Review: Sam Cooke - Sam Cooke (1961)

Tracks: 1) Swing Low, Sweet Chariot; 2) I’m Just A Country Boy; 3) They Call The Wind Maria; 4) Twilight On The Trail; 5) If I Had You; 6) Chain Gang; 7) Grandfather’s Clock; 8) Jeanie With The Light Brown Hair; 9) Long, Long Ago; 10) Pray; 11) You Belong To Me; 12) Goin’ Home.

REVIEW

I do not know whose idea it was to continue the «conceptual conveyor» of «Sam Cooke Becomes Billie Holiday», «Sam Cooke Becomes Frank Sinatra», «Sam Cooke Becomes Tony Bennett», etc., with the gimmick of «Sam Cooke Becomes Johnny Cash», but I do know I owe a debt of surprising gratitude to that person — for providing me with the first Sam Cooke LP in quite a long time where enjoyment of his wonderful voice is mostly free of any accompanying pangs of cringe at the corny material he is provided with or at the schlocky arrangements in which the material is draped. That the album was titled simply Sam Cooke, the same way as his old debut for Keen (although it would later be retitled Swing Low in some countries to avoid confusion), is probably just a coincidence, but a symbolic one: starting with this «reboot» of sorts, Sam’s subsequent LPs for RCA would slowly, slowly, slowly gain in artistic quality, reflecting both the gradually improving artistic status of the LP medium in pop music and Sam’s own maturation. Had he lived but two or three years more, who knows, we might eventually have gotten a What’s Goin’ On or a Talking Book out of him. In the meantime, though, it is almost amusing that it took the image of Sam Cooke as a «lonesome cowboy» to inject some true artistic value in his long-players.

It still begins with a single, though. Released on July 26, 1960, ‘Chain Gang’ was arguably the most important song in all of Sam’s career — a turning point that was necessary to prepare the ground for ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ four years later. Prior to that moment, pretty much all of the songs Sam wrote himself were love ballads; what exactly triggered his brain to write a (mildly, but still) «socially conscious» number instead is a mystery we won’t be able to solve — all we can say is that it was probably bound to happen sooner or later.

Of course, unlike ‘Change’, ‘Chain Gang’ did not mark too much of a stylistic change in Sam’s writing. It’s a bouncy, fun, danceable tune whose mood could be easily taken for that of a love song, especially if you’d failed to notice the lyrics or did not pose yourself the question of why exactly does that ringing percussion in the background sound like a hammer on rock, or why the background "ooh, aah" vocals sound like rhythmic work grunts. But this, precisely, was the trick: by sending the song all the way up to #2 on the Billboard charts, Sam Cooke made the entire nation swing its hips to a sad tale of a bunch of convicts lost in the monotonousness of their daily duties by the roadside. And then there’s the sublime agenda of stirring up pity for his protagonists, as he takes that same wistful melancholy of his lost-love serenades and applies it to the plight of men in prison uniforms. There’s even a nice textual throwback here — at the very end of the song, when he begins to ad-lib while impersonating a convict, the line "give me water, I’m thirsty" clearly hearkens back to Sam’s gospel days with The Soul Stirrers when one of their main highlights was ‘Jesus Gave Me Water’.

Indeed, the much-lauded inventive gimmick of conveying «road work atmosphere» through the available studio means of a pop song production does not amaze or move me nearly as much as hearing a great human voice realizing its true potential. As a romantic crooner, Cooke could easily slip into schlocky sentimentality when he gave it his all; but when he used his voice to channel mercy and compassion, there was simply no way he could fail. So even if the main hook of the song is its chorus — in which even the final nasals of the heavily accentuated words (‘mennn’, ‘chainnn’, ‘gannnnng’...) echo the relentless fall and resonance of the hammer — the main message of the song is in the verses, which don’t even arrive until about one-third-way into the tune. It’s quite a subtle achievement, and a sort of double-agent trick on Sam’s fanbase. Once, along with Ray Charles and others, Sam would use his experience in the gospel genre to inject the «sacred» spirit into the «profane» (or, at least, «secular») art of serenading. Now here, he is taking the fully-formed sexual body of the pop song and inverting it with a message that is as close to that original gospel as possible — which makes ‘Chain Gang’ an absolutely outstanding number even in comparison to most of the other highlights of his catalog.

I do not know if the success of ‘Chain Gang’ had anything to do with the concept of this LP, but I do know that the song itself, stuck right in the middle of the album, fits it like a glove. The overriding theme here is life outside the big city — the Wild West, the countryside, the roamin’ and the ramblin’ — and the image of the ‘Chain Gang’, "working on the highways and byways", becomes an appropriate part of a larger whole, even if not a single one of these songs comes close to mirroring its impact or importance. But they are tremendously helped by Hugo & Luigi’s decision to cut down on the bombast a little, and give Sam more space at the expense of monumental orchestration. Not that strings and brass are going anywhere, but they are used more sparingly and subtly — surprisingly, the most notable instrument on the record is the bass, always at the center of the groove and a perfect «dark» counterpoint for Sam’s «light» singing style. Given that all the bass work is credited to Milt Hinton, a veteran of the Cab Calloway orchestra and one of the most prolific bass session players on both the jazz and the pop market, this is perhaps not such a big surprise...

Obviously, the opening ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ is a natural highlight; even the «poppified» arrangement of the gospel classic cannot detract from the fact that this material and Sam Cooke were born for each other — unlike, say, Sam Cooke and ‘Under Paris Skies’ — and although the brass fanfare at the end spoils the mood a bit, the verses deliver exactly the way we’d expect them to. I do suppose that to some gospel purists, Sam’s approach to the genre, particularly in his post-Soul Stirrers days, might feel a bit blasphemous, what with that same purring, seductive voice he’d used for his lady fans now directed to singing the Lord’s praise — but lighten up, people, you don’t always need to put on the heavy boots of Mahalia Jackson to talk to the old man up in the sky. Soft and sentimental works, too, as long as it’s not overpowered by dazzling glitz and flashing glam, and this recording mostly stays away from such excesses.

It is difficult to dwell too much on the other songs individually — what should I write about cover versions of ‘They Call The Wind Maria’ or ‘Jeanie With The Light Brown Hair’? — but, as I said, collectively they do not prompt such a repulsive reaction as the material covered on Hits Of The 50’s or Cooke’s Tour. Somehow, there’s an atmosphere of improved sincerity and authenticity, as if this kind of «saloon music» were closer to Sam Cooke’s essence than «cabaret music» or «casino music», if you get my drift. But also the emphasis on quiet, solid rhythm, only occasionally spruced up by brass, woodwinds, and strings helps immensely.

Another piece of good news is that for the first time ever, the album boasts not one, but three Sam Cooke originals: in addition to ‘Chain Gang’, there are ‘If I Had You’ and ‘You Belong To Me’, two straightforward love serenades co-written by Sam with his manager, James W. Alexander. Of those, ‘You Belong To Me’ is especially notable, like a perfect illustration of how much can be done by a beautiful and versatile voice with the tiniest of lyrical means — hear how Sam sings the line "all of my love belongs to you" in three different ways (call them «tender», «pensive», and «ecstatic», if you wish), only to cap it off with a "because you, you belong to me" that is at the same time respectfully sentimental and sternly possessive. (How am I doing with my adjectives so far?). You can definitely feel how this kind of modulation, bearing much more meaning than the words themselves, would influence Paul McCartney, for instance, in his early (and not just early) Beatle days. But even if Paul McCartney would write more interesting and innovative melodies, his control of his own voice’s overtones would never even remotely approach Sam’s.

By the time the album closes down with the appropriately placed ‘Goin’ Home’, Cooke has more or less repaired his reputation as an LP artist (with me, anyway) — even if the record could certainly profit from the inclusion of a couple more of his contemporary singles, such as ‘Sad Mood’ from November 1960, which was, I think, recorded during more or less the same sessions that yielded the bulk of this album (it definitely has Milt Hinton on it as well, given the prominence of the simple, but important bass line reinforcing the «sadness» of the song). With the power of ‘Chain Gang’ behind it and, for the first time, a consistently satisfying background sound for the man’s vocal artistry, Sam Cooke should really count as a reboot, and the opening statement of Sam’s «mature» period, which would, unfortunately, only last for three years, but which would also be one of the major blessings for the American pop music scene specifically in its (generally rather bleak) pre-British Invasion period.

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