Year: Day to Day Men: January 22
The Bamboo Grove
The twenty-second of January in 1931 marks the birth date of American singer, songwriter and producer Samuel Cooke who, along with Ray Charles, became one of the most influential Black vocalists of the period after World War II.
Born Samuel Cook in Clarksdale, Mississippi, he was the fifth of eight children born to Reverend Charles Cook of the Church of Christ and Annie Mae Carroll. In 1933, the Cook family relocated to Chicago where Cooke attended Wendell Phillips Academy High School. At the age of six, Cooke sang in the choir of his father’s church and as a member of his siblings’ music group, the Singing Children. He joined the Highway Q. C.’s, an American gospel group, as lead singer at the age of sixteen.
In 1950 at age nineteen, Cooke replaced gospel tenor Robert H. Harris as lead singer of Harris’s gospel group The Soul Stirrers, who had just signed with Los Angeles’s Specialty Records. The group’s first recording under Cooke’s leadership was “Jesus Gave Me Water” in 1950. Other songs recorded by the group included Thomas Dorsey’s “Peace in the Valley” and Mollie Wilson’s “Jesus Paid the Debt”. Cooke was often credited with bringing a younger crowd of listeners to the genre of gospel music.
In 1957, Sam Cooke turned against the traditions of the Black musical community and decided to pursue pop music. To signal this new period in his life, he added the “e” to his surname. Cooke reinvented himself as smooth, romantic singer in the mold of Nat King Cole. He wrote many of his best songs, among which was his first hit “You Send Me” for Keen Records. In 1957, this song was number one on all the charts and established Cooke as a star. Between 1957 and 1964, Cooke had thirty songs in the top of the charts in the United States. Among these were “Chain Gang”, “Another Saturday Night”, “Wonderful World” and “A Change is Gonna Come”.
Cooke was one of the first Black performers and composers who administered the business side of music. He founded his own song publishing and management firm, Kags Music, in 1958 so he could own the copyrights to his music. Cooke also founded a record label, SAR Records, as a place where he could expand his artistic abilities and to give other struggling artists a venue to record. In 1963, he signed a five-year contract for businessman Alan Klein to manage both firms; Klein negotiated a deal with RCA Victor in which the company would get exclusive distribution rights in exchange for 6% royalty payments and payments for the recording sessions. Cooke, as a result, would receive preferred stock as an advance and yearly payments for the following four years.
Sam Cooke, however, was killed on December 11th of 1964 at the Hacienda Motel in South Central Los Angeles. Answering reports of shooting and a kidnapping, police found Cooke’s body with a gunshot wound to his chest, later determined to have pierced his heart. The motel owner, Bertha Franklin, said she shot Cooke in self-defense. There were no other witnesses on the scene; however, the hotel’s owner, Evelyn Carr, said she was talking to Franklin by phone at the time and had heard a conflict and gunshot.
As Carr’s testimony corroborated Franklin’s account and both passed polygraph tests, the coroner’s jury ultimately accepted both accounts and returned a verdict of justifiable homicide. With that verdict, the case was officially closed. Many of Cooke’s family and supporters rejected the verdict. Singer Etta James wrote that she had seen Cooke’s body before the funeral and questioned the accuracy of the official version due to the injuries she saw on Cooke’s body.
After two memorial services, one in Chicago and the second in Los Angeles, Samuel Cooke’s body was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. Cooke’s album “Shake” and two singles, “Shake” and “A Change is Gonna Come”, were released posthumously. Cooke received multiple posthumous awards which included a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and induction into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the National Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame. The title of his single “A Change is Gonna Come” is written on a wall of the Contemplative Court of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.