Tracks: 1) Far Away Places; 2) Under Paris Skies; 3) South Of The Border (Down Mexico Way); 4) Bali Ha’i; 5) The Coffee Song (They’ve Got An Awful Lot Of Coffee In Brazil); 6) Arrivederci, Roma (Goodbye To Rome); 7) London By Night; 8) Jamaica Farewell; 9) Galway Bay; 10) Sweet Leilani; 11) The Japanese Farewell Song; 12) The House I Live In.
REVIEW
If you agreed with me that Hits Of The 50’s was pretty embarrassing, you might want to know that album’s corn factor was almost nothing next to Cooke’s Tour — by all means, the absolute nadir of Sam’s artistic career, a record so utterly stupid and pointless that it drags the very idea of a «concept album» through the thickest mud before it even has had the time frame to properly crystallize. It was bad even by the standards of 1960; by those of the 2020s, it is much worse. So, of course, you just got to hear it. It gives a pretty good idea of where the average «bourgeois American society» was at the end of 1960, and of what the white record executive’s idea of a «polite» musical program by a black artist used to be at the time. (Not taking a big part of the responsibility off Sam’s own shoulders, though: he was quite consciously and of his own free will embarking on this path of endearing himself to conservative white audiences by pandering to their cheapest tastes).
Anyway, Cooke’s Tour is indeed a «concept album» — basically a Broadway / Hollywood musical in the good old-fashioned musical tradition, where each of the songs, usually nicked from its own musical, deals with one of the world’s locations, from European cities like Paris, Rome, and London, to Asia (Japan, Melanesia) and Central / South America (Mexico, Brazil), curiously leaving out Africa in the process; the list is bookmarked at the beginning with ‘Far Away Places’, an old Bing Crosby standard that acts as a general prelude to the «travelog», and ends with ‘The House I Live In’, a song originally written by Lewis Allen and Earl Robinson as a human rights anthem but, in the context of this album, feeling more like a patriotic «after all, there’s no place like home» conclusion.
I will refrain from saying that the album sucks because, to the best of my knowledge, up to 1960 Sam Cooke had never even set foot on any territory outside the United States of America and its closest neighbors in the Caribbean — at the very least, his recorded touring schedule indicates that he would only visit Germany and England as late as 1962, and no records exist of Mr. Cooke ever setting foot in Japan or Brazil. (In theory at least, he may certainly have taken a vacation in Hawai’i or Mexico, but I have no idea). Even so, it is very close-minded to insist that somebody is physically incapable of conveying the atmosphere of a certain environment without having «lived» it to the fullest — even if the result is an approximation, it can be a very deeply felt one, or one that actually offers a unique angle (e.g. I could never understood the artificially puffed-up hatred that some people spew at the California-bred Creedence Clearwater Revival for daring to sing from a «Southern» perspective — all that mattered to me is that John Fogerty deeply and sincerely loved the world of the bayous, which, as far as I’m concerned, gave him a perfectly valid right to eulogize them in his beautifull crafted songs).
However, this is clearly not the case with Cooke’s Tour. Sam Cooke was by no means an ignoramus — he is usually described in biographies as always having had an inquisitive mind, and well-versed in both movies and literature — but the «setlist» in this «program» has nothing whatsoever to do with anybody’s love for anything, except for the general American public’s love for the candy-colored «a whole new world» aesthetics. Most of these songs are stiff, stuffy, cheesy pieces of musical-exotica, borrowing superficial bits of other countries’ musical stylistics (Paris = accordeon, Mexico = castanets, Hawai’i = steel guitar, Japan = koto, etc.) only to drown them all in the monotonous and equally superficial sentimentalism of old school Tin Pan Alley songwriting. Sure, if we go down history lane, there are some nice stories behind some of them — like Harry Owens’ dedication of ‘Sweet Leilani’ to his newborn Hawai’ian daughter, etc. — but absolutely none of it matters under these particular circumstances.
If this was not a concept album — if, say, I’d encountered some of these songs individually, scattered around some of Sam’s other records where they would be mixed together with more contemporary and meaningful material — the individual impressions of some of them could, perhaps, be slightly ameliorated. Thus, the 1946 Sinatra-sung joke tune ‘The Coffee Song’ ("they’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil") could simply be perceived as a joke tune, at least if you take a time trip to 1946 when lines like "a politician’s daughter was accused of drinking water / and fined a great big fifty dollar bill" were indeed considered cutting-edge humor. But (a) in the context of this album, the song sort of pretends to occupy a «culturological» niche, introducing listeners to the peculiarities of Brazilian society as opposed to Italian or Jamaican society; (b) at least Sinatra sang this with his usual humorous flair — Sam’s performance almost gives the impression that he takes the lyrics seriously, with his usual perfect vocal tone and a caressing lightness that, however, betrays no hints of irony. This is one of Sam’s natural limitations — he could perfectly convey beauty, tenderness, or melancholy, but irony and humor were largely out of his reach — and it just makes me wonder about who were the idiots who suggested that he sing this kind of material. Hopefully we don’t have to blame it on Hugo & Luigi, who, after all, would do a good job of producing all those good songs for Sam... eventually.
In the end, of all the tourist stops made along the way, there is only one toward which I feel a little bit partial: ‘Jamaica Farewell’. Unlike most of the Tin Pan Alley / Bing Crosby / Frank Sinatra fluff, this one is at least somewhat «authentic», written or re-invented by Lord Burgess, the acknowledged master of all things Caribbean and a frequent writer for Harry Belafonte; likewise, Sam was also well-versed in the Caribbean spirit, having been a frequent visitor to Kingston on his tours (probably the only place outside of the U.S. proper that he’d visited more than once). And the song, for once, is recorded in style, with a sympathetic woodwind / electric guitar melody making a nice change from Belafonte’s original acoustic guitar recording. Each time Sam melancholizes about having "to leave a little girl in Kingston Town" in the chorus, there’s a tiny authentic shiver running down my spine — the only time this generally wretched album does it to me. ‘Jamaica Farewell’ is the one song I’d heartily recommend here for any Sam Cooke playlist; everything else is mostly just fodder for objectively sarcastic culturological analysis.
Unfortunately, it also applies to ‘The House I Live In’, the pompous conclusion to the album which, technically, should count as the first authentically «socially conscious» song recorded by Sam — a good four years before ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’. Given the album’s overall fluffy popcorn nature, the decision to finish it off with a song by Earl Robinson, blacklisted until only recently, may feel almost unusually brave; but since there is nothing specifically «communist» in this people’s anthem (originally conceived as an anti-racist rather than anti-capitalist manifesto), in the context of Cooke’s Tour it rather just plays the part of a home sweet home epilog. It’s sort of as if the protagonist of the album took his stereotypically clichéd tour all around the world, then came back only to placate himself with the idea that "all races, all religions, that’s America to me", or that "the air of feeling free, the right to speak my mind out, that’s America to me", and this makes him feel just a little bit better after having to leave that little girl behind in Kingston Town, not to mention all his other seedy love affairs in Paris, Rome, London, and Japan. I mean, who really needs to break little girls’ hearts all around the world when all races and religions are already available back in the USA?
Again, if you fish the song outside its stupid context, it works much better — unlike ‘The Coffee Song’, this is the kind of material that Sam was really born to sing — but it is still smothered in cloying, mawkish strings and chimes that try to carry us back to 1945, when Sinatra introduced the song to the world, rather than to any place in the near future. If you are able to concentrate exclusively on Sam’s hypnotizing overtones and smooth phrasing — in fact, if you can do this throughout the entire album — then Cooke’s Tour may indeed turn out to be not just a delightful journey through a set of locally-flavored happy-or-sad frames of mind, but firm proof that Sam Cooke is, by definition, incapable of turning out a single bad LP, or even a single bad song; everything he sings turns to gold just on the strength of the Magic Voice. If, however, like myself, you are typically immune to the Magic Voice factor and always require a little something extra to bring out the full effect of the Magic Voice, I don’t see how Cooke’s Tour could be perceived as anything other than an awkward lapse of taste in a rather ruthless hunt for public acceptance. Perhaps it is best to rewrite history and pretend that the album simply never happened — which would be quite in line with the 21st century’s multiple attempts to rewrite history in whichever way pleases the concerned party — but then again, it is also true that a deeper understanding of the embarrassment of artistic failure can often gain a deeper insight into the wonder of artistic success, isn’t it?
Only Solitaire reviews: Sam Cooke
Adequacy of 0 😂, I guess I gotta check this out then