take their bath -- seven children, one bathroom! --

so we could be dressed and be at church at nine o'clock for Sunday

school. After Sunday school you had eleven o'clock service, with

prayer and singing, and Papa would do the sermon for the day. Then

Mama would take us to the basement and heat up our food in the church

kitchen. Then we had afternoon service, and after that BYPU, which is

a young people's service, then the eight o'clock service until about

10 o'clock, when we would go home. Plus Wednesday night prayer

meeting! One time Mary, our oldest sister -- she was used to doing

what she wanted -- decided she wasn't going to go to church. She

said, " I know what I'm gonna do. I'm going to wash my hair, and then

I'm going to tell Papa, `I can't go to church 'cause I just got my

hair washed, and I haven't got it done.' " Well, she washed her hair,

and she told Papa, but he just said, " That's all right, just come

right on. " So she had to go to church with her hair all a mess. Papa

didn't play. You had to either go to church or get out of his house.

 

-- Hattie, Agnes, and L.C. Cook in a spirited chorus of voices

recalling their early religious training

 

The Chicago Heights church, which had first been organized in 1919,

grew dramatically under Reverend Cook's stewardship. The " seventeen "

previous ministers, he told gospel historian David Tenenbaum, had

been able to do nothing to increase the size or fervor of a

congregation made up for the most part of workers from the local Ford

assembly plant, but, Reverend Cook said, " I worked up to one hundred

and twenty-five, I filled the church up. You had to be sure to come

there on time if you wanted a seat. "

 

He was, according to his daughter Agnes, a " fire-and-brimstone

country preacher " who always sang before he preached, strictly the

old songs -- two of his favorites were " You Can't Hurry God "

and " This Little Light of Mine. " He took his sermon from a Bible text

and was known to preach standing on one leg for two minutes at a time

when he got carried away by his message. The congregation was vocal

in its response, shouting, occasionally speaking in tongues, with

church mothers dressed in nurse's whites prepared to attend to any of

the congregation who were overcome. The Cooks didn't shout, but Annie

Mae would cry sometimes, her children could always tell when the

sermon really got to her and her spirit was full by the tears

streaming down her cheeks. The other ladies in the congregation were

equally moved, for despite his stern demeanor, the Reverend Cook was

a handsome man -- and despite his numerous strictures, as his

children were well aware, the Reverend Cook definitely had an eye for

the ladies. Annie Mae sang in the choir, which was accompanied by a

girl named Flora on piano, and different groups would come out

occasionally to present spiritual and gospel music programs. One

group in particular, the Progressive Moaners, became regular

visitors -- they always got a good response -- and that is what gave

the Reverend Cook the idea for the Singing Children.

 

The Cook children were all musical, but Charles, the next-to-oldest,

was the heart and soul of the family group. He was eleven, " and I had

to sing every Sunday in church, my daddy used to make me sing all the

time, stop me from going out in the street and playing with my

friends. " He and his big sister, Mary, sang lead in the five-member

quartet. Hattie, who was eight, sang baritone; Sam, already focused

on music as a career at six, sang tenor; and L.C., the baby of the

group, was their four-year-old bass singer.

 

They practiced at home at first but soon were " upsetting " the church

on a regular basis, taking the Progressive Moaners' place at the

center of the service and in the process reflecting as much on their

father, Reverend Cook, as on themselves. They sang " Precious Lord,

Take My Hand " and " They Nailed Him to the Cross " with Flora

accompanying them. " We just practiced our own selves and decided what

songs we was going to sing, " recalled Hattie. " Every time the church

doors opened we had to be there. "

 

Before long they were going around to other churches and leading off

their father's out-of-town revivals in Indianapolis and Gary and

Kankakee. The entire family traveled together, all nine of them,

generally staying with the minister, but not infrequently having to

split up among various church households due to the size of the

group. Each of the Singing Children had a freshness and charm. They

were a good-looking family, even the boys had pretty, long bangs, and

the church ladies used to cluck over that baby bass singer who put

himself into the music so earnestly, and the handsome lead singer --

he was a big boy who carried himself in a manly fashion -- but no one

missed the little tenor singer, either, the one with the sparkle in

his eye, who could just melt your heart with the way he communicated

the spirit of the song. Sometimes, when he got too many preaching

engagements, Reverend Cook would send them to sing in his

place. " When they'd come back, the people would tell me,

say, `Anytime you can't come, Preach, just send the children to

sing.' "

 

All the children were proud of what they were doing, both for

themselves and for their father. And their father was proud of them,

not only for causing the Cook family sound (his sound) to become more

widely known but for adding substantially to his store of

entrepreneurial activities: the church, the revivals, the riders he

carried out to Reynolds each day for a fee in his nearly brand-new

1936 Chevrolet, soon to be replaced by a Hudson Terraplane, and, when

Charles was old enough to drive, a pair of limousines ( " Brother, I

made my money! " he was wont to declare in later years with unabashed

pride).

 

But Charles, a gruff, sometimes taciturn boy with a disinclination to

show his sensitivity, soon grew disenchanted with the spotlight. " Aw,

man, my daddy used to make me sing too much. I used to get so tired

of singing I said, I'm gonna get up there and mess up, and he won't

ask me to sing no more, but once I got up there, that song would get

so good, shit, I couldn't mess up. I couldn't mess up. But I said, if

I ever get grown, if I ever make twenty-one, I'm not going to sing

for nobody. And I didn't. "

 

Meanwhile, Sam, the irrepressible middle child, made no secret of his

own impatience for the spotlight. Even L.C., who slept in the same

room with him and appreciated wholeheartedly his brother's wit and

spark, was taken aback by Sam's undisguised ambition. Charles could

easily have resented his brother's importunity, but instead he

retained a strictly pragmatic point of view. " Well, he had such a

pretty little tenor -- I mean, it was kind of undescribable, his

tone, his singing. But we didn't have nobody to replace him. So we

wouldn't let him lead. We were the lead singers, my sister and I. We

pretty much had the say-so. "

 

It was a busy life. The children all went to Doolittle Elementary

School just two blocks west of the Lenox Building, and they were all

expected to do well. Both parents checked their homework, though even

at an early age the children became aware that their mother possessed

more formal schooling than their father, and she would even

substitute-teach at Doolittle on occasion. Reverend Cook, on the

other hand, conveyed a kind of uncompromising rectitude and pride,

which, in all of their recollection, he was determined to instill in

his children. " He had a saying, " said his youngest daughter,

Agnes, " that he would write in everybody's course book when they

graduated, and he would recite it to you constantly: `Once a task is

once begun / Never stop until it's done / Be the labor great or

small / Do it well or not at all.' He always told us, `If you're

going to shine shoes, be the best shoe-shine boy out there. If you're

going to sweep a street, be the best street sweeper. Whatever you

strive to be, be the best at it, whether it's a small job or working

in top management.' He always felt that you could do anything that

you put your mind to. "

 

Everyone was expected to contribute. The girls did the housework.

Willie, the oldest, the adopted cousin, was already sixteen and

working for the Jewish butcher at the chicken market across the

street. At eleven, Charles went to work as a delivery boy for the

Blue Goose grocery store. Even the little boys helped their mother

with her shopping.

 

Charles joined the Deacons, a neighborhood gang. Sam and L.C. freely

roamed the streets, but there was only so much you could get away

with, because the neighborhood functioned, really, as an extended

family; if you got too out of hand, the neighbors would correct you,

even go so far as to physically chastise you, and Reverend and Mrs.

Cook would certainly do the same.

 

There were still white people in the neighborhood when the Cooks

moved in, but by now almost all its residents were black, the

shopkeepers uniformly white -- and yet the children for the most part

thought little about segregation because their exposure was limited

to the fact, but not the experience, of it. Reverend Cook, on the

other hand, was unwilling to see his children, or anyone else in the

family for that matter, treated like second-class citizens. One time

the police confronted Charles on the street, and Reverend Cook, in

his children's recollection, came out of the house and said, " Don't

you mess around with my kids. If there is something wrong, you come

and get me. " And when the policeman touched his holstered gun, their

father said, " I'll whip that pistol off you. " He meant it, according

to his children, " and the police knew he meant it. Our daddy wasn't

bashful about nothing. He always told us to hold our head high and

speak our mind. `Don't you all run from nobody.' "

 

It was a family above all, one that, no matter what internal

frictions might arise, always stuck together. Charles might feel

resentment against his father and long for the day when he could find

some escape; the girls might very well feel that it was unfair that

the boys had no household responsibilities; Sam and L.C. might fight

every day just in the course of normal events. " We was always

together, " said L.C. " We slept together, we grew up together.

Sometimes we'd be in bed at the end of the day, and Sam would

say, `Hey, we didn't fight today,' and we'd fight right there in the

bed -- that's how close we were! " But the moment that the outside

world intruded, Cooks, as their father constantly reminded them,

stood up for one another. Mess with one Cook, mess with all.

 

The children all took their baths before their father came home from

work ( " We could tell it was him by the lights of his car " ). Then they

would sit down at the round kitchen table and have dinner together,

every night without exception. They weren't allowed to eat at

somebody else's house ( " If you had a friend, bring them home " ). Their

mother, who addressed her husband unfailingly as " Brother Cook, "

never made them eat anything they didn't like and often cooked

something special for one or another of her children. Chicken and

dumplings, chicken and dressing, and homemade dinner rolls were the

favorites, along with red beans and rice. None of them doubted for a

moment that Mama loved him or her best of all. She lived for her

children, as she told them over and over, and she prayed every night

that she would live to see them grown, because " she did not want a

stepmother over her children. "

 

After dinner, in the summertime especially, they might go for a

drive. They might go to the airport to watch the planes take off;

they might go to the park or just ride around downtown. On weekends

they would all go to the zoo sometimes, and every summer they had

family picnics by the pavilion at Red Gate Woods, part of the forest

preserve, family picnics for which their mother provided baskets of

food and at which attendance was not optional.

 

Once a year the family attended the national Church of Christ

(Holiness) convention in Annapolis, Detroit, St. Louis, and every

summer they drove to Mississippi, spending Reverend Cook's two-week

vacation from Reynolds shuttling back and forth among their various

relatives all over the state, with Reverend Cook preaching (and the

Singing Children accompanying him) wherever they went.

 

The preparations for the trip were always busy and exciting, with

Mama staying up the night before frying chicken and making pound cake

because there was nowhere on the road for a black family to stop.

Papa did all the driving, at least until Charles turned fifteen, and

after the first hour or so, everyone started to get hungry and beg

Mama for a chicken leg or wing out of the shoe boxes in which she had

packed the food. They all sang together in the car, silly songs

like " Merrily, We Roll Along, " and read off the Burma-Shave signs

that unspooled their message sign by sign on the side of the highway.

They all remembered one sequence in particular year after year. The

first sign said " Papa liked the shave, " the next " Mama liked the

jar, " then " Both liked the cream, " and, finally, " So there you are! "

One time, Agnes recalled, they ran out of bread for the cold cuts,

and Papa sent her and her sixteen-year-old sister, Mary, into a

grocery store -- she couldn't have been more than five or six at the

time. " Well, Mary went in and picked up the loaf of bread and put it

on the counter just like she do anywhere else, just like she would do

at home, and the man said, `You're not from around here, are you?' So

she says no, and he said, `When you come in here, you ask me for what

you want, and I'll get it for you.' So she said, `I'm buying it. I

don't see why I can't pick it up. I'm taking it with me.' "

 

It was a very different way of life. Charles and Mary went out in the

fields to pick cotton, but, L.C. said, he and Sam had no interest in

that kind of work ( " We were out there playing with the little girls,

trying to get them in the cotton gin " ), and Hattie, who did, was

forced to take care of Agnes. One time Sam and L.C. were watching

their grandfather pull up some logs in a field, " and he just throwed

the horse's reins down when he seen us coming, " said L.C. " Well, Sam

got tangled up in the reins, and they had to run and catch the horse.

And we got Sam back to the house, and he was all right, but I never

will forget, he said, `That horse tried to kill me.' I said, `No,

Sam, the horse was just spooked. She wasn't trying to kill you.' He

said, `No -- Nelly tried to kill me!' "

 

They met far-flung relatives on both sides of the family who had

never left Mississippi, including their mother's cousin Mabel, who

lived in Shaw and was more like a sister to her, and their father's

brother George, who sharecropped outside of Greenville. Their

grandmother, L.C. said, was always trying to get Sam and him to stay

with her. " She would say, `You got to come live with us,' but I had a

little joke I'd tell her. I said, `You know what? If Mama and them

hadn't of moved and left Mississippi, as soon as I'd gotten big

enough to walk, I'd have walked out!' They used to laugh at me and

say, `Boy, you're so crazy.' "

 

Papa preached and they sang all over the state. To Hattie, " It was

really a learning experience, " but from Charles' point of view, " We

was glad to get there, glad to leave. "

 

They saw their father as a stern but fair man, but their mother was

someone they could tell their secrets to. She treated their friends

with the same kind of gentle consideration that she showed all of

them, never reluctant to add another place to the table or take a

mattress and lay it on the floor. " I don't know where one of you all

might be, " she told them by way of explanation, " maybe someone will

help you some day in the same way. " If any one of them was in a play

and just said " Boo, " why, then, to their mother, they were " the best

booer in the world. "

 

None of them was ever really singled out. Papa whipped all of them

equally, and Mama rewarded them all the same -- but even within the

family Sam stood out. To L.C., bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, someone

who by his own account, and everyone else's, too, " always thought

like a man, " Sam was similar -- but at the same time altogether

different. " Hey, I thought I had a personality. But Sam had the

personality. He could charm the birds out of the trees. "

 

If you tried to calculate just what it was, you would never be able

to figure it out. There were other little boys just as good-looking,

and there were undoubtedly others just as bright -- but there was

something about him, all of his siblings agreed, whether it was the

infectiousness of his grin, or his unquenchable enthusiasm, or the

insatiable nature of his curiosity, he possessed a spark that just

seemed to light a fire under everyone he was around. He was a great

storyteller and he always had something to tell you -- but it was the

way he communicated it, the way he made you feel as if you were the

only person in the world and that what he was communicating to you

was something he had never told anyone else before: there was a

seemingly uncalculated spontaneity even to what his brothers and

sisters knew to be his most calculated actions. He was always calling

attention to himself. " He loved to play little pranks, " his sister

Agnes said, " and he could think of more jokes than anyone else. " But

why his actions failed to cause more jealousy or resentment than they

did, no one could fully explain. Unless it was simply, as L.C.

said, " he was just likeable. "

 

To his older sister Hattie, Sam always had his own way of doing

things. Sam and L.C. and Charles all pooled their collection of

marbles, " but Sam liked to be by himself a lot, too, and he would

take those marbles and have them be like boxers in the ring -- he

made up all kinds of things. "

 

For that same reason, to his ninety-eight-year-old father looking

back on it all thirty-two years after his son's death, " Sam was a

peculiar child. He was always headman, he was always at the post,

from a kid on what he said went. He'd just be walking along the

street and make a song out of it. If he said it was a song, it was a

song all the way through. "

 

The others could see the contributions their next-to-youngest member

made even to such familiar spirituals and jubilee numbers as " Deep

River, " " Swing Down, Chariot, Let Me Ride, " and " Going Home, " not to

mention the more modern quartet style of Birmingham's Famous Blue

Jays and the Five Soul Stirrers from Houston, both of whom had

recently moved to the neighborhood. Spiritual music was at a

crossroads, with the older style of singing, which the Reverend Cook

favored -- " sorrow songs " from slavery times along with the more up-

tempo " jubilee " -style rhythmic narratives of the enormously

influential Golden Gate Quartet -- giving way to a more direct

emotional style. This was the new quartet sound, with five- or six-

member groups like the Stirrers expanding on the traditional parts

while featuring alternating lead singers who egged each other on to a

level of histrionics previously confined to the Pentecostal Church.

Their driving attack mimicked the sound, as well as the message, of

gospel preaching, and their repertoire, too, frequently sprang from

more accessible personal testimony, like the " gospel blues "

compositions of Thomas A. Dorsey. To the Singing Children it made

little difference, they sang it all. Their repertoire was aimed at

pleasing their audience, but they were drawn to the exciting new

quartet sound. Anything the Soul Stirrers or the Blue Jays sang, they

learned immediately off the record. But Sam's ability to rearrange

verses or rhyme up familiar Bible stories to make a song was not lost

on any of them, least of all the Reverend Cook.

 

It wasn't long before the Singing Children had a manager of their

own, a friend of their father's named David Peale who owned a filling

station and had plenty of money. He set up church bookings for them,

established a firm fee structure ( " We charged fifteen cents'

admission, and we wouldn't sing if we didn't get paid " ), drove them

to their engagements in a white Cadillac limousine, and collected the

money at the door. They had quite a following, according to Agnes,

still too young to join the group. " Everywhere they went, they would

turn the church out. "

 

Sam accepted Christ at eleven, in 1942, just after America had

entered the war -- but like all of his brothers and sisters, the

religion that he embraced seemed to have less to do with the Church

of Christ (Holiness) or their father's strictures than the simple

precepts that Reverend Cook had taught them: show respect to get

respect, if you treat people right, they in turn will do right by

you. At the same time, as Reverend Cook was equally quick to point

out, there was no prohibition in the Bible against worldly success;

in fact, there were many verses that endorsed it, and as proud as he

was of his ability to put enough food on the table to feed a family

of ten -- and to have recently acquired two late-model limousines, a

radio, a telephone, and a brand-new windup phonograph -- he was

equally determined that his children should learn to make their own

way in the world.

 

Sam took this lesson in the spirit, but perhaps not quite in the

manner, that his father intended. He established his own business

with a group of neighborhood kids, with his brother L.C. serving as

his chief lieutenant and himself as CEO. " Yeah, tearing out people's

fences and then sell it back to them for firewood at twenty cents a

basket. We did that; Sam didn't do it -- he get the money. Sam would

have me and Louis Truelove and Slick and Dan Lofton (there was about

five of us) to go tear out the fence and chop the wood up -- naw,

they didn't know it was their fence -- and then as soon as we get the

money, he take half of everybody's but mine. "

 

He was a mischievous, inquisitive child, always testing the limits

but, unlike L.C., not inclined to measure the consequences of his

every action. He went to the movies for the first time at around

thirteen, at the Louis Theater at Thirty-fifth and Michigan, somehow

persuading his younger brother to accompany him. " I said, `You know

Papa don't believe in it.' He said, `Nobody gonna say anything, and

you ain't gonna tell anyone.' I said, `Noooo . . .' `Then how he

gonna know?'

 

" After that we went all the time -- me and Sam had a ball. One time

there was no seats, and Sam called, `Fire!' Shit, they wanted to put

our ass in jail. But we got a seat. We used to get tripe sandwiches

at this little place on Thirty-sixth, they be all covered with onions

and pickles, and you get in the theater and just bite down on it, and

everybody in the show want to know, `Who got them tripe sandwiches?' "

 

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's estimation, they might read as many

as ten books apiece. " I mean, the whole family read. We would take

turns reading tales out of different books, because our parents, even

though they didn't go far in school, really valued education. But Sam

was really a bookworm, he was a history buff, but he would read just

about anything. "

 

He 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. "

 

The 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.

 

It 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. "

 

Sam and L.C. harmonized with other kids from the neighborhood, too

( " You know, everybody in the neighborhood could sing " ). They sang at

every available opportunity -- Johnny Carter (later lead singer with

the Flamingos and Dells), James " Dimples " Cochran of the future

Spaniels, Herman Mitchell, Johnny Keyes, every one of them doing

their best in any number of interchangeable combinations to mimic Ink

Spots harmonies, " singing around [different] places, " as Sam would

later recall, just to have fun.

 

His mind was never far from music; one day, he told L.C., he would

rival Nat " King " Cole, another Chicago minister's son, whose first

number-one pop hit, " (I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons, " was one

of Sam's recent favorites. But somehow he never seemed to contemplate

the idea that he might have to leave the gospel field to do it. Nor

did he allow the music to distract him from his main task of the

moment, which was to finish high school. Reverend and Mrs. Cook were

determined that each of their children would graduate from Wendell

Phillips -- and it seemed as if L.C. was the only one likely to

provide them with a real challenge ( " Everybody else liked school; I

didn't " ). Sam saw education as a way to expand what he understood to

be an otherwise narrow and parochial worldview. Reading took him

places he couldn't go -- but places he expected one day to discover

for himself. He was constantly drawing, caught up in his studies of

architectural drafting at school but just as quick to sketch anything

that caught his interest -- he did portraits of his family and

friends, sketches to entertain his little brother David. In the

absence of inherited wealth, he placed his faith in his talent and

his powers of observation, and despite an almost willful blindness to

his own eccentricities, he was a keen student of human nature. Which

was perhaps the key to his success with girls, as his brother L.C.

saw it, and the key to his almost instant appeal to friend and

stranger, young and old alike.

 

His father had full faith in all his children, but perhaps most of

all in his middle son. He was focused in a way that none of the

others, for all of their obvious intelligence, ambition, and good

character, appeared to be -- and Reverend Cook had confidence that

neither Sam's mischievousness nor his imagination would distract him

from his mission. It was Sam's mark to sing, as his father was well

aware. " He didn't bother about playing ball, nothing like that. He

would just gather himself on the steps of buildings and sing. "

 

It was a gift of God, manifest from when he was a baby, and the only

question in Charles Cook's mind was not whether he would achieve his

ambition but how.

 

Then one day in the spring of 1947, two teenage brothers, Lee and

Jake Richards, members of a fledgling gospel quartet that so far had

failed to come up with a name for itself, ran across Sam singing " If

I Didn't Care " to a girl in the hallway of a building at Thirty-sixth

and Rhodes. He was singing so pretty that Lee and his brother started

harmonizing behind him, and it came out so good that they asked him

who he was singing with. " I don't sing with nobody, " Sam told them,

and they brought him back to the apartment building where they lived

on the third floor, at 466 East Thirty-fifth, just a block away, and

where Mr. Copeland, the man who was training them, and the father of

their fourteen-year-old baritone singer, Bubba, had the apartment at

the back.

 

for music lovers everywhere......bob