The story of Sam Cooke

From Clarksdale to Chicago

Samuel Cook was born on the twenty second of January 1931 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the heart of the Delta blues country. His father, Charles Cook, was a Baptist preacher who also worked in a Clarksdale oil mill, and his mother was Annie Mae. Sam was the fifth of eight children. In 1933 the family packed up and moved north to Chicago, part of the great migration of Black families out of the South. There, on the city's South Side, the Reverend Cook built a life around the church, and his children grew up singing in it. The e on the end of the name came much later, when Sam decided he wanted a fresh start.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sam started performing at the age of six, alongside his brothers Charles and L.C. and two of his sisters, in a family gospel group called the Singing Children. Even as a small boy he knew what he wanted. His brother L.C. remembered Sam telling him he was preparing himself, because he was going to be a singer and would never work a nine to five job. And he never did. He went to Wendell Phillips Academy High School, the same school Nat King Cole had attended a few years earlier, and the church choir was his training ground. He was bright, handsome and polite, and people noticed him wherever he went.[1] [2] [3] [4]

As a teenager Sam became lead singer of the Highway Q.C.'s, a gospel group started in 1945 by boys from Highway Baptist Church in Chicago. Around this time he befriended another young singer from the neighborhood, Lou Rawls, who sang with rival groups and would later take Sam's place in the Q.C.'s. The group toured, and the road taught hard lessons. Years later Sam told his protégé Bobby Womack about a trip to Memphis with the Q.C.'s, when he was still a boy, and someone slapped him in a park simply because he was Black and was not supposed to be there. His father had taught him never to back down when he was in the right. He never forgot either lesson.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Gospel's young idol

In 1949 a gospel singer and talent scout named J.W. Alexander, who sang with the Pilgrim Travelers and helped find acts for Specialty Records in Los Angeles, heard the teenage Sam with the Highway Q.C.'s. The following year a door opened. Rebert Harris, the great lead voice of the Soul Stirrers, quit the group in late 1950, fed up with the business and with the behavior he saw on the gospel highway. The Soul Stirrers were the most influential quartet in gospel, and after a brief spell with Paul Foster on lead, they turned to Sam. He was just nineteen, stepping into the shoes of a man fifteen years older who had shaped the whole modern quartet sound.[1] [2] [3] [4]

One of Sam's first records with the group, Jesus Gave Me Water, became a major hit on the gospel circuit, and decades later the Library of Congress picked it for the National Recording Registry. At first Sam modeled himself closely on Harris, and older members noticed that other singers could outsing him. But the crowds loved him anyway. Around 1953 he found his own signature, a light, fluttering high note that writers came to call his yodel. It would later carry straight onto the pop charts. He also wrote songs for the group, and toured the country with the Soul Stirrers and J.W. Alexander's Pilgrim Travelers throughout the early and middle fifties.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Gospel was supposed to move the church mothers, but Sam was drawing a different crowd. Young women rushed the stage just to get a look at him, and the writer Daniel Wolff compared his pull on Black teenagers to the effect Elvis Presley had on white ones. His private life was already complicated. In 1953 he married a singer and dancer named Dolores Milligan, known on stage as Dee Dee Mohawk. That same year, his childhood sweetheart Barbara Campbell gave birth to his daughter Linda. As his biographer later made clear, Sam fathered several children with different women during his gospel years, far from the pious image the church circuit expected.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By the mid fifties Sam had hit a ceiling. Gospel records sold mostly to poorer, rural audiences, and a gospel star could only go so far. His biographer Peter Guralnick said Sam had been raised by his father never to let anyone set limits on him, and he wanted to reach everybody, Black and white, rich and poor. J.W. Alexander saw it too, and increasingly pictured Sam as a teen idol singing secular songs. The trouble was that crossing from church music to pop was seen as a betrayal. Gospel fans and religious leaders could turn on a singer who did it, and Sam was the biggest young name in the field.[1] [2] [3]

Crossing over

Sam's first step into pop was a disguise. In New Orleans in December 1956 he recorded a song called Lovable, a reworking of a gospel number, and it came out under the name Dale Cook, in the hope that church audiences would not find out. It fooled almost nobody, because that voice was instantly recognizable. Lovable was neither a hit nor a flop. But it showed what he could do, and the backlash from the gospel world duly arrived. Sam formally left the Soul Stirrers. Remarkably, his preacher father gave him his blessing, telling him that what mattered was not what he sang, but that God had given him a voice to make people happy.[1] [2] [3]

At Specialty, the label owner Art Rupe agreed to let Sam record pop under his own name, but he expected something wild and bluesy in the style of the label's other star, Little Richard. When Rupe walked into a session and heard Sam singing Gershwin with a white vocal group behind him, he was furious. He argued with the producer Bumps Blackwell and decided not to release the recordings, which included You Send Me and Summertime. Blackwell and Sam walked out, taking the tapes to a new Los Angeles label called Keen Records, founded by the brothers John and Alex Siamas. It turned out to be one of the costliest decisions in Rupe's career.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Keen's first single paired Summertime with a love song Sam had written, You Send Me, recorded in Los Angeles in June 1957 with René Hall arranging and Clifton White on guitar. Summertime was meant to be the hit, but disc jockeys flipped the record over. You Send Me broke nationally that October and reached number one on both the pop and rhythm and blues charts in December 1957, selling around a million and a half copies. It was the only pop number one of his life. Overnight, his earnings reportedly jumped from about two hundred dollars a week to more than five thousand. The gospel singer was now a secular superstar with fans of every color and age.[1] [2] [3]

Stardom came with a few bumps. A white singer, Teresa Brewer, rushed out a cover of You Send Me aimed at pop radio, the usual practice at the time, but for once the original beat the copy. On the third of November 1957 Sam made his debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, and the live broadcast ran over time, so the screen went black in the middle of his song. Viewers were so angry that Sullivan booked him again for the first of December. Meanwhile Specialty, seeing its former artist at the top of the charts, dug out an old recording, I'll Come Running Back to You, which went to number one on the rhythm and blues jockey chart early in 1958.[1] [2]

The Keen years and a fatal road

Sam wanted more than the chitlin circuit, the network of Black venues where most rhythm and blues acts made their living. In March 1958, only months after You Send Me, he booked two weeks at New York's Copacabana, the grand supper club of white show business. By his own account he bombed. Much of the audience barely knew who he was, and he stayed away from the Copa and many white clubs for years afterwards. That August he played the Cavalcade of Jazz at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles alongside Ray Charles and Little Willie John. The hits kept coming on Keen, among them For Sentimental Reasons, You Were Made for Me and Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha.[1] [2]

In November 1958 Sam's car crashed while he was touring the South, on the road from Saint Louis to Greenville, Mississippi. His chauffeur, Edward Cunningham, was killed. Sam, his guitarist Cliff White and his old friend Lou Rawls were taken to hospital. Rawls was in the worst shape. He was pronounced dead before he even reached the hospital, then lay in a coma for five and a half days, and needed a year to recover, with months passing before his memory came back. Rawls later called the crash the event that changed his life. For Sam it was a brush with death at the very moment his career was taking off.[1] [2]

Sam's marriage to Dee Dee Mohawk had ended in divorce in 1958. In 1959 she was killed in a car collision in Fresno, California, and although they were no longer married, Sam paid for her funeral. His personal life was tangled in other ways too. In 1958 a woman in Philadelphia named Connie Bolling said Sam was the father of her son, and he settled with her out of court for around five thousand dollars. Soon after, he married Barbara Campbell, the mother of his daughter Linda, in Chicago, with his father performing the ceremony. They went on to have two more children, Tracy, born in 1960, and a son, Vincent, born in 1961.[1] [2] [3]

At Keen Sam was learning to write and produce for himself. Only Sixteen, a 1959 hit, was inspired by the sixteenth birthday of Lou Rawls's stepsister, and was first written for an actor who hung around the studio. It was credited to Barbara Campbell, a pen name that also covered two young staffers, Lou Adler and Herb Alpert. Adler and Alpert had started a song about a boy who knows little about school but plenty about love, and Sam kept nagging them about it, then reshaped it around education. He cut it in March 1959 at his last Keen session, with no orchestra at all. That song, Wonderful World, sat in the can for a year.[1] [2]

RCA hits and his own label

In January 1960 Sam signed with RCA Victor, the label of Elvis Presley, reportedly for an advance of a hundred thousand dollars, and began working with the producers Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, known as Hugo and Luigi. His first two RCA singles flopped. Then Keen struck back. Keen co-founder John Siamas found the unreleased Wonderful World and put it out in the same week as an RCA single. It reached number twelve on the pop chart and number two on the rhythm and blues chart, Sam's biggest hit since You Send Me. The success of that simple, homemade record helped push his music in a new direction.[1] [2] [3]

RCA's own breakthrough came in the summer of 1960 with Chain Gang, released on the twenty sixth of July. Sam had been inspired by seeing a real chain gang of prisoners working on a highway while he was on tour. It went to number two on both the pop and rhythm and blues charts and became his first top ten hit in Britain. Some critics have found the record strange, a catchy pop song built from the sound of forced labor, but it made Sam one of RCA's biggest sellers. By the start of 1962 he was, by most accounts, the label's best selling singles artist after Elvis himself.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sam was also becoming a businessman, rare for a Black performer of his era. With J.W. Alexander, and with his old Soul Stirrers mentor Roy Crain, he set up SAR Records around the turn of the decade, along with the publishing and management company Kags Music. SAR released the later Soul Stirrers with Johnnie Taylor, who had replaced Sam in the group, plus his brother L.C. Cooke, Mel Carter, a teenage organist named Billy Preston, and the Womack Brothers from Cleveland. Sam renamed them the Valentinos, moved them to Los Angeles and steered them from gospel to soul. Their records Lookin' for a Love and It's All Over Now launched the career of Bobby Womack.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The hits of these years are some of the most loved in pop. Cupid, in 1961, was written for another singer until the producers decided to keep it for Sam, and it reached number seven in Britain. Twistin' the Night Away, recorded in December 1961, topped the rhythm and blues chart in 1962. That spring, in Atlanta, Sam phoned Luigi Creatore to pitch two new songs, and on the twenty sixth of April 1962 he recorded Having a Party and Bring It On Home to Me in a single joyful session, with Lou Rawls answering his lines on the second. Critics later called Bring It On Home to Me perhaps the first record to define the soul experience.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Sam's politics were showing too. In 1961 he made headlines by refusing to perform at a segregated concert in Memphis. On tour he saw audiences split by a rope, Black fans on one side and white on the other, and at one Southern show he noticed police dogs patrolling only the Black side of the hall. In October 1962 he toured Britain with Little Richard, whose band included the teenage Billy Preston. Richard at first sang only gospel and was booed, then watched Sam go down a storm and fought back with his old rock and roll hits. The warm British welcome encouraged Sam to put more gospel fire into his own shows.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Nineteen sixty three: fire, grief and a fight

On the twelfth of January 1963 RCA flew two engineers to Miami to record Sam live at the Harlem Square Club, a two thousand capacity hall in the Black neighborhood of Overtown. The crowd was packed with devoted fans from his gospel days, and with King Curtis leading the band on saxophone, Sam gave them a raw, sweaty, shouting show nothing like his polished pop records. It captured the late set, starting around one in the morning. RCA listened and panicked. The label thought it was too loud and too gritty for the smooth crossover star it was selling, and quietly shelved the tapes. They would sit in the vault for twenty two years.[1] [2] [3]

A few weeks later, over three late nights in February 1963, Sam made the most intimate album of his career. Night Beat was cut with a small band in RCA's Hollywood studio, including the sixteen year old Billy Preston on organ, Barney Kessel on guitar and Hal Blaine on drums. It was full of blues, including his version of Willie Dixon's Little Red Rooster, which had first been offered to his brother L.C., who said he was no blues singer. Little Red Rooster became a pop and rhythm and blues hit. So did Another Saturday Night, which Sam wrote while stuck in an English hotel that would not allow female guests.[1] [2] [3]

Then came the worst blow of Sam's life. In June 1963 his eighteen month old son Vincent drowned in the family swimming pool at their Los Angeles home. For about six months afterwards Sam recorded almost nothing new. Later, recording the old folk ballad The Riddle Song, which touches on a baby, Sam broke down in tears in the studio, according to the string section leader Sid Sharp. The same year he was reading hungrily, from the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar to James Baldwin, and building a library of Black history.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1963 Sam also found a new manager, a brash New York accountant named Allen Klein. Sam had repeatedly asked RCA to review his royalty accounts and been refused. Klein forced the label to open its books, recovered back royalties, reportedly around a hundred and ten thousand dollars, and took a quarter of that as his fee. Then he renegotiated Sam's contract. A company called Tracey Limited, named after Sam's daughter Tracy, would make his records and license them to RCA, giving Sam artistic control. It looked like a triumph of Black ownership. But Klein controlled Tracey, and that detail would shape everything after Sam's death.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the eighth of October 1963 Sam, his wife Barbara and his band arrived at a Holiday Inn in Shreveport, Louisiana, where they had phoned ahead for rooms. The clerk said there were no vacancies. Sam refused to leave and demanded the manager. Barbara feared for his life, and he told her they would not kill him because he was Sam Cooke. When the group finally drove off, honking and shouting, police were waiting at their next motel and arrested them for disturbing the peace. The New York Times ran the story the next day. Six weeks later, Sam was on stage at the Apollo when news came that President Kennedy had been shot.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A change is gonna come

Earlier in 1963, J.W. Alexander had given Sam the new Bob Dylan album, and one song on it, Blowin' in the Wind, shook him. He loved it, but he told friends he was almost ashamed that a young white man had written the song about Black America that he should have written himself. The March on Washington that August moved him again. Then, just after Christmas 1963, he called J.W. over to his house to hear something new. He played it twice on his guitar, the second time line by line. He said it had come to him almost as if in a dream, and that he hoped it would make his father proud.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For once, the studio perfectionist let go of control. Sam handed the song to his arranger René Hall and told him to give it whatever it demanded. Hall wrote it like a film score, with each verse carried by a different section, strings, horns, and timpani for the bridge, with a French horn for melancholy. On the thirtieth of January 1964 they recorded it at RCA in Hollywood. The session drummer was so intimidated by the orchestra that he refused to leave the control room, so Earl Palmer, working next door, stepped in. When Sam played the finished track to Bobby Womack, Bobby said it sounded like death. Sam agreed, and said that was why he would never play it in public.[1] [2] [3] [4]

He performed it on television just once. Allen Klein loved the song and talked Sam into singing it on The Tonight Show on the seventh of February 1964, arranging for RCA to pay for a full string section. NBC did not keep the tape. Two days later the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan and swallowed the week's attention. On the twenty fifth of February Sam was ringside in Miami when Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston, and the new champion hauled him into the ring shouting his name. Afterwards Sam, Clay, Malcolm X and the football star Jim Brown spent the night together at the Hampton House motel, the night later imagined in One Night in Miami.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ain't That Good News, Sam's last studio album, came out in early 1964, with A Change Is Gonna Come buried on side two. The title song and Good Times were hits, and critics now rank the album among his finest. In July 1964 Sam finally returned to the Copacabana, and this time he triumphed. RCA recorded the shows for Sam Cooke at the Copa, a slick set of standards introduced by Sammy Davis Junior, the only live album released in his lifetime. He made a television appearance on Shindig, screen tested for a film role, and in his final recording session cut a driving dance song called Shake. He was thirty three and seemed to be just getting started.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The Hacienda Motel

On the night of the tenth of December 1964, Sam was out in Los Angeles, and friends and staff at a restaurant called Martoni's remembered him carrying a large roll of cash. He left with a twenty two year old woman named Elisa Boyer, whom he had met that evening. Boyer later told police that she asked him repeatedly to take her home, but that Sam, who seemed drunk, drove his red Ferrari down the freeway instead to the Hacienda Motel, a Black owned motel at Ninety First and Figueroa in South Los Angeles. She said he seemed to know the layout of the place, as if he had been there before.[1] [2] [3]

Boyer's account, which Sam's family and many fans have never accepted, went like this. She said that in the room Sam forced her onto the bed and began to undress her, and she was sure he meant to rape her. When he went into the bathroom, she grabbed her clothes and ran, scooping up most of his clothes by mistake. She said she knocked at the manager's office, got no answer quickly enough, and fled to a phone booth, where she called the police. Minutes later Sam, wearing only a sports jacket and one shoe, came pounding on the manager's door, demanding to know where the girl was.[1] [2] [3]

The manager, a fifty five year old woman named Bertha Franklin, said there was nobody in her office but herself. According to Franklin, Sam broke in, grabbed her, and they struggled and fell to the floor. She got free, fetched a pistol and fired, and one bullet struck him in the chest, piercing his heart. She said he told her in a puzzled voice that she had shot him, then came at her again, and she hit him with a broomstick before he collapsed. The motel's owner, Evelyn Carr, said she was on the phone with Franklin during the fight and heard it all. Sam Cooke died on the floor of that office, on the eleventh of December 1964.[1] [2] [3]

On the sixteenth of December 1964 a coroner's jury of seven deliberated for about fifteen minutes and ruled the killing a justifiable homicide. Police said both women's stories were backed by lie detector tests, and the case was closed. Barbara Cooke sat pale and silent in court. Sam's friends were outraged, none of them had been there, and Muhammad Ali said that if the victim had been Frank Sinatra or the Beatles, the FBI would be investigating. Money was part of the mystery. Police found only a twenty dollar bill in Boyer's purse and a money clip with one hundred and eight dollars in Sam's car, far less than the cash people remembered.[1] [2]

Sam's body was taken home to Chicago, where on the eighteenth of December huge crowds, reported at around two hundred thousand people, lined up for blocks to file past his coffin. The next day there was a second service at Mount Sinai Baptist Church in Los Angeles, where Ray Charles stepped in for a grief stricken Bessie Griffin and sang The Angels Keep Watching Over Me. Sam was buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale. On the twenty second of December RCA released Shake as a single, with A Change Is Gonna Come on the flip side, trimmed for radio. Shake reached the top ten, and the civil rights movement took up the other side almost immediately.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The legal fallout was grim. Bertha Franklin received death threats, left her job at the Hacienda and kept her new address secret. After the inquest cleared her, she sued Sam's estate for two hundred thousand dollars, claiming physical injuries and mental anguish from his attack. The estate countersued for about seven thousand dollars to cover his funeral costs. Elisa Boyer testified on Franklin's side. In 1967 the court awarded Franklin thirty thousand dollars. Peter Guralnick later described Boyer as a prostitute, which has fed a long running theory that she set out to rob Sam that night, though nothing in the official record supports it.[1] [2] [3]

Scandal, catalogues and a slow resurrection

Just seventy seven days after Sam died, his widow Barbara and his twenty year old protégé Bobby Womack tried to marry at the Los Angeles county courthouse. Bobby wore one of Sam's suits. The license was refused because he was under twenty one, so they married on the fifth of March 1965, the day after his birthday. Much of the soul world saw it as a betrayal. Disc jockeys threw away Womack's records, audiences booed him, his own brothers turned against him, and he was badly beaten in a Chicago hotel. Womack said he only went to Barbara's side because he feared what she might do if left alone.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The marriage ended in violence. In 1970 Barbara discovered that Bobby was having sex with her teenage daughter, Sam's daughter Linda, and fired a gun at him, and the bullet grazed his head. They divorced in 1971, and according to Womack, Linda never spoke to her mother again. Linda later married Bobby's younger brother Cecil, and as Womack and Womack the couple had a worldwide hit in 1988 with Teardrops. Bobby's son with Barbara, Vincent, took his own life in 1988 at the age of twenty one. Bobby himself rebuilt his career over decades and died in June 2014, aged seventy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sam's music ended up in Allen Klein's hands. SAR Records folded soon after his death. Klein advised Barbara not to sell, but by 1968 he had bought out the remaining interests for around three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and his company ABKCO has controlled Sam's later recordings and publishing ever since. Klein went on to manage the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, and died in 2009. For years parts of Sam's catalogue were out of print. A 2019 documentary argued the family saw little from his music. Klein's son Jody later oversaw lavish reissues, and Peter Guralnick, with access to Klein's archive, wrote the major biography, Dream Boogie, in 2005.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Rediscovery came in waves. In 1985 an RCA executive named Gregg Geller found the forgotten Harlem Square Club tapes and released them, and critics hailed one of the greatest live albums ever made. In 1986 Sam was one of the first ten people inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the same year a Levi's jeans advert revived Wonderful World, which reached number two in Britain. He never won a competitive Grammy, but received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. In 2019 the mayor of Shreveport apologised to his family for the 1963 arrest and gave Sam the key to the city.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A Change Is Gonna Come grew into one of the most important songs in American history. Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin recorded it, Rosa Parks reportedly listened to it after Martin Luther King Junior was killed, and Barack Obama echoed its words on the night he won the presidency in 2008. Its title is written on a wall of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Sam's brother L.C. died in 2017, and his widow Barbara in 2021. As of 2026, Rolling Stone ranks Sam the third greatest singer of all time, and his influence runs through Aretha, Otis, Al Green, Rod Stewart and nearly every soul singer since.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Sam Cooke

Sam Cooke and Barbara Campbell. Barbara Campbell was Sam's childhood sweetheart from Chicago and the mother of his first daughter, Linda, born in 1953. They married after his divorce from Dee Dee Mohawk, with his father officiating, and had Tracy and Vincent. Vincent's drowning in 1963 shook the marriage. She was with Sam during the Shreveport arrest. After his death she married Bobby Womack, a union that ended in 1970 when she fired a gun at him. She died in 2021.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sam Cooke and Bobby Womack. Sam discovered the Womack Brothers singing gospel in the fifties, signed them to SAR, renamed them the Valentinos and made the young Bobby his guitarist from 1961. Bobby was among the first to hear A Change Is Gonna Come. Sam talked him into letting the Rolling Stones cover It's All Over Now, and the royalties changed Bobby's mind about the Stones. After Sam's death Bobby married his widow, a scandal that shadowed his career for decades.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sam Cooke and J.W. Alexander. J.W. Alexander, a gospel singer with the Pilgrim Travelers, spotted the teenage Sam in 1949 and became his mentor, business partner and closest adviser. Together they founded Kags Music and SAR Records, co-wrote songs, and planned Sam's move into pop. It was J.W. who gave him the Dylan album with Blowin' in the Wind, and J.W. who first heard A Change Is Gonna Come. After Sam died, J.W. managed Lou Rawls to stardom. He died in 1996.[1] [2] [3]

Sam Cooke and Allen Klein. Allen Klein, a New York accountant, became Sam's manager in 1963 after forcing RCA to audit his royalties. He built the Tracey Limited deal, pushed Sam to sing A Change Is Gonna Come on television, and after Sam's death bought out his estate's interests for around three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Klein's company ABKCO still controls much of Sam's catalogue. Sam was his first management client, and a stepping stone to the Stones and the Beatles.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls. Lou Rawls grew up near Sam on Chicago's South Side, sang with him in teenage gospel groups and replaced him in the Highway Q.C.'s. He survived the 1958 car crash that killed Sam's driver, after being pronounced dead on the way to hospital. Rawls sang the answering voice on Bring It On Home to Me, and after Sam's death J.W. Alexander guided his solo career. In 1970 Rawls charted with his own version of that song.[1] [2] [3]

Sam Cooke and L.C. Cooke. L.C. Cooke, born in 1932, was Sam's younger brother and fellow member of the Singing Children and the Highway Q.C.'s. He actually crossed from gospel to secular music before Sam, singing with the Magnificents in 1956. Sam put You Send Me in L.C.'s name, offered him Little Red Rooster, and recorded him on SAR. L.C. later toured with Little Richard's old band the Upsetters, and died in July 2017 at eighty four.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sam Cooke and Muhammad Ali. Sam was a close friend of the young boxer Cassius Clay. After Clay beat Sonny Liston in February 1964, he pulled Sam into the ring in front of the television cameras. They spent that night with Malcolm X and Jim Brown in Miami. When Sam was killed, Ali said the FBI would have investigated if he had been Frank Sinatra or the Beatles.[1] [2] [3]

Sam Cooke and Malcolm X. Sam had known Malcolm X since his first headline shows at the Apollo, and at first cared little for his religious beliefs. Through their mutual friend Cassius Clay, Sam came to take Malcolm's message of Black self determination more seriously in early 1964. Their clash in One Night in Miami is fictional. Malcolm was assassinated in February 1965, two months after Sam's death.[1] [2]

Sam Cooke and René Hall. René Hall, a guitarist and arranger from Louisiana, arranged You Send Me and nearly all of Sam's biggest records, from Twistin' the Night Away to Night Beat. On A Change Is Gonna Come Sam gave him complete freedom for the first time, and Hall wrote a small symphony, strings, horns and timpani. He later worked with Marvin Gaye and Bobby Womack, and died in 1988.[1] [2] [3]

Sam Cooke and Art Rupe. Art Rupe ran Specialty Records, which recorded the Soul Stirrers and Sam's first pop session. Rupe wanted Sam to sound like Little Richard, and when he heard him crooning Gershwin he argued with producer Bumps Blackwell and shelved the tracks, including You Send Me. Sam and Blackwell left for Keen, and Specialty later cashed in with old recordings. Rupe lived to a hundred and four.[1] [2] [3]

Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin. Sam was a friend of Aretha's father, the Detroit preacher C.L. Franklin, and she met him as a girl. He was one of her greatest influences, and as a teenager she told her father she wanted to follow Sam into pop. Sam tried to bring her to RCA, but she chose Columbia. She reportedly switched to his cigarette brand, and later called him one of the greatest male singers of all time.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Sam Cooke

• Sam added the e to his surname only when he went pop, as a symbol of a fresh start. He was born Samuel Cook. When he crossed from gospel to secular music he became Cooke, reportedly to mark a new start and to sound a little classier. His brother L.C. did the same when he recorded.[1] [2] [3]
• Sam went to the same Chicago high school as Nat King Cole. Sam attended Wendell Phillips Academy High School on Chicago's South Side, the school Nat King Cole had attended a few years earlier. Cole later became one of the models Sam studied for crossing over to white audiences.[1] [2]
• His first pop single came out under a fake name, Dale Cook, to hide it from gospel fans. Lovable, a reworked gospel song, was released under the alias Dale Cook so church audiences would not learn he had recorded pop. His voice was so recognizable that the disguise failed almost immediately.[1] [2]
• Specialty Records recorded You Send Me but refused to release it. Label boss Art Rupe objected to the pop direction and to Sam singing Gershwin, and chose not to issue You Send Me and Summertime. The tapes went to Keen, where You Send Me became a number one hit.[1] [2]
• You Send Me was the B side. Summertime was supposed to be the hit. Keen released Summertime as the intended A side, but disc jockeys preferred the flip. You Send Me went to number one on both the pop and rhythm and blues charts in December 1957.[1]
• Sam's first Ed Sullivan Show appearance was cut off mid song when the broadcast ran long. On the third of November 1957 the live show ran over and the screen went black while Sam was singing. Viewers complained so loudly that Sullivan booked him again for the first of December.[1]
• Only Sixteen was inspired by the sixteenth birthday of Lou Rawls's stepsister. Sam wrote it with the birthday of Rawls's stepsister Eunice in mind, and first gave it to an actor named Steve Rowland. Rowland's manager disliked it, so Sam recorded it himself in 1959.[1]
• Allen Klein once offered ten thousand dollars for any film of Sam singing Wonderful World. No footage of Sam performing Wonderful World is known to exist. In 1986 Klein, then president of ABKCO, offered a ten thousand dollar reward for anyone who could find some. None surfaced.[1]
• A jeans advert made Wonderful World a number two hit in Britain in 1986. After a sound alike version featured in a 1985 Levi's 501 commercial and the film Witness, Sam's original was reissued in the UK and climbed to number two, twenty six years after it first charted there.[1]
• Wonderful World was recorded with no orchestra and no arranger, at his last Keen session. In March 1959 Sam cut it with just guitar, bass, a teenage drummer and a quartet of singers that may have included J.W. Alexander and Lou Rawls. Keen released it a year later to compete with RCA.[1]
• Cupid was originally meant for a different singer, Sandy Stewart. Sam's producers asked him to write a song for Sandy Stewart after seeing her on The Perry Como Show. Once they heard more of her singing, they kept Cupid for Sam instead.[1]
• Half of the producing team Hugo and Luigi missed Sam's first RCA session because he feared flying. Only Luigi Creatore made it to Los Angeles to co-produce Cupid, because his cousin and partner Hugo Peretti was afraid of flying.[1] [2]
• Bring It On Home to Me was first offered to Dee Clark, who turned it down. Sam wrote it on tour and offered it to fellow singer Dee Clark before recording it himself. It reworked a 1959 song by Charles Brown and Amos Milburn in a churchy call and response style.[1]
• Another Saturday Night was written in an English hotel that banned female guests. Sam wrote the 1963 hit while touring Britain and stuck in a hotel room where no women visitors were allowed. It topped the rhythm and blues chart and was later a hit for Cat Stevens.[1] [2]
• At the Harlem Square Club, drinks were sold from a cage by a bartender with a shotgun. According to Newsweek, as quoted by Pitchfork, liquor at the Miami club was served from a caged enclosure by an armed bartender. RCA recorded Sam's one in the morning set there with eight microphones and a three track machine.[1]
• Billy Preston was sixteen when he played organ on Night Beat. Preston, later famous for his work with the Beatles, played on the February 1963 sessions and on Little Red Rooster, where his organ imitates a crowing rooster and barking dogs. He also made his debut album for Sam's SAR label.[1] [2] [3]
• Charlie Watts based his drums on the Stones' Little Red Rooster on Sam's version. When the Rolling Stones took Little Red Rooster to number one in Britain in 1964, Charlie Watts said his drum part was inspired by Sam Cooke's 1963 recording, where Hal Blaine played drums.[1]
• The drummer booked for A Change Is Gonna Come refused to play, so Earl Palmer stepped in. John Boudreaux was so intimidated by the orchestral arrangement that he would not leave the control room. Earl Palmer, working in the studio next door, came over and played the session.[1] [2]
• NBC logged A Change Is Gonna Come under a different title and did not keep the tape. When Sam sang it on The Tonight Show in February 1964, an NBC timekeeper wrote it down as It's a Long Time Coming. The network did not save the recording of the performance.[1]
• Sam was on stage at the Apollo when President Kennedy was shot. He opened a run at the Apollo on the twenty second of November 1963. Because Sam was paid on a percentage, owner Frank Schiffman needed his consent to close the theater, and Sam said he did not feel like working either.[1]
• Klein took a quarter of the back royalties he won for Sam from RCA. After forcing an audit in 1963, Klein recovered about a hundred and ten thousand dollars in back royalties for Sam and took a twenty five percent finder's fee.[1]
• Sam was Allen Klein's very first management client. Before Klein managed the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, he was an accountant who audited record companies. Sam Cooke, who could not get RCA to pay what he was owed, was his first client as a manager.[1]
• On a 1963 tour, Sam travelled in a custom built Checker that could seat nine people. Along with a Cadillac and a Buick station wagon, Sam had a specially built Checker, a cross between a station wagon and a limousine, to carry his entourage around twenty four states and Canada.[1]
• Sam stopped straightening his hair long before it was fashionable. He began wearing his hair natural so early that people advised him to get a haircut. He told Bobby Womack he would never straighten his hair again.[1] [2]
• Months before his death, Sam had screen tested for a movie role. By late 1964 he had triumphed at the Copacabana and taken a screen test for a film, part of a plan to move beyond records into wider show business.[1]
• Sam never won a competitive Grammy. Despite his hits, Sam never won a Grammy in competition. The Recording Academy gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999, and ABKCO's documentary Sam Cooke Legend won a Grammy in 2004.[1] [2]
• Sam was the first person honoured on the Clarksdale Walk of Fame. In 2008 his hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, gave him the first plaque on its Walk of Fame, and in 2009 he was honoured with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker in the town.[1] [2]
• Chicago named part of East Thirty Sixth Street Sam Cooke Way in 2011. The honorary street sign stands near Cottage Grove Avenue, close to the corner where Sam hung out and sang as a teenager. Many of his relatives attended the ceremony.[1]
• Rod Stewart said he spent two years listening almost only to Sam Cooke. Stewart said he knew he sounded a bit like Sam, so he studied his records. His first solo attempt was a cover of Shake, and Sam remained his lifelong vocal idol.[1] [2]
• Bettye LaVette and Jon Bon Jovi sang A Change Is Gonna Come at Obama's 2009 inaugural concert. More than forty four years after Sam's death, the duet at the Lincoln Memorial celebration revived the song for a new political era, following Obama's own nod to it on election night.[1] [2]
• Sam's first Soul Stirrers hit was added to the National Recording Registry in 2022. Jesus Gave Me Water, one of Sam's earliest recordings as the group's lead singer, was chosen by the Library of Congress for preservation in 2022.[1]
• Sam defined soul as the capacity to project a feeling. In one of his final interviews he offered that simple definition of soul, and spoke of his intense desire to make all his audiences happy.[1]
• Asked for his favourite singers in 1964, Sam named Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. He also praised Louis Armstrong and Pearl Bailey for their feeling for the blues. His brother L.C. said Sam loved B.B. King, Bobby Bland and Junior Parker too.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.