Review: Sam Cooke - Sam Cooke (1958)
Tracks: 1) You Send Me; 2) The Lonesome Road; 3) Tammy; 4) Ol’ Man River; 5) Moonlight In Vermont; 6) Canadian Sunset; 7) Summertime; 8) Around The World; 9) Ain’t Misbehavin’; 10) The Bells Of St. Mary’s; 11) So Long; 12) Danny Boy; 13) That Lucky Old Sun.
REVIEW
Among all the great black artists of the 1950s, Sam Cooke is one of the least probable to be appreciated through an LP-based trajectory. For the first few years of the secular — and, as history would have it, the most important — segment of his musical career, his LPs were not essentially collections of his biggest singles with a few fillerish album-only tracks thrown in here and there, but rather side projects, designed with only the most devoted fans in mind. Thus, his self-titled debut album for the Keen label only includes one of those singles — and of the other tracks, not one has been seen fit to be included on The Man Who Invented Soul, a nicely representative 4-CD boxset overview of the man’s soul years which should satisfy most listeners’ curiosity about the man who, well, invented soul (though the title of the boxset does sort of equate Ray Charles with chopped liver in the process). Of course, Sam Cooke is first and foremost The Voice, which means there is always a payoff, whether you’re listening to ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ or ‘Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive’. But he was also a trailblazer — and most, if not all, of his trailblazing is to be found on his singles.
So let us start appropriately with his first single — ironically, also his biggest one, since he would never get to have another #1 on the US pop charts. According to most memoirs, the original recording of ‘You Send Me’ turned into a battleground between Art Rupe, the head of Specialty Records where Sam had previously done most of his gospel work with the Soul Stirrers, and Bumps Blackwell, the man responsible for steering Cooke away from God and producing his early secular recordings for the small Keen label. Back in those days, making a crossover from gospel to pop for a black singer was somewhat akin to making a crossover from classic opera to Andrew Lloyd Webber for a white one — and, in all honesty, nobody could prove that the young and ambitious singer was seriously tempted with the perspective of fame and fortune when he ultimately made his stand with Blackwell rather than Rupe. Yet when fame and fortune come hand-in-hand with innovative artistic vision and startling musical results, who could blame this kind of sellout?
Because ‘You Send Me’ (along with its lesser known predecessor ‘Lovable’, which was still released on Specialty and credited, out of caution, to Sam’s alias «Dale Cook») really did create a new type of sound: the gospel-influenced romantic pop ballad, Nat King Cole meets Thomas Dorsey. The backing track is a doo-woppy waltz; the back vocals are gospel crooning; and Sam’s lead vocal combines the suave and seductive overtones of a ladykiller idol with the epic vocal power of a musical preacher (particularly on the bridge section). Of course, this is pop-oriented «light soul» as compared to Ray Charles’ R&B-oriented «deep soul»; but it is also the perfect romantic counterpoint to Uncle Ray’s much more rough and physical approach to the subject matter of his songs. With ‘Lovable’ and ‘You Send Me’, Cooke creates the image of a gallant, courteous ladies’ gentleman who somehow manages to come across as both classy and genuine — a relatively rare exception in the world of pop, particularly black one (with people like Marvin Gaye, it felt like they were only waiting for the right moment to get rid of those cuffs and ties; Sam, on the other hand, sort of seemed like he was naturally born into that particular image).
The B-side of ‘You Send Me’ was, however, closer in spirit to the general composure of Sam’s first LP — a cover of ‘Summertime’ from Porgy and Bess, far from the first and much further from the last one. It gets an imaginative musical reinvention, almost proto-Bondian with its echoey bass pattern and ghostly-haunting background wailing; but Sam’s reading of the text itself is fairly literal and not particularly exciting per se, unless you simply adore the sound of his singing voice (and there is every reason why you should). This is the general formula that was expanded for the self-titled debut album: mostly classic or slightly more modern show tunes, mixed in with some folk oldies and delivered by Sam in a sincere, but somewhat perfunctory manner.
If you are a big fan of ‘Moonlight In Vermont’ and ‘Danny Boy’ all by themselves, Sam’s versions of these classics will soothe your soul for sure. But if, like me, you only like them in outstanding interpretations (for instance, as vehicles for Billy Holiday or some other singer with a unique personality), the suave and delicate vibe which Cooke provides them makes it all way too dangerously close to harmless and cuddly lounge entertainment. A nice touch of class is provided by the backing band, ambitiously called «The Bumps Blackwell Orchestra» but in reality more of a small jazz combo, with prominent bass, jazzy electric guitar, and only occasional piano and horns here and there. The downside of this, however, is a fairly lo-fi level of production: you can distinctly hear the difference between the crystal clear and sharp sound of ‘You Send Me’ (an earlier recording from June ’57) and the comparably muddy and flat sound of the early ’58 Keen recordings for the LP.
Therefore, if you want to get a clearer picture of Cooke’s musical evolution in the early days of his solo career, it will make much more sense to follow the trail of his singles (which honestly should all be attached as bonus tracks to this album). The first one of these was ‘I’ll Come Running Back To You’, deceitfully beginning with a classic Ink Spots guitar line but quickly turning out to be more in an R&B vein — it actually has more «soul» to it than ‘You Send Me’, which fully explains why it also went to #1 on the R&B charts but only stalled at #17 on the pop register. (If you listen really closely, you can spot the melodic similarities with ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ — it is mostly the faster tempo that is confusing). Ironically, the single was released not on Keen, but on Specialty Records: apparently, Art Rupe was trying to cash in on the newly found popularity of his former protegé, gospel purity be damned and all.
Meanwhile, on Keen Bumps Blackwell was still trying to cultivate Sam’s honey-drippin’ image: December ’57 sees the release of ‘(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons’, the first Cooke single not actually written by Cooke and, honestly, just not a very good song: it has no distinctive hook and mainly gets by on its doo-woppy / crooning atmosphere. Much better is ‘You Were Made For Me’, again written by Sam and released three months later: here, the hook power is unmistakable — following each set of Sam’s favored lists of comparisons ("a fish was made to swim in the ocean, a boat was made to sail on the sea..."), delivered with the usual gallant suaveness, he finishes each verse with an almost doom-laden epic delivery of "you were made for me", subtly lowering his pitch with each new verse to hammer that nail deeper and deeper in.
On the whole, this little string of singles illustrates Cooke’s early stylistic fluctuations much better than the LP. Not every song he wrote or performed in those days was great (his best years would not really begin until his transfer from Keen to RCA), but the important journey in search of himself had truly begun. You can discern all the influences — sometimes it feels like he is trying to be a one-man Ink Spots, sometimes a black Sinatra, sometimes a Nat King Cole in the R&B era — but in the end, slowly but surely, he was working toward his own singular style, smudging and ignoring genre borders and being almost equally well palatable for old-fashioned audiences and long-haired musical rebels.
Only Solitaire: Sam Cooke reviews