Bobby Womack, whose career Cooke helped launch, remembers: “Sam was always into reading. He read black history a lot, he read Aristotle, he read The New Yorker and Playboy magazine, I mean he read all the time. Everywhere he went he would look and see where he could get a book—he didn’t care what it was about, he would get something.” Womack remembers Cooke telling him, “That’s the only way you can grow. Otherwise you’re going to write love songs for the rest of your life. But everything ain’t about love. If you in a situation that you thought was supposed to be a certain way, you can write in a way where it’s like an abstract painting.”
While he maintained an active interest in “white” culture, Cooke never passed, as black novelist Julian Mayfield phrased it, “into the mainstream, and oblivion.” His commitment to black culture and black people culminated in his work with the SAR record label, which he founded with Soul Stirrer manager Roy Crain and gospel singer J. W. Alexander of the Pilgrim Travellers. Once Cooke established a solid financial base with his crossover hits, he worked to realize his vision of bringing real gospel music to a pop audience. His brother L. C. remembers Sam insisting that “Real gospel music has GOT to make a comeback.” According to Bobby Womack, Cooke was also determined to bring the political meanings masked by his pop lyrics closer to the surface: “He said, ‘Bobby, let me tell you something. People will buy the news if it’s sung with a melody.’ He said, ‘News is cold. Only bad news makes the press. But if you sung it with a melody, it would lighten the burden a little bit, and people would understand.’ ”
At SAR, Cooke sought to help both new talent and established gospel acts reach a mixed audience. As Alexander recalls, the label consciously applied Cooke’s formula for negotiating the larger culture: “We knew because of our background, it was just a matter of different lyrics.” The results were frequently brilliant. On the sides cut by the Valentinos (originally the Womack Brothers) and the revived Soul Stirrers with Johnnie Taylor and Paul Foster sharing lead vocals, the potential of a blacker pop sound shines through clearly. The Soul Stirrers’ “Wade in the Water” and “Stand by Me Father” hold their own with most of Cooke’s pop hits.
It’s something of a mystery why SAR never really connected with a white audience. Maybe it was the distribution problems that constantly plague small labels. Or maybe Cooke simply let the mask slip too much. The Soul Stirrers’ “Mary Don’t You Weep” doesn’t really pretend the Pharaoh who got drowned lived three thousand years ago in Egypt. And the soaring “Free At Last” recasts Cooke’s pop composition “Just for You”—which can also be heard as a love song to the Lord—as an explicit tribute to Martin Luther King.
Although the mass white audience wasn’t ready for the gospel side of Cooke’s vision, the music world was. Smokey Robinson acknowledged that “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” later covered by the Beatles, was inspired by Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me,” which features a soulful call and response between Cooke and Lou Rawls, who sang lead for the Pilgrim Travellers before embarking on a solo career. Billy Preston, who did his first recording for SAR, would later play keyboard for both the Beatles and the Stones. His straight-out-of-church organ helps make the Beatles’ “Don’t Let Me Down” one of the greatest soul songs ever recorded by a “white” group. John Lennon wasn’t stretching things when he told Beatles manager Allen Klein: “If you can understand Sam Cooke’s music, you can understand mine.”
Cooke’s impact on soul was equally powerful. The Simms Twins’ SAR cut, “Soothe Me,” pointed the way toward the call-and-response duets of Memphis soulmen Sam and Dave, who cut their own version of the song; Otis Redding frequently covered Cooke’s songs while developing his own style of secular testifying. Curtis Mayfield, who perfected Cooke’s style of gospel soul, recalls Cooke as an inspirational model when he was growing up in Chicago’s Black Belt: “Oh yeah, I was a Sam Cooke fan. With the Northern Jubilees [Mayfield’s first gospel group] we admired the Soul Stirrers so much and tried to duplicate some of their sounds, but of course Sam Cooke was Sam Cooke. When ‘You Send Me’ came out, man, we thought it was just a fantastic piece of music.” An incident described by Soul Stirrer Le Roy Crume concerning the group’s recording of “Lead Me Jesus” highlights the complicated relationship between gospel and soul:
Sam told me, “Le Roy, I got a hit coming out, ‘Soothe Me.’ ” And he said, “I want you to write a gospel to it” I said, “You’re not going to let your r&b number come out first?” He said, “Oh, no, I’ll hold it.” Man, that r&b came out before our record, and I said, “Sam, why you do that?” Man, we played Atlanta and the promoter was standing out on the steps, and he didn’t say hello or nothing, he just said, “Crume, why in the world did you guys do that?” I said, “What, man? What are you talking about?” He said, “This rock ‘n’ roll song. You all recorded a rock ‘n’ roll song.” I said, “No, man, we didn’t record a rock ‘n’ roll song. He said, “Well, it’s just like a rock ‘n’ roll song. It’s not going to work, man.” He said, “You guys used to be #1 in here, but you can forget it. Man, you might get booed off the stage.” Oh man, I was so scared. That was the one time I took Jimmie in the dressing room and said, “Jimmie, let’s don’t even touch that song.” I said, “Just sing one line, and let’s walk.” Well, that’s what we did, and, man, the crowd just went crazy, and the promoter came to me and said, “Damn, you guys can do anything you want!”
Cooke was acutely aware that the benefits of a desegregated music scene flowed both ways. When Bobby Womack expressed his anger over the Rolling Stones’ cover of “It’s All Over Now,” Cooke calmed him. “This will be history,” Cooke told his protégé. “Bobby, man, this group will change the industry. They ain’t like the Beatles, they’re the ghetto kids. They gonna make it loose for everybody.” Despite the Stones’ hard-edged image, the Beatles were a whole lot closer to being real ghetto kids. But Cooke’s cultural analysis holds. Just as the Stones, Beatles, and Righteous Brothers drew on black traditions to enrich their music, Cooke was learning something from what the white folks were doing. Modeling “A Change Is Gonna Come” in part on Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Cooke was intrigued by the ragged sincerity of the folk revival. The folk singers “may not sound as good,” he observed, “but the people believe them more.”
“There’s something coming,” he told Bobby Womack, “and it’s coming fast.”
9
“The Times They Are A-Changin’”: Port Huron and the Folk Revival
Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” heralded the new world coming with a warning that tripped quickly from clarion to cliché. But for a brief time in the early sixties, a cluster of mostly white, mostly middle-class students seemed determined to forge a new politics attuned to the ideal of the beloved community. Armed with acoustic guitars and an earnest belief in interracial brotherhood, the musicians connected with the folk revival brought the movement’s basic values as close to the pop culture mainstream as they’ve ever been, before or since. In the early sixties, their energies coalesced around the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
Media-fed memory has reduced SDS to a cluster of chaotic images: Tom Hayden endorsing guerrilla warfare in the streets of Newark; the Weathermen rampaging through the Days of Rage; students seizing the administration building at Columbia University, angry hecklers drowning out Ted Kennedy at the University of Wisconsin; the whole world watching blood flow in the streets of Chicago outside the 1968 Democratic Convention. Even when distorted by revisionism and nostalgia, those images nonetheless reflect the passion, confusion, and profoundly misguided ideological romance of the late sixties. Sometimes it seemed that no one, not even the people who wrote it, remembered