Review: Sam Cooke - My Kind Of Blues (1961)

Tracks: 1) Don’t Get Around Much Anymore; 2) Little Girl Blue; 3) Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out; 4) Out In The Cold Again; 5) But Not For Me; 6) Exactly Like You; 7) I’m Just A Lucky So And So; 8) Since I Met You Baby; 9) Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home; 10) Trouble In Mind; 11) You’re Always On My Mind; 12) The Song Is Ended.

REVIEW

On May 16, 1961, the world was treated to ‘Cupid’, a song Sam allegedly wrote for some nameless lady singer but was then convinced by Hugo and Luigi to keep for himself. It wasn’t a tremendous hit in the US — compared to ‘Chain Gang’, its chart success was much more modest — but it did become one of his biggest hits across the Atlantic, and possibly did more to popularize Cooke in the UK than anything else. Most importantly, it was just a great pop song, and up until this day, it remains one of Sam’s three or four most recognizable calling cards. (Heck, it was even sampled by frickin’ Carly Rae Jepsen for her own ‘Tiny Little Bows’! Adorable, right?).

It’s a bit oddly structured, basically collating verse and chorus in one so that the short bridge sections end up feeling like actual verses. I don’t particularly like that bridge — the entire "now I don’t mean to bother you but I’m in distress..." part sounds lifted from some generic Mexican dance number, rather lightweight and unimaginative. But given that it’s twice as short as the verse-chorus thing, repeated thrice in its entirety over the song, it is clear that Sam’s focus of pride here was the "Cupid draw back your bow..." section, and for a good reason: it features one of the greatest open-close vowel alterations in pop music history. Let’s get a little on the phonetic side, okay? Some of the finest emotional contrasts can be gotten out of the "oooh" – "aaah" juggling of close rounded vowels and open unrounded ones, like at the very start of the Beach Boys’ ‘I Can Hear Music’ (not in the original Ronettes version), or in the variation between "ooh ooh OOH ooh" and "aah aah AAH aah" in the Stones’ ‘Miss You’. It’s not just cool because it’s cool; it’s emotionally cool because the close vowels create a sort of «introspective», «inward-soul» feeling while the open vowels, of course, give the reverse, and when done properly, this thing gives the song a multi-dimensional flavor where it feels like the singer(s) is/are alternately pouring their feelings out to the world and channelling them within themselves (or towards God dwelling in our heart, if you so desire).

‘Cupid’ has precisely that effect, with its delicious contrast between "Cupid, draw back your boow-oow... and let your arrow goow-oow..." (introverted) and "Cupid, please hear my cry-y-y-y and let your arrow fly-y-y-y" (extraverted). I have heard several covers of the song by people who supposedly «get» Sam Cooke, from the Supremes to Rod Stewart, and out of all the crowd, only Otis Redding comes close to getting that contrast right — but still not as emphatic or disciplined as on the original version. So the next time somebody asks you the question, "what’s so great or special about Sam Cooke?", just say, "who else can juggle their oooh’s and aaah’s with such simple elegance and emotional depth?" (and then hit them on the head with something heavy while they’re busy trying to come up with an answer, take their money and run away).

Given the brilliance of ‘Cupid’, a good idea might have been to follow it up with an album of original or mostly original material that could have finally unveiled the talents of Sam Cooke, the songwriter, on a large-scale basis. Naturally, instead of that Hugo & Luigi followed it up with a bad idea — another album consisting of nothing but covers of mostly old, pre-1950s material; as you can probably tell by merely looking at the track listing, My Kind Of Blues uses a pretty wide definition of the word «blues» — if you’re hoping for Sam Cooke’s take on Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters, you’re stark out of luck here. The closest the record comes to actual «blues» in the sense in which we still use the word today is in its inclusion of several vaudeville-style urban blues from the legendary black queens of the 1920s, e.g. ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out’ (Ida Cox) or ‘Baby Won’t You Please Come Home’ (Bessie Smith). The rest are essentially pop standards with a bluesy or jazzy vibe to them, ranging from Duke Ellington to Gershwin to Rodgers & Hart — something like a tightly condensed summary of the Ella Fitzgerald series of Songbooks. Well... I guess it might just be «Sam Cooke’s Kind Of Blues», because I would have a hard time imagining Sam singing ‘Come On In My Kitchen’. (At least, singing it with the generally desired psychological effect, that is).

Still, My Kind Of Blues is not the worst of all those cover / tribute albums plaguing Sam’s career. As an LP, it is, of course, a temporary disappointment after the right moves made with Swing Low. However, the choice of source material usually makes sense — there’s barely any glitzy-corny stuff such as made Cooke’s Tour virtually unlistenable, and no conscious attempts to emulate Sinatra or Nat King Cole, or, Heaven forbid, «emulate» Billie Holiday. As for the production, it is predictably Vegasy as usual, but with much more emphasis on horns and pianos than strings — definitely not enough to make things feel «gritty», but enough to make them feel a little less «schmaltzy» than usual. Actually, there’s some pretty tasteful piano playing on these numbers: a stripped-down version of the whole thing, maybe with just Sam and a small jazz combo with those piano players would have earned him a lot more reputation points in retrospect.

Curiously, the biggest overall problem with the album is not even the production, but Sam’s attitude. Needless to say, his singing is technically impeccable and inimitable; but the flashy, on-top-of-the-world vibe of the music also infects the vocal delivery, and this leads to a whole lot of oversinging — it’s as if Sam felt himself way overconfident at the mike this time around, and so he chokes the songs with lots of ad-libbing, extra melismatic runs, quasi-scatting, and suchlike, filling up almost any hole in the vocals that allows for filling. This sort of «wild vocal rampage» was hardly invented by Cooke — he probably borrowed it from some of the jazz singers — but I cannot help feeling that this is the first time, chronologically, that I am witnessing it on a soul-pop record, and so, ultimately, I guess you could even trace all of Robert Plant’s annoying baby-baby-babies someplace back here, because Robert Plant really inherited all those from the likes of Rod Stewart and Steve Marriott, and both Rod and Steve were big Sam Cooke fans back in the day.

If not for all the unnecessary vocal acrobatics, this opening rendition of ‘Don’t Get Around Much Anymore’ would be pretty decent: the occasionally overbearing horns usually make enough openings for the rhythm section to swing and the piano player to exercise his Art Tatum-influenced runs, keeping you busy each time Sam pauses to take a breath. Unfortunately, as the song progresses, the horns become ever more glitzy and Sam gets ever more carried away; the song pretty much ends with the singer on top of the world, even if the song’s lyrics never ever suggested anything of the sort. This Vegas-style crescendo is then repeated on many, if not most, of the other numbers, with the album quickly settling into a predictable formula — it actually sounds better if you press the skip button around halfway through most of the tracks.

Similarity of the arrangements and Sam’s adoption of the same «all-out» approach to singing on all the tracks leads to an inevitable consequence: no matter the original mood or purpose of these songs, they all sound the same in the end. Clearly, the message and mood of ‘I’m Just A Lucky So And So’ and ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out’ could not be any more different, but you wouldn’t ever know it just by listening to the two songs outside of any context. As beautiful as Sam’s voice is, there is no danger of this «showtune» version of ‘Nobody Knows You’ ever wiping out memories of Bessie Smith’s original; and for all the melancholy generated by the opening verse of ‘Baby Won’t You Please Come Home’, those silly horns still do a great job of blowing all those clouds away. Who needs their baby to come home, anyway, when there’s top hats and neon lights and showgirls a-plenty?

Probably the most musically satisfying little bit on here is Sam’s interpretation of ‘Little Girl Blue’, which cuts down on both the thickness of the horn sound (in favor of a slightly more pastoral attitude) and the incessant ad-libbing. I can only wonder if this in any way reflects the impact of Nina Simone’s then-recent version, but the pure fact is that it is the only song on this album without the obligatory Vegas touch — though, of course, it still does not even begin to poke at the melancholy depths of Nina’s take.

All said, though, as I have already pointed out, My Kind Of Blues is on the whole imminently more listenable than any of Sam’s previous LP of «old-timey» material. Two years later, Sam would make a step in the right direction and update this vibe for Night Beat, with its comparatively minimalistic and tasteful arrangements; but even here, the selection of material allows him — at least, formally — to come across not just as the stereotypical «breaker of hearts», but occasionally as a man who’s got his own heart broken, adding a bit of a cloudy sky to the usual eternal sunshine. That’s not much of a consolation for those who would rather have themselves a full LP of songs like ‘Cupid’, I know. But it’s all we got when it comes down to satisfying our appetites for something that would go beyond a mere greatest hits compilation.

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