Read Online Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick - Free Book Online

one made.”
    Either Sam or L.C. took their mother shopping on weekends. Every Saturday they would go to Hillsman’s downtown, where the quality of the food was better than in the neighborhood groceries, and it was cheaper, too. They got a chocolate milkshake and a hot dog as a reward, and their twelve-year-old sister, Agnes, resented it. “The boys didn’t have any [other] chores to do. They were really spoiled by my mother. What made it so hard on me, one of my sisters was seven years older than me, the other ten, so that meant they were out of the house, and all the work fell on me. I used to say, ‘I wish I was a boy, I wouldn’t have to do this.’”
    Agnes resented the way her older brothers felt like they had to protect her all the time, too. “My fondest memory of Sam is when my mom and dad would go out of town [on a revival] and they would take my little brother—so we would have the house to ourselves, because we never did want to go with them. We would just have a ball. But as far as boys were concerned, he would just let them know right away, ‘This is my sister. Respect her.’ As a matter of fact, all of my brothers were like that.
Leave her alone!
They made sure no one [ever] talked to me!”
    He couldn’t control who talked to her at a QCs’ program, though. Agnes was one of their most faithful fans. “You could always count on a church full of girls, and I was one.” She nearly always went with her girlfriend Reba Martin, along with other kids from the neighborhood, and she was enthralled by the way that Sam could captivate an audience by the sheer force of his personality. “He just drew everyone to him. And it made me feel great, because this was my big brother. He wore his hair straight back, and he had waves in it, the top was long and the bangs were close to his head. He was learning, and as he continued to sing, his performance got much better. All the boys had a role that they did outstandingly. They were unique, I think, because they were so young. And everywhere they went, they upset the house. The older groups wouldn’t even call them up, because they knew they would turn the house out. I mean, the QCs were the baddest thing out there.”
    Sam was unquestionably the key. As Creadell Copeland put it, “All we had to do was stand behind Sam. Our claim to fame was that Sam’s voice was so captivating we didn’t have to do anything else.”
    What made that voice so captivating to some extent defied analysis. For all the comparisons to R.H. Harris and the Soul Stirrers, there was something different in the young man’s approach, there was something about his manner, and the manner of his singing, that was altogether his own.
    He had clearly studied Harris. His diction, his phrasing, his gift for storytelling, the way in which he would make extemporaneous “runs” and then end up right on the beat with an emphatic enunciation of the word or phrase that would bring the whole verse into focus—these stylistic traits all echoed the older man’s. But where Harris was in the end a “hard” singer, who, for all of his precise articulation, the controlled drama of his delivery, and the soaring sweep of his falsetto flights, bore down relentlessly in his vocal attack, Sam, unlike many of the new breed of quartet singers, sang in a relaxed, almost deceptively simple fashion that reflected not just the breathy intimacy of Ink Spots lead Bill Kenny but the relaxed, almost lazy approach of Bing Crosby, or even Gene Autry, whose “South of the Border” was a staple of his secular repertoire. He was a crooner in a field which, however much the aim of each group was to cause every one of its female followers to fall out, had not put much stock to date in the subtleties of seduction.
    He was also, like Harris, a straightahead stand-up singer. Not for the QCs or the Soul Stirrers the acrobatic antics of some of their more flamboyant counterparts, running all over the stage, falling to their