Concert For Obama

Hi there everybody,

yesterday Jon Bon Jovi and Bettye LaVette sang Sam's 'A Change Is Gonna Come' on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Here's the Youtube clip:

Welcome

Welcome to the official blog for the website SongsOfSamCooke.com. Here stories and articles will be posted about Sam Cooke, his music and his life and whatever else we can find. I'm going to start with an article that I've written a while ago which was originalle posted on Isolation.TV. Enjoy!

Sam Cooke's Bring It On Home: Definition of Soul

There are two albums by Sam Cooke, called Mr. Soul and The Man Who Invented Soul. I wouldn’t go as far and claim that he was indeed the first, but he was definitely one of the first to sing in a style, which we now call soul music. What is soul? Is it always a black artist, singing a song that a black author wrote and that has some sort of feeling? No, not at all. In fact, soul legend Solomon Burke said that everything sung with feeling would be soul, whether it is rhythm and blues, rap or country. Soul is a word that comes directly from church, where it means spirit.

In the Baptist churches being overcome by the ‘holy spirit’ was the epitome of religious ecstasy, the thing most people aimed for. To reach this ecstasy the member of the congregation was helped by the minister who had a myriad of tricks to his availability. A sermon would be started slow and almost whispering. Then the minister would slowly pick up speed and volume until he was shouting and constantly screaming ‘Amen’ or ‘Oh Lord’. The congregation did not sit silent but participated in the sermon. If the minister asked for an amen, he would get an amen. This is the tradition of call & response on which a lot of (black) music is based. The churches in (southern) America where this was a standard way of participation were the Baptist, Pentecostal churches. The Church of God of in Christ (COGIC) was the most outspoken and also one that allowed the use of instruments in church. This church influence is one part of the equation. The other side is that complete opposite of church music: (rhythm &) blues.

Sam Cooke had a pedigree in both music styles. Better known these days as the guy singing Cupid and Wonderful World, he was an even bigger star in the gospel circuit of the 1950’s. His father, of course of minister, took him and his siblings around the churches in and around Chicago singing in a family gospel group called The Singing Children. After this he joined a high school group called The Highway QC’s with which he toured around the Midwest. Mentor and tutor of this group was RB Robinson, baritone singer for the Soul Stirrers, gospel’s premier quartet, led by Rebert Harris who was a legendary singer but in 1953 he turned his back the gospel road, thinking it was too big and most of all too commercial. The Stirrers took the risk of asking 19-year-old Sam Cook (the e was added later) to join as lead singer. He passed the audition with flying colours and became the number 1 singer in the field of gospel. Not only because of his smooth singing but because of his good looks as well. The younger audience members now took up the front benches at Stirrers shows to gaze at Sam Cooke. A fellow traveller on the gospel road was Rawls, who died in 2006.

But Sam wanted more, seeing the success black singers had (and getting all the money for one person, not the entire group) he tried his hand at singing a few pop songs. A gospel singer singing pop songs was still not done in those days. In fact, he didn’t even release it under his own name but took the alias of Dale Cook. But his voice was unmistakable and people knew it was him and it was time to cross over. After a few average songs and a label change he struck gold with You Send Me, which sold millions. His name was made and he could start a career on his own. In the following years he became one of the premier stars in black R&B but also white pop. The first few years of his career at Keen Records and the first few albums at RCA were mediocre, attempts to woo the white audience with concept albums about the 50’s or an album filled with travel-songs, but it never showed him at his best. The songs he wrote himself were getting better, and with the slowly disappearing of the great divide between black music and white pop his songs got more touches of those two black music styles: blues & gospel.

And Bring It On Home To Me has exactly that feel. Many people in the 60’s and maybe even today might be more familiar with the recorded by The Animals. They open with a blues notes on piano before Erik Burdon joins in with his strong voice, made for blues. It’s one of the few versions where the artist covering it makes it his own. Sam Cooke was very much inspired by the music of blues musician Charles Brown, who was also an inspiration to Ray Charles. Over the course of his career he covered a Brown song on more than one occasion. Driftin’ Blues, and the amazing Trouble Blues (on his best studio album Night Blues) are good examples. BIOHTM was loosely based on Brown’s I Want To Go Home which he in turn based on a gospel song Thank God It’s Real. Once more is shown that the Lord’s music and the Devil’s music are close relatives

On April 26th of 1961 Sam went into the studio in Hollywood with a full orchestra including legendary drummer Earl Palmer, pianist Ernie Freeman and his friend from Chicago and the gospel highway; Lou Rawls. The same day they recorded Having A Party, which turned out to be the A-side of a future single release. Ernie Freeman’s piano starts off the song and is rapidly joined by the steady beat of Palmer. Then Sam’s starts the first line: ‘if you ever, change your mind, about leaving me behind’. The tone is set from the get-go; it’s most definitely a blues ballad about Sam trying everything to keep his girl from leaving. But there’s a second voice hovering in the background. Lou Rawls sings backup, standing a little further away from the microphone. At the end of every chorus they do what their fathers had done so often and especially every Sunday in church. Sam throws a shouted ‘yeah’ up in the air and Lou follows straight away and repeats his words. The blues continues, he was trying to be a man when she left, but he is hurt nonetheless. His pleas get stronger, even offering her money and jewellery. BIOHTM has no chorus, like most blues songs. It’s two lines of similar content followed by ‘Bring it on to me, bring your sweet loving, bring it on home to me’.

The Rock & Roll hall of fame named it one of the 500 most important pieces of music that had shaped rock and roll. In this case, BIOHTM is soul at it’s very best; gospel and blues at the same time. Isn’t it true that we only know what good is when we also know what evil is? In early 2007 Vibe magazine named it #15 in the best duets of all time list that they had thought of. I am not sure if you can actually call this a duet since Rawls never really has his own parts and just shadows Cooke, but the influence of this song should be clear by now. In fact, I have thusfar found at least 100 covers of this song by the likes of the Supremes, John Lennon, the Zombies, Otis Redding & Carla Thomas (which is more a duet than Cooke and Rawls) and the Dixie Chicks. But the story of Bring it on home to Me doesn’t end here.

Part II: The Harlem Square

The movie ‘Ali’ starts off with scenes of a singer in club somewhere talking/singing to the audience, in between we see shots of Muhammed Ali beating Sonny Liston to become the World Champion. When he is talking to the press he sees Sam Cooke standing on the canvas. Ali (then still carrying the name of Cassius Clay) stops the interview and embraces Cooke, calling him the best rock and roll singer in the world, and just as pretty as him. The singer in the scenes in between is Sam Cooke standing on a stage in a club in the black neighbourhood of Miami. Cooke had a few months before toured England with Little Richard who was doing a show full of gospel songs and tricks. Cooke had always used some of these tricks but usually thought it better not to do that too much in fear of alienating the white buyers of his records, of which there were many. But in the last two years of his life something dawned in him and he put together a show that would show him and his songs from a rougher side than people had previously seen, unless they were already watching him sing during the Soul Stirrers days. When he saw the success James Brown had with his live recording at the Apollo in New York he also wanted to record a live album. For the taping he chose a club in Miami: the Harlem Square Club.

As a backing band he now had King Curtis, but he always travelled with the same drummer and guitarist/musical leader; Clif White. Harlem Square is an amazing record. The first songs are rougher and louder than people were used to. Silly, average love songs like Cupid were turned into swingers. There was time for contemplation, but also to dance and twist to Twisting The Night Away, which was followed by the blues swinger Somebody Have Mercy. So far so good, but with the last notes of Somebody Have Mercy Sam changes appearance, he somehow sees the light and acts out the part which he had seen his father do on so many occasions when he was young; Sam Cooke becomes a full blown preacher.

Clif strums a chord for a few bars and Sam addresses his congregation.

Ssssssomebody have mercy on me right now
I begin to feel allright now
Lord have mercy
I said I begin to feel allright now

So far it’s a sermon, but then it becomes a wordly celebration again.

I feel you are in the mood to tell you about my baby right now
And I call my baby and the telephone
I finally get somebody on the telephone
I say “who is this?”

I don’t want you operator
I want my baby.. ooooooh, operator, I want my baby

He slows down again a little

And finally the operator get my baby on the telephone
And as sure as I hear my baby say ‘hello’
Something starts to move deep down inside me
I say I got a message for you honey
I wanna tell you ‘Darling You Send Me’

He revokes his first hit in a few words

That’s what I wanna tell you baby
Oooh, Youuuuu
Ooh, you send me, Lord
Oooooh, youuuuuu
Ooooooooooooohooohoo, you send me
Lord have mercy
Oooo
ooooaaaaoooo
honest you do
and I tell her: listen to this baby
and I got a message for your honey.
This song is gonna tell you how I fell
I know you’ve been away from me a long time, but

Then the actual song starts. The song of course is Bring it on home to me. It’s rougher, coarser, and louder than on record. He talks to the crowd, explains what he is going to do, intersperses the lines the people already knew with words of explenation and encouragament, like a preacher would with parts of the bible to explain them to his congregation. Everybody is with him and when he asked them to say ‘yeah’ when he says so they fullheartedly do, louder and more soulful than Rawls did. It is repeated a few times until he realizes that it might get to far already one big high-pitched falsetto shriek. The emotional explosion has to be the end of the show, and there are still two songs to go. The show continues for two more songs before he leaves but BIOHTM is the highlight of the album. Cooke never saw it released during his lifetime however. He was killed in December 1964.

But Live at the Harlem Square Club wasn’t released until 1985, 22 years after it had been recorded. Record label RCA was very afraid that the smooth crossover appeal he had would be destroyed, the album was just too black. A few months later when he recorded a nightclub show in front of a mostly white audience At The Copa in the New York City he was a very different singer, this album was released and became a big seller for RCA. When it was released it changed the opinion people still had about him and the live album now ranks among the best I’ve ever listened to, with Bring it on Home to Me being the ultimate Sam Cooke song.