Review: Sam Cooke - Tribute To The Lady (1959)

Tracks: 1) God Bless The Child; 2) She’s Funny That Way; 3) I’ve Got A Right To Sing The Blues; 4) Good Morning Heartache; 5) T’Aint Nobody’s Bizness (If I Do); 6) Comes Love; 7) Lover Girl (Man); 8) Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off; 9) Lover Come Back To Me; 10) Solitude; 11) They Can’t Take That Away From Me; 12) Crazy In Love With You.

REVIEW

Every once in a while in the professional life of any linguist (myself not excluded), somebody from the big bad outside world is bound to contact the expert and ask: «what’s your opinion on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?», the purpose of the question usually being to (a) show that the person in question knows what the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is, (b) let you know that, no matter what your answer may be, it shall never shatter the ironclad opinion that the person already holds on the subject. In all honesty, I have never given that much thought to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a.k.a. the «hypothesis of linguistic relativity», since it is more a matter of linguistic philosophy than linguistic science. But on the other hand, when it comes to linguistic philosophy, almost every theory ever put out by reasonable professionals usually finds itself in limbo between truth and falsehood — and every once in a while each of us may come across specific situations in which the way that things are put into words by somebody else genuinely impacts your perception of said things. (Admittedly, the hypothesis has more to do with structural / grammatical properties of language than pure lexics, but for the sake of this review, let’s get a little bit expansive).

What exactly does this have to do with Sam Cooke’s third and last album for the Keen label, released in the spring of 1959? (The second one was Encore, a bunch of orchestrated standards produced by Bumps Blackwell which I have agreed to skip in this chronological survey of Cooke’s career — there’s only so much schlock I can agree to take from the guy, considering that his main strengths lay so drastically elsewhere). From a purely musical perspective, this is a collection of old jazz, blues, and vaudeville standards, on which Cooke is backed by the René Hall Orchestra — another exercise in retro stylistics, but not fully unreasonable per se; why shouldn’t Sam Cooke be deprived of the pleasure to perform pre-war material in his own style, particularly if the songs have actual class? (as opposed to most of the stuff on Encore).

Unfortunately, the album is called Tribute To The Lady, and there is absolutely no getting away from the fact that it was recorded as a musical homage to Billie Holiday — not just because of the title, but also because all the songs on the album come from Billie’s setlist, and some have, indeed, very specifically been associated with Lady Day (‘God Bless The Child’, ‘Lover Man’, ‘Solitude’, etc.). Initially, I quite naturally thought that this was a posthumous tribute; however, Billie died on July 17, 1959, whereas sessions for Tribute were held in January / February of the same year, and the album was released in April (meaning that Billie herself might have had a chance to hear it before her demise). One can only speculate on how the track list, the arrangements, and the general mood might have been drastically different, had the Keen label given the green light for this just a few months later than it did — but even if we agree to judge it strictly in the context of early 1959, when nobody could yet see the future with 100% clarity and foreknowledge, Tribute To The Lady is still rotten to the core, and remains the most pointless and embarrassing entry in Sam’s entire catalog (though at least a somewhat intriguing and perversely fascinating entry, as opposed to Encore, which is just a big fat nothing).

Now, it is no secret that I deeply and dearly love Billie Holiday, whose status in the world of vocal jazz is akin to that of Jimi Hendrix in the world of electric rock music simply because there has never been anybody else in the world quite like her. I also admire Sam Cooke when he is at his best, charging the listener with the spiritual optimism and sexual energy of his pop, R&B, and even gospel performances. Unfortunately, the idea that Sam Cooke could ever «pay tribute» to Billie Holiday is one of those catastrophic types of mismatches like when Woody Allen tries to make an Ingmar Bergman movie (Interiors) or, closer to home, when Paul Stanley begins to sing opera arias. I certainly realize that when "comes love, nothing can be done", but love also makes us stupid, which is fine if you don’t run around and make it public, but will definitely bite you in the ass if you decide to run naked across a football field yelling "SHE LOVES ME!" — which, in a way, is the everyday life equivalent of Tribute To The Lady.

The overproduced, schmaltzy, Vegasy arrangements of all the songs are only one, and far from the biggest, problem with this «tribute» — after all, Billie had also had quite a few big band and orchestral arrangements in her life, though even her most overproduced efforts late in life (e.g. on the Lady In Satin album) never really sounded like they were supposed to be accompanied by scantily clad parading models in boas and feathers, a glittery vision that cannot escape my eyes over the entire course of this musical disaster. The biggest problem is that not a single one of these tracks betrays any signs of actual understanding between the covered artist and the one offering the tribute. Billie’s unique delivery of these songs, be it the deeply personal ‘God Bless The Child’ or even the generically playful ‘Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off’, involved humanizing the material, making it sound realistic — a bit bumbling, a bit vulnerable, almost completely devoid of scenic mannerisms and artificialities.

Cooke, in comparison, sings everything here like a perfectly oiled, well-trained robot, stripping the songs of whatever pain and emotion Billie might have endowed them with and turning them back into their empty sheet music shells. It is hard to blame him because he largely does the exact same thing he does on all of his pop hits — it’s just that this exact same thing does not work on this pre-war material, where pretty much everything, due to its initially non-descript or, worse, initially schlocky nature, depends on personality and interpretation rather than pre-written hooks. I do not believe it was ever in his power to do this thing differently, which means that he should never have tackled the job in the first place. Songs like ‘Solitude’ and ‘Good Morning Heartache’, which used to be the perfect vehicles for conveying an atmosphere of bitter melancholy in Billie’s hands, here sound like fluffy crooning lounge ditties, a reasonable accompaniment for digesting your lamb chops or steak in some high-class nightclub and nothing more.

Perhaps the worst offender is Sam’s recording of ‘T’Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness (If I Do)’, once a powerful statement of self-assertion for Bessie Smith, later subverted and personalized by Billie, and now turned into a meaningless lounge husk of a song by Sam — of course, this was the song to be released as the lead single from the album (fortunately, it at least flopped). Does this mean that Cooke cannot sing the blues? Definitely not, as he would later prove with Night Beat; but on this album, he is not really singing the blues — he has been saddled with the idea of Billie Holiday as a glitzy nightclub entertainer, charming the pants off all the gentlemen the same way Sam Cooke is expected to charm the skirts off all the ladies. Consequently, this all ends up being more of a tribute to, say, Dinah Washington than Billie Holiday; a good analogy for this perception would be learning to love the Beatles by only listening to those artists whose songs they had covered, rather than to the Beatles’ own compositions.

But what do we really have left if we try to flush out «linguistic relativity»? Well, in that case we simply replace the reaction of embarrassment with that of boredom. I find nothing interesting in René Hall’s perfunctory arrangements, and no quirky traces of color introduced by Sam in his performances. I have no worthwhile observations on any particular details, on anything that would stand out at least slightly from these utterly generic readings. If you are enamored with Cooke’s voice as such — losing your head over every note the man ever sang — by all means, go ahead and dive in; I myself prefer to be similarly enamored with Billie’s voice instead. To me, this remains a very proverbial case of how somebody’s love for somebody else is not at all guaranteed to produce worthy results (a situation more than common with 21st century artists influenced and inspired by all the great musical output of the 20th century, but one which obviously goes all the way back to at least Icarus’ appreciation for his Dad’s craftmanship).

It is also an interesting case of how moving to a bigger, more overtly «capitalistic» record label actually improved things for the artist — although Cooke’s discography for RCA would still include old-school crooner material (Hits Of The 50’s), the label would at least not make such a rigid distinction between placing all of his good stuff on singles and all of his schlock on albums, like Keen did. God only knows what sort of ridiculous LP projects Bumps Blackwell would put Sam through, had he continued along that same trajectory.