Sam Cooke

Sam Cooke’s last words were “Lady, you shot me.” The lady in question was Bertha Franklin, manager of a motel in LA. On the night of November 10, 1964, Cooke picked up a seedy girl in a bar, and took her for a long drive to an appropriately seedy motel. They checked in at 2.30am the following morning. Forty minutes later, Cooke was dead.

Apparently, Cooke tried to rape the girl he picked up, who ran away when Cooke went to the bathroom. She called the police to say she’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where she was. Back at the motel, Cooke had forced his way into the Mrs Franklin’s office, and apparently started attacking her.

Franklin told the coroner’s jury:

He started working on the door with his shoulder... it wasn’t long before he was in. When he came in he went straight to the kitchen, then he looked in the bathroom. He grabbed both my arms and started twisting... we got into a tussle...He fell to the floor. He fell on top of me. I started kicking. I was scratching, kicking, biting, everything. I got up... he came to me. I pushed him back again, then I grabbed the pistol and started shooting... he wasn’t too far, very close range.

He said ‘lady, you shot me!’ He ran into me again. I started fighting again. I grabbed the stick. The first time I hit him, it broke.

The killing was judged ‘justifiable homicide’, though some were not convinced. Jet magazine wrote at the time “Close associates, too numerous to mention, have declared that Sam Cooke was not the sort of man to kidnap a girl, force her into sex against her will, or attack a middle-age woman.”

This is very probably true, though Cooke did have a reputation as a serial womaniser: “Sam never remained faithful to any of his wives and girlfriends... One night, he even took the wife of one of his tourmates in a hotel bathroom for a quick interlude, while he was in the room.”

Samuel Cook was born on January 22, 1931 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, one of eight children of a baptist minister. He started out as a gospel singer, and found fame with the Soul Stirrers.

Cooke’s best known song with the Stirrers was Touch the Hem of His Garment, which was hurredly written on the way to a recording session on February 2^nd, 1956. Their manager was getting worried about their lack of material, so Cooke said “Well, hand me the Bible. He skimmed through it, and said: “I got one. Here it is right here”

Cooke wrote the song right there, and they recorded it that day. The verse which inspired it was presumably Matthew 14, 35-6:

And when the men of that place had knowledge of him, they sent out into all that country round about, and brought unto him all that were diseased; And besought him that they might only touch the hem of his garment: and as many as touched were made perfectly whole.

By December 1956, Cooke was getting restless for mainstream success. He “thought he should be making pop records. Yet in the world of gospel, even the suggestion of such was heresy.” He released a solo pop song, Loveable, under the pseudonym Dale Cook. People recognised his distinctive voice, though, and he was kicked out of the Soul Stirrers.

                                                                                                                                                                           

Cooke brought out a string of big hits in the next few years. Though quite a big star, he was still subject to the usual racism of the era. Gale Contemporary Black Biography describes one bizarre incident in New Jersey:

“Cooke and the band had stopped at a roadside restaurant, and the waitress there refused to take their order; when someone put "You Send Me" on the jukebox she continued to ignore them while swooning at the jukebox to her favorite song, completely unaware who the men were.”

Cooke can be seen as an important figure in the civil rights movement. He was “a groundbreaking independent black-music capitalist. He owned his own record label (Sar/Derby), music publishing concern (Kags Music), and management firm.”

He also wrote and recorded A Change is Gonna Come, which became an anthem for the civil rights movement. It would also have kickstarted his career, but he died shortly before it was released.

What to hear: Portrait of a Legend, which may be the greatest ‘greatest hits’ compilation of all time. Apparently his studio albums are quite patchy.
Why: By using a gospel style to sing about non-religious topics, Cooke helped invent soul. He was also one of the genre’s finest singers.