Keep
Movin' On
Keep
Movin' On
Label: Abkco 3563 (2003)
Songs:
Cover Illustration:
Angelo Tillery
Restoration: Steve Rosenthal
Personnel includes: Sam Cooke (vocals); Clifton M. White (arranger, conductor, guitar, strings); Rene Hall (arranger, conductor, guitar, piano, organ); Glen Campbell, Bobby D. Womack, Cecil Womack, Howard Roberts (guitar); Emmet Sargeant (violin, cello); Tiber Zelig (violin, strings); Darrell Terwilliger (violin); Alexander Neiman (viola, strings); Jesse Ehrlich (cello); William E. Green (flute, saxophone); Melvin C. Lastie (saxophone, trumpet, trombone, piano); Gerald S. Wilson (trumpet); James A. Decker (French horn); Vernon H. Porter (trombone); Ray Pohlman, Russell Bridges (piano); Buddy Clark (bass); James E. Bond, Jr. (upright bass); John Boudreaux, Jr. (drums, percussion); Hal Blaine, Robert O. Bryant (drums).
Producers include:
Sam Cooke, Luigi Creatore, Hugo Peretti, Al Schmitt.
Compilation producers: Jody H. Klein, Teri Landi.
Engineers include: Dave Hassinger, Bones Howe, Dick Bogart.
Recorded between 1959 and 1965.
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Liner Notes
Sam Cooke's vision never ceased to grow. Just nineteen when he joined the
nation's #1 gospel quartet, he took his place seemingly without a moment's doubt
("I had never seen anything like it;' says singer Lloyd Price. "I was the
hottest thing in the country with
'Lawdy Miss Clawdy; and here was this guy who just stood there and sung, and he
rocked them") and gave the Soul Stirrers their greatest commercial success with
"Jesus
Gave Me Water" the first recorded number on
which he sang lead.
Six
years later, in 1957, after conducting a sometimes contentious debate with
himself for over a year, and with the active encouragement of Specialty a&r man
Bumps Blackwell, he became the first of the gospel stars to go pop, enjoying a
#1 hit with his first release, "You Send Me:' With former Pilgrim Travelers'
manager J. W. Alexander he established his own song publishing company, Kags,
the following year, and in the fall of 1959, spurred on by the idea that there
was nothing that a white business establishment could do that they were not
capable of doing, he and Alexander, together with Soul Stirrers founder S.R.
Crain, established their own label, SAR Records, as much as anything, J. W. said,
to record "people we liked. Sam loved producing, and he wanted to give young
artists a chance."
With his signing to the RCA label in 1960, it might have seemed as if all of his
most manifest ambitions had been fulfilled: he had achieved the kind of
respectability that Nat "King" Cole had found at Capitol, he was being offered
the opportunity to expand his musical horizons beyond the parochial boundaries
that limited so many rhythm and blues artists to the "race" market exclusively.
Between 1960 and 1962, he generated one classic hit after another ("Chain
Gang", "Wonderful
World', "Cupid",
"Having
a Party", "Bring
It On Home To Me"-but by the end of that year,
after a triumphant English tour co-headlining with Little Richard, it was clear
that he was restless. In January he debuted his new stage act (after Europe,
said J.W. Alexander, and the challenge of matching Little Richard night after
night, "Sam finally got back into doing his gospel thing, you know, the real
fervent approach"). In February he recorded an intimate, in-the-wee-small hours
concept album: "Night
Beat", that was almost its stylistic opposite,
and by summer he and Alexander had their biggest pop hit, Mel Carter's "When a
Boy Falls In Love,' on SAR's sister label Derby. But it was an almost chance
business meeting in March of that year that would have as liberating an effect
on Sam Cooke's career as any step he had taken to date.
Actually it was a chance meeting on one side only. Allen Klein was a 31-year-old
accountant, much of whose work focused on the music industry. Three years
earlier he had met disc jockey Doug "Jocko" Henderson through his association
with rhythm and blues star Lloyd Price, and he had just gone into partnership
with Jocko with the idea of finding more music business clients. Together they
had overseen the refurbishing of Philadelphias cavernous State Theatre, where
Jocko, whose Rocket Ship radio show was a hit in New York and Philadelphia but
who had never been able to break into the concert promotion business in his
native Philadelphia, hoped to challenge the hegemony of fellow Philadelphia DJ
Georgie Woods. The star of Jocko's opening show on March 8, 1963, was Sam Cooke.
It was Jocko who recommended that Sam talk to Allen about bis business.
I'm
the guy who said, 'Sam this guy would be phenomenal for you: The record
manufacturers didn't treat anybody good, but the black artists, they tried to
make sure they got absolutely nothing, absolutely, positively nothing. Allen was
my accountant and my very close friend, and Sam was happy with him:' By May 1
Allen Klein had been designated Cooke's official representative to bath RCA and
BMI, the licensing agency that collects performance royalties for songwriters
and publishers. By September he had gotten Sam $119,000 in back royalties, a
$50,000 BMI advance (payable over two years), and a brand-new record deal which
not only paid the artist $450,000 over five years but guaranteed full creative
control under the aegis of the newly formed Tracey Ltd, a self-created
manufacturing company which would license Sam Cooke's records to RCA for a
period of thirty years. The idea, says Klein, whom Sam asked at this point to
become his official manager ("I told him I had never managed anyone before. He
said, 'Look, I never wrote a song before I wrote my first one"'), was to give
Sam "total artistic freedom, total control over his back catalogue, and the
ability to be completely self-contained:' an idea coinciding almost exactly with
sentiments that Cooke himself was expressing at just about the same time. "My
future lies more in creating music and records than in being a [live]
performer:' Sam told Billboard in early 1964, and while it may not have been
retirement precisely that was on his mind, he was definitely planning a major
change. "Sam saw the business changing,' says Bobby Womack. "He told me, 'There's
something coming, and it's coming fast." It was a whole new way of doing things,
according to Sam. "It wasn't about uniforms or how you dressed or same false
world that you go to:' It was about talent, individuality, and the ability to
control, and own, your own work.
The
first full-scale session under the new arrangement came just before Christmas,
1963. Like nearly all of Sam's sessions, there was no question who was in charge
("I love talent, 'cause then you don't have to do anything!" says Luigi
Creatore, who with his cousin and partner Hugo Peretti, had signed Sam to RCA).
This was only the second time, though, that Sam would be going into the studio
with the explicit intention of creating something more than a succession of hit
singles or an album-oriented "theme" (Cooke's Tour, a collection of "travel
songs:' was an early RCA example; Tribute to the Lady, a memorial to Billie
Holiday on Keen, was a more ambitious one). He
had been home since Thanksgiving with the idea of concentrating solely on the
upcoming session ("I told him to go home, you don't have to worry about money:'
says Allen Klein) and to same extent, on the first night of the session, the
tension may have shown.
He opened with "Ain't
That Good News" a recent composition that was
little more than an adaptation of the old gospel number-with two significant
differences. One was the aid-timer banjo that opened the track ("Sam liked all
kinds of music;' gays Luigi. "Stick a banjo in and get a different sound, that
gives you something"); the other was the strong sense of wistful fatalism
undercutting the overt cheerfulness of
the song. "I think that's because of the way he used the sixth chord rather than
the [more common] dominant seventh;' says New Orleans songwriter/producer Allen
Toussaint, who points out, "It caused him to be hip but not rowdy, extremely hip
but the kind of hip that carries a comb, not a knife:' What is even more
striking, though, as I think Toussaint might agree, is the war in which 'this
very elegance of delivery is set off by an unaccountable melancholy, a kind of
bittersweet quality that lies at the heart of all of his best work, from, his
1957 "teen romance" hit, "You
Send Me" on.
It
was this very bringing together of opposites, the manipulation of conflicting
emotions With the most familiar of musical settings ("You're singing for people
who don't sing;' Sam told Bobby Womack, explaining the simplicity of his
compositions) that enabled Sam to achieve such direct communication in a manner
that in same wars appears obvious (the warmth of his voice, the directness of
his words) but in
other ways defies logical analysis. "Good
Times" for example, the second song of the
session would appear to convey the most unambiguous of social exhortations
("Come on and let the good times roll/We gonna stay here till we soothe our
souls/if it takes all night long") in the most transparent of fashions. Clearly
inspired by Louis Jordan's seminal 1946 hit, "Let the Good Times Roll,' it never
abandons its good-time theme, and yet it convers that same sense of wistful
melancholy while at the same time, like nearly all of Sam Cooke's songs,
deliberately inviting its audience to sing along.
It
look twenty-five takes to achieve that simplicity, with numerous overdubs by the
singer himself of all the background parts and a sense of perfectionism that
would seem to belie the easygoing nature of both the singer and the song. What
he was aiming at in his delivery, he told a disbelieving Bobby Womack, was a
kind of natural, conversational tone. "He said, 'You know who I try to sing
like? Louis Armstrong.' I said, 'Louis Armstrong?' I thought that was crazy! But
he said, 'Don't listen to the voice. Listen to the phrasing. It's not like a
song, it's like two people rapping:" And, for all the indisputable beauty and
natural grace of Sam's delivery, you realize that it's true. It wasn't until Sam
and Louis Armstrong were long dead that Bobby finally snapped to it, "and I
heard Sam's voice saying, 'Didn't I tell you,
fucker? Didn't I tell you?'"
Sam came into the studio to sing, that's all. And his wife came with him. She
sat in the back. We were all conscious of what had happened. But we did what we
had to do. -Luigi Creatore on the somewhat subdued mood of the December
session, just six months after the drowning death of Sam and Barbara Cooke's
18-month-old son
In
the wake of that death, perhaps in denial of it, Sam had worked harder than
ever, remaining on the road almost constantly from one week after the funeral in
June until Thanksgiving. "You never saw anger, but you saw depression;' says Lou
Rawls. "He never really opened up, though, and let it go. I guess you would say
he was introverted in that sense. Sam had the kind of charisma, when he walked
in a room you just felt the glow of someone special. He never wanted to leave
anybody with a bad taste in their mouth:'
Perhaps that is what comes through in the music, both the charisma and the
sorrow. On the second night of the session, after a buoyant "Basin
Street" complete with supper-club ending, and "Home"
another '30s standard (not coincidentally also recorded by Louis Armstrong), he
embarked upon a pensive original by his longtime guitarist, Cliff White. "No
Second Time" sounds as if it was written
specifically for Sam-and it may well have been, given the rarity of Sam
recording anyone's originals but his own-but what is most striking about it is
its tone of muted anger, the kind, of emotion that Lou Rawls and almost everyone
close to Sam says he would never directly express. "The
Riddle Song" the traditional Appalachian ballad
which under other circumstances might invite charges of saccharinity, conveys
emotion of a different soft. When he sang the answer to the final riddle ("How
can there be a baby with no crying?"), Sam himself started to cry, according to
string section leader Sid Sharp. "You could hear his voice break:' Sharp told
Cooke biographer Daniel
Wolff. "He definitely was crying:' By the time that he returned to the studio in
January of 1964, Sam had taken another step in another
unlikely direction. In the fall he had met up again with an old friend, Harold
Battiste. Battiste, a former school-teacher and New Orleans native, had just
gone to work for Specialty Records when Sam recorded "You
Send Me" and in the intervening years had
struck out on his own, forming a musicians' collective called AFO (All For One),
with which he had sought, in the terms of his 1959 Manifesto, to take control of
the means of production. In the summer of 1963 he and his fellow group members,
known collectively as the APO Executives,
had moved to Los Angeles, where union rules proved a stumbling block to regular
work, and they were on the verge of going home when they ran into Sam. By
January Sam had put them on retainer and made up his mind to use them on his
sessions with the idea, said J. W.
Alexander, of "broadening his sound:' and with a commitment to the same
political goals that Harold Battiste, then a Black Muslim, espoused: political
and economic self -determination. Not everyone was happy with the new musical
arrangement. Bobby Womack for
one,
not yet twenty and recently plucked from his brothers' group, the Valentinos, to
play guitar for Sam, saw the AFO as a kind of step backward. "I didn't like it,
I thought it was old-fashioned, but Sam heard something in New Orleans that he
felt should be brought back to LA. I thought Sam's stuff was too pretty for the
way they voiced, but he said it was going to be a whole new thing: he was really
trying to create something different:' The first date on which they played was a
January 21 Johnnie Morisette session for SAR that Sam produced.
A week later, on January 28, they were back in the studio for the first day of a
split, two-day session with Sam. Taking advantage of a Soul Stirrers gospel
session he had scheduled for earlier that day, Sam not only produced two very
different-sounding gospel sides on the quartet with the AFO band providing
support; he added the Stirrers' unmistakable gospel harmonies (and LeRoy Crume's
guitar) to his own session, to create a melding of gospel fervor and New Orleans
rhythms on a pair of songs he had already recorded on two of his SAR artists
plus a country-and-western standard. “Rome
(Wasn't Built in a Day)" had itself started out
life in very different fashion when it was first recorded by country singer
Johnny Russell in 1958. Originally written by the Prudhomme twins (Betty and
Beverly), Los Angeles songwriters who had met Sam in the wake of his earliest
pop success, it had captured Sam's fancy and he had rewritten it for former Soul
Stirrer Johnnie Taylor's first pop hit in 1962. For his own version Sam slowed
the tempo down and, once again, imparted a wistful quality
to it, giving each verse the same clipped conversational tone that he admired in
Louis Armstrong, then permitting the chorus to swell in the more languorous
legato fashion that he felt encouraged the audi
ence
to sing along. "Meet
Me at Mary's Place" was a variation on "Meet
Me at the Twistin' Place" a hit he had written
and produced on the irrepressible Johnnie Morisette two years earlier, with,
once again, a very different approach from the original. Sam seemed to hear a
melody that stood almost in opposition to the raucous party-like
atmosphere of Morisette's version (and Sam's original lyrics), while the
Stirrers' good-natured background vocals reinforced its gospel feel and
underscored its new message (sent out to Mary Trap, a gospel promoter in
Charlotte, North Carolina, whose house was a kind of headquarters foT all the
traveling quartets), an affectionate salute not just to a single individual but
to a fondly recoIlected era. Even "Tennessee
Waltz," the Patti Page standard, had a strong
gospel flavor to it, with the opening reminiscent of Roy Hamilton's
gospel-intlected "You Can Have Her" and the high note Sam reaches for in the
chorus ("I never thought he was going to make it;' says
LeRoy Crume with wry amusement) providing an ironic moment of almost triumphant
emotionalism in a sad song originally written m three-quarter time. "A
Change Is Gonna Come,” the first song he took
upat the full-orchestra session scheduled just two days after the Soul Stirrers
AFO date, was born of the contradictions Sam Cooke had observed all his life and
experienced almost daily. Like most black entertainers, he had been conflicted
for some time as to how to respond to racial conditions, particularly in the
South, where he had been touring constantly for well over a decade, first with
the Soul Stirrers, then on his own. In 1961, for example, he had refused to play
a segregated date in Memphis in the face of threats of jail and financial
penalties, but for the most part he had made the same choice as other
performers, confining himself to small, if meaningful, acts of personal
liberation. By 1963, though, the civil rights revolution was
exploding all around him and every other entertainer out there ("We travel all
over the country,” said Sam's friend and early mentor Clyde McPhatter, "having
the opportunity to observe first-hand the plight of [our people]"), and it was
in tact conversations with student
sit-in demonstrators in Durham, North Carolina, in May of 1963 after a show,
that first inspired the idea tor the song. This was followed almost immediately
by his hearing Bob Dylan's "Blowin'
in the Wind" ("He listened to that;' said J. W.
Alexander, "and he said, 'Alec, I got to write something. Here's a white boy
writing a song like this...:') and his own arrest in October for trying to
register at a segregated Shreveport motel. With that the song came to him,
almost, he said, as if it were dictated in a dream. "He was very excited;' said
J. W. Alexander, "and when he finished it, he explained it to me-his reason
behind the lyrics. Like, 'I don't know what's up there beyond the sky'
-it's like somebody's talking about I want to go to heaven, really, but then who
knows what's really up there? In other words, that's why you want justice on
earth. Or, you know, in the verse where he says, 'I go to my brother and I say,
Brother, help me please: -you know he was ta1king about the establishment-and
then he says, 'That motherfucker winds up knocking me back down on my knees: He
said,
'I think my daddy will be proud: I said, 'I think so, Sam:" Everyone in the
studio seemed to know how significant the song was, if only by the way that Sam
was treating it. According to Rene Hall, a New Orleans native who arranged the
vast majority of Sam's sessions from "You
Send Me" on, it was the only song Sam ever gave
to him to fully orchestrate. Under ordinary circumstances "he would tell me what
line he wanted, he'd hum what he wanted the bass to play, hum the string [part]
and various instruments. The only tune that I can ever recall where he said,
'I'm going to leave that up to you,’ was 'A
Change Is Gonna Come' and I wanted it to be the
greatest thing in
my [life]:' The wash of strings set off by a French horn, J. W. Alexander said,
gave the song a particularly mournful sound. "It was very deep:' says Luigi
Creatore, who with his partner Hugo Peretti left RCA shortly after the session.
"It was a serious piece, but still it was his.
He was really digging into himself for this one,”Sam rarely gang the song in
public-there is no otherrecorded performance, save for an appearance on the
Johnny Carson show just one week later. By the time that he went into the studio
again in March, he had
attended the Clay-Liston fight in Miami, where he was summoned into the ring by
Cassius Clay and hailed by the new champion as "the World's Greatest Rock 'n'
Roll Singer:' An inveterate reader from childhood on, he was focused more and
more now on race issues,
studying W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, and Black Muslim
readings recommended by Malcolm X, with whom he spent a good deal of time in
Miami ("I ain't no Muslim;' he told his brother L.C, "and I ain't gonna be, but
they got some good ideas").
He was focusing on his musical future, too. With the coming of the Beatles and
singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, he saw the musical climate rapidly changing,
a change he urged his SAR artists to embrace. On March 24 he produced a session
on the Valentinos, known as the Womack Brothers when Sam first signed them to
SAR as a gospel quartet three years earlier. The centerpiece for the March
session was a song that Bobby Womack had written with his sister-in-law called
"It's All Over Now" When the Rolling Stones
covered the song just as it was taking of a few months later, Bobby was
heartbroken, and angry, too. "But Sam said, 'Bobby, you'll never regret this: I
said, 'Man, them cats ain't even hittin' the notes: He said, 'Bobby, this group
will change the industry. They gonna make it loose for everybody, and there
ain't no sense in fighting it. It's just gonna make you bigger:" At that same
March session the Womacks were fooling around with a song called "If I Got My
Ticket,” "Sam told us it needed work, it wasn't ready yet:' The next day Sam
went into the studio, with Bobby and his brother Cecil joining Harold Battiste's
New Orleans contingent, and used the same melody for a dance song that he called
"Yeah
Man,“ It would become better known in Arthur
Conley's version as "Sweet Soul Music"-but its infectious
rhythm and genial tone echoed Sam's view that popular music more and more was
"almost all sound. It used to be that sound brought attention to the lyric;' he
explained, but what uou needed to do today was to find sounds that could
"emotionally move" an audience, "inject [the kind of] fervor that makes people
want to dance”That direction was taken several steps further inhis final
session, in November, when he cut a song inspired by Bobby Freeman's "The Swim”
a pure rhythmnumber propelled by bass, toms, and Bobby Womack's guitar. "He was
trying to get a new beat, a new dance thing going;' recalls Al Schmitt, who had
taken over a&r duties
from Hugo and Luigi in March. "Everybody in the studio was excited. We thought
we had started a whole new thing:'
Real gospel music has got to make a comeback
- Sam Cooke in Melody Maker, July 4, 1964
Actually if you listen to this album you might deduce that Sam's original gospel
sound never really went away. "A
Change Is Gonna Come" could be seen as an
extension, both melodically and lyrically, of gospel music's greatest tradition:
delivering good news in bad times. "Ain't
That Good News" makes the connection even more
explicit, while "Ease
My Troublin' Mind" and "That's
Where It's At" provide a kind of template for
the gospel-based '60s soul that came to dominate the charts for the next three
or four years. Even "Tennesse
Waltz" suggests the underlying gospel feeling
of almost all of Sam Cooke's work. But if you listen to this album in another
way, it stands as testimony to the diversity of Sam Cooke's musical interests as
well, to the restless exploration that led him to insist stubbornly on his own
interpretation of
George Gershwin's "Summertime"
against the advice of his musical elders at his very first full-fledged pop
session. "Sam listened to everything," says his brother L.C. "Hillbilly. Opera.
There wasn't nothing Sam didn't like. And he could sing it all:' The range of
music that he took on in the last year of his life pretty much beats out this
statement: standards like "You're
Nobody Till Somebody Loves You" a dreamy teen
ballad like "When
a Boy Falls in Love" the lush orchestration of
Harold Battiste's "Falling
in Love" corny but heartfelt chestnuts like "Country
Boy" a ricky-tick novelty like "Cousin
of Mine" (which Sam persuaded a very credulous
Bobby Womack was a true story)-banjos, flutes, French hams, and gospel harmonies
all meld together to create satisfyingly unpredictable whole. "An artist isn't
buried in one section;' says Luigi Creatore. "He's aware of music all around
him:' "He always seemed to have a vision of how to make the music sound;' says
Harold Battiste, whose own taste leaned more to progressive jazz. "He's a
unique, original singer-I don't know what makes him that, but it's like with
Charlie Parker, it's hard to get around singing after Sam without getting same
part of Sam:' His approach to each song is different; his diction will vary,
depending on context, from the correctness of "Country Boy" to the more
idiomatic voice of "Troublin' Mind:' And yet it is always Sam. Listening to a
rough cut of the album with Bobby Womack, I am struck by how
visibly excited Bobby becomes as he hears the previously unreleased "Keep
Movin' On" (from a session on which Bobby did
not play) for the first time. "Yeah;' he says, singing along with its simple
inspirational message. "I remember playing this in the car. I didn't realize he
ever cut it. He' d always say, 'I like that song: keep moving on, you know:" It
expressed, gays Bobby, a kind of philosophy. "Sam would say, 'You know, You'll
keep going, and one day you'll realize when you firt start, it's when You're at
your best. You don't even think about what you're doing, and then all of a
sudden twenty years later you trying to come up with a record: Well, you know,
you
start thinking about it. Today you're young. Tomorrow you're old, and, you know,
it's all gone past and it's somebody else's turn. It don't make death such a
horrible thing. It's just another stage:'
On December 10, the last night of
his life, Sam met with longtime arranger Rene Hall to go over the new act he was
putting together for a Christmas engagement at the Deauville Hotel in Miami.
They taped some new songs, sketching out the arrangements, until Sam had to
leave for dinner with Al Schmitt and his wife at a Hollywood nightspot. There
the discussion focused on the new album Sam was planning, a blues album for
which he was just beginning to come up with material. "Sam told me, 'This is
what I want to do,”says Schmitt. "It was the first I had heard of it!" Wecan, of
course, only imagine what that album might have been like. We Can only imagine
what the rest of
Sam's life would have been like if he had not been shot and killed, at
thirty-three, in a senseless incident later that night But this is more than
the story of a future that never fully came to pass-though it is that, too. We
hear many stories of unfulfilled promise, but the focus in the case of Sam
Cooke should be on the remarkable things he achieved in his fourteen years in
the spotlight, the gifts with which he left us. We know one thing: Sam's voice
remains unquenchable: the rest, the joy, the unvanquishable spirit with which he
embraced life sings out in the songs. He wasn't worried about others imitating
him. He knew, says Bobby Womack, that "nobody sound like Sam but Sam. Just like
nobody sound like Ray Charles but Ray. He said, 'I don't even know why I do
what I do. When I do it, it just comes" And that's the way this music sounds:
as spontaneous, as elegant, as full of mirth, sadness, and surprise as when it
first came out of his mouth, translating somehow across the ages in wars that
have little to do with calculation or fashion and everything to do with
spontaneity of
feeling, with a kind of purity of soul.
Peter Guralnick is currently working on a biography of Sam
Cooke to be publishedby Little, Brown.