The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Forum / The pinnacle of pop, Sam Cooke.

The pinnacle of pop, Sam Cooke.

by 26 Comments

I’m not sure why, but tonight I have been listening to Sam Cooke. He is known as someone who was cut down far too soon, but he had a ten year recording career, which is much better than most. My goodness, but his voice goes right through me. He makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I am struggling to think of another singer who can move me like this.
He is so technically perfect, yet without any evidence of craft or effort. Ella Fitzgerald can do this to me sometimes, and Otis too, and Van as well. But Sam is the man. He invented modern soul music. Can he be topped?

0

Comments

  3. Yes, an incredible voice. Effortless.

    My two favourites are “Night Beat” and “One Night Stand – Live at the Harlem Square Club 1962”.

    For years I’ve been meaning to pick up some of his gospel material with the Soul Stirrers, but somehow I’ve never got around to it.

  6. His voice is about as perfect as perfect can be I think.

    James Carr, Otis Redding & Stevie Wonder run it close but Sam always pips it for me.

    That’s Where It’s At & Cupid are just sublime.

    Here is my best of if anyone is interested

    • That’s where it’s At is magnificent.
      One of my favourite performances of his is the relatively obscure I dream of Jeanie ( yes, the Scottish song). It’s an outstanding vocal performance.

  7. Let’s cut to the chase then, shall we?

    “A Change is Gonna Come”. The greatest song ever recorded, with a simply unbeatable vocal. I wrote a load of mush on the pre-drupal site about the way it sounds, but maybe this time around let’s have a look at how it came to be.

    Famously inspired by “Blowing In The Wind”, but arguably owing an even greater debt to Paul Robeson’s “Ol’ Man River”, “A Change is Gonna Come” was originally released three days before Christmas 1964, as the B-side to “Shake”. It had been recorded six weeks earlier. In between the two events, on December 11, 1964, Sam Cooke had been shot and killed.

    Cooke had written the song almost exactly a year earlier, and while the final production would take quite some time, the tune itself came remarkably easy. Cooke’s biographer, Peter Guralnick, offers the following: “It was less work than any song he’d ever written. It almost scared him that the song — it was almost as if the song were intended for somebody else. He grabbed it out of the air and it came to him whole, despite the fact that in many ways it’s probably the most complex song that he wrote.”

    Cooke was repeatedly warned that the content of the song would alienate the white section of his audience, potentially curtail his career, and maybe even place him in outright danger. Nonetheless, he pressed on with it, expressing the hope that it would make his father proud. Right from the start, a heavy vibe hung over “A Change Is Gonna Come” – when Cooke first played it to his friend, Bobby Womack, Womack responded that it sounded “like death”, to which Cooke replied “Man, that’s kind of how it sounds like to me. That’s why I’m never going to play it in public.”

    He was almost true to his word. Remarkably, “A Change Is Gonna Come” was performed in public by Sam Cooke just once, on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson, in February 1964. Cooke had been scheduled to perform “Ain’t That Good News” (his then current single), but was persuaded late on by Allen Klein to make the switch. As far as I’m aware, there is no surviving footage of the performance (the network didn’t save the tape), and two days later the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, well and truly moving the spotlight away.

    Even in the studio, the song continued to scare the shit out of people. John Boudreaux, the drummer originally slated for the sessions, was intimidated by the orchestral arrangement and refused to leave the control room; session player and close collaborator Earl Palmer was working next door and filled in.

    It’s difficult to overstate how risky “A Change Is Gonna Come” was for Cooke. He’d worked extremely hard to achieve a mainstream crossover, something not many black artists were being permitted in 1963, and it didn’t sound remotely like his other work. It was as if The Beatles had jumped from Love Me Do, direct to Strawberry Fields Forever, in the space of months, rather than years.

    We’ll never know where Cooke might have gone next, had he lived. Whether he had anything else like this left in him, whether he’d have had the bravery to probe further, or would have fallen back to his regular pop material. Either would have been fine by me. What we do know is that “A Change Is Gonna Come” is three minutes of sonic perfection that properly moved the world, and that Cooke’s vocal is so utterly, utterly commanding that every cover version you’ll ever hear (and it’s been covered by pretty much anyone with a half decent voice, and many others beside) sounds like someone mucking about with their mum’s hairbrush in front of the mirror.

    There’s a lot of talk on this site about music that will be timeless, will somehow live forever. I generally think that sort of stuff is nonsense – pop music is pop music, it comes and then it goes, and everything is washed away eventually – but if any tune has a legitimate claim to that kind of stature, it’s this one.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bgsiSHmZ20

    • I like a bold approach to such matters.
      Rather like meeting some people for the first time at the chit-chat phase of a party & instead of saying ‘ So, how do you know Jimmy?’, getting right in there with ‘ Well then, does God exist or not?’
      You make a great case for an unproveable thesis, & I would give ACIGC serious consideration for the top slot.
      Others ( in all impassioned seriousness, which is the best kind) have nominated Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday, Mystery Train by Elvis, Family Affair by Sly & so on.
      With the wind blowing in the right direction, & in the correct mood, I could be persuaded by all of them. I’d change my mind the next day though, or the next time I heard Roadrunner by The Modern Lovers.
      One thing I’d be pretty sure of though would be that the greatest recorded song of all time would be by an African American. Sam Cooke? James Brown ( my probable serious nomination)? Curtis Mayfield? Smokey Robinson? Louis Jordan? Who knows or can really say? Nobody of course, but a fun game to play & maybe AWers fancy naming their top 3 recorded songs of all time? Could be fun but more likely agonising!

    • Cooke’s scatting a minute and a half into “…Wonderful World” is such a thing of beauty – it’s the sound of a great new pop song drifting through your bedroom window on a summer breeze.

Leave a Reply