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CounterPunch
December
24, 2002
Shaken and Stirred:
Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers
by DAVID VEST
The earth is in a blaze
The world is in a maze
The way of life today is strange and odd
What happened across the sea
May come to you and me
Thus begins the first cut, written by the great
"Georgia Tom" Dorsey, on the first disc of the three
CD box set "Sam
Cooke with the Soul Stirrers, The Complete Specialty Recordings."
If you didn't get it for Christmas, go
get it right now. Don't stop at a church on the way to the record
store expecting to hear anything like this. It's about as far
from the mewling drivel of most modern "gospel" music
as Thelonious Monk is from Richard Clayderman.
The package contains surely the best
liner notes ever to grace a gospel collection, written by Daniel
Wolff, who knows (and clearly loves) what he's talking about.
He's the author of "You
Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke" (Quill), a
must-have book for anyone interested in soul, gospel or pop music.
Sam Cooke was the ultimate crossover
artist. He crossed over from gospel into R&B, and then he
crossed all the way over into "pop." I am old enough
to recall the shock that went through the industry when RCA Victor
signed him. Suddenly a Black artist was being treated like pop
royalty. (Naturally, photos of Cooke wearing Pat Boone-style
sweaters soon followed, to show he was "clean-cut"
and no threat.)
He crossed over on the melismatic bridge
of his unforgettable voice. Unfortunately, the one time I saw
him perform, the bridge collapsed under him.
It happened in Birmingham about three
or four years before his death. In contrast to Cooke's reputation
as a great live performer, this day was a disaster. Cooke and
Barrett Strong, who had the original version of "Money,"
were unadvertised, last-minute additions, replacing Dee Clark
on the bill of a "package show" featuring dead-on performances
by Big Joe Turner, Jimmy Reed, Bo Diddley, LaVern Baker, The
Drifters, The Coasters, Barrett Strong, Hank Ballard and the
Midnighters and others. All for a two dollar admission charge!
Lloyd Price's Orchestra played behind
everybody who didn't bring their own band, and therein lay the
trouble. They soared behind Big Joe, who nearly tore the roof
off the building, but they were clearly unfamiliar with Strong's
recent hit or with any of Cooke's material. The entire audience,
to the last teeny-bopper, knew "Everybody Loves to Cha-Cha-Cha"
by heart, but the professional musicians onstage had never heard
of it. Lacking charts, they were helpless.
There were the days when rock shows and
R&B reviews hired "jazz" and big band players to
add respectability, when even Lionel Hampton, that old Republican,
tried to get away with calling his music "rock and roll."
The traveling orchestras of that time, whose members disdained
most pop music, including rock and even blues (unless there was
some uptown crooner in a tux singing about "misery"
and vowing to drink muddy water and sleep in a hollow log), deserve
a special chapter in the Annals of Not Getting It. Delta blues
was "hillbilly music" to these cats. Lots of them are
still working today as "blues" acts, having missed
the swing revival. Anyway, they'd rather play "Misty"
and "Fly Me to the Moon." Just don't ask them to attempt
"Boogie Chillen."
Price's band had real players in it,
most of them probably from New Orleans. Incredibly, in 1960 (or
was it 1961?) they had never listened to Sam Cooke.
Unable to get them to follow even "You
Send Me," which any amateur could learn to play in five
minutes, Cooke, who had entered to screams and squeals, gave
up after about three songs and left the stage to polite applause
and scattered boos. The response to Bo Diddley a few minutes
earlier had been deafening. Diddley had told the orchestra to
take a break and performed backed only by drums and maracas.
Barrett Strong's fate was even worse
than Cooke's. The audience rose to its feet and lustily booed
the band's pathetic attempt to turn "Money" into a
shuffle, minus the signature piano riff. It might as well have
been a Lawrence Welk tribute to Jimi Hendrix.
When I got back up to Huntsville, a nearly
three-hour drive in those days, I told a friend how great the
show had been. "Jimmy Reed was awesome! Bo Diddley destroyed
the house. Big Joe Turner was rockin' and shoutin'. Oh, yeah,
Sam Cooke was there, too."
Flash forward some twenty-five years,
to a performance of "The Gospel at Colonus." At the
end of the play The Soul Stirrers, backed by an enormous choir,
sang "Now Let the Weeping Cease." Bass singer Jesse
Farley still anchored the group. The lead singer by now was Willie
Rogers, who sounds like a young Sam Cooke, even echoing his melismatic
phrasing.
I saw the play five times in seven days
in Houston, mainly to see Clarence Fountain and the Five Blind
Boys of Alabama as King Oedipus, but I must say that while it
was the Blind Boys who delivered the real excitement, it was
the Soul Stirrers who brought the healing.
Willie Rogers is still working with the
Soul Stirrers, ably filling the shoes once worn by legendary
lead singers such as Rebert H. Harris, Paul Foster, Johnny Taylor,
Lou Rawls, Martin Jacox and Cooke.
Sam Cooke was probably not a great gospel
singer. The great ones stay at it over decades and grow into
the material. His magnificent voice is still trying to find itself
on some of these tracks, inserting swoops and yodels where they
don't always belong, sounding too self-conscious. Some of these
songs are weak compositions, too, with an unfinished air about
them.
But the Soul Stirrers were and are a
great group, whoever is singing lead, and a few of these songs
are masterpieces. Cooke's lead on "The Last Mile of the
Way" is beautiful, almost too pretty, but when Paul Foster
takes over mid-song he makes the hair on my neck stand up. With
producers like Art Rupe and Bumps Blackwell, it's a given that
these sessions feature no clueless musicians reading charts.
The set list includes Cooke's first attempts
to make pop records, four tracks cut at Cosimo's Studio in New
Orleans with Earl Palmer on drums and Edgar Blanchard on guitar.
It closes with the Soul Stirrers' famous appearance at the Shrine
Auditorium, with Cooke and Foster inciting the crowd to near-riot
frenzy.
Clearly Sam Cooke's presence on them,
openly trying to hijack the gospel context and make it directly
about sex, is the reason these recordings have been made available.
But there is much more to the Soul Stirrers than Sam Cooke, and
there is a crying need for other box sets highlighting different
periods of the group1s storied career.
The best thing about this package, besides
the portrait it gives us of Sam Cooke just before stardom came,
is that it may convince someone to turn off the stereo and go
out and see the Soul Stirrers.
No kidding. They1ll be appearing in Florida
over the next few days:
DEC. 28---TAMPA
DEC. 29---ORLANDO
DEC. 30---SARASOTA
DEC. 31---LAKELAND
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
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