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

knees, tossing the microphone about like a football—maybe the strongest point of similarity between the Soul Stirrers and the Highway QCs was that, sex appeal aside, they were about pure
singing,
first, last, and always.
    Sam’s older sister Hattie was amazed that he never betrayed nervousness of any kind. To QCs baritone singer Creadell Copeland, what was even more surprising was how well Sam dealt with all the local fame and adulation. There were always girls around clamoring for his attention, but Sam handled them with deference and respect. He never got carried away with his own image and appeared to be genuinely interested in other people. “He was the kind of person who even as a youth, he would always put his hands on you—he would be touching you all the time, and this was long before it became fashionable. He liked to get right in your face if he was talking to you; if he walked up to you, he didn’t stand away from you. He had a lot of strange habits that I scrutinized pretty good—because of his talent, and because of the fact that he was so successful in all of the things that he tried to do.”
    T HE QC S MIGHT MAKE as much as $30 or $35 on a good night, generally less, but the money didn’t really matter. After a while they got to the point where they could draw people to a program on their own, but mostly they worked with three or four other young quartets. Their repertoire continued to grow as they took advantage of their newest member’s talent not just for delivering a broad range of material but for rearranging some of the old “way-back” numbers and telling familiar stories in new ways. They sang “When You Bow at the Cross in the Evening” and the Golden Gate Quartet’s “Our Father,” Lucie Campbell’s brand-new composition “Jesus Gave Me Water,” “Steal Away,” and “Nearer My God to Thee,” Sam’s mother’s favorite. When Mahalia Jackson’s “Move On Up a Little Higher” came out that winter, they adopted it as their theme song. Sam would turn out the church with it every time—
unless
Mahalia happened to be on the same program.
    They spoke constantly of achieving the celebrity and success of groups like the Soul Stirrers or the Famous Blue Jays, they dreamed of escaping the neighborhood—going all over the country, like the Soul Stirrers, with five different changes of uniform and their own limousine. They even talked about singing pop because they knew “that was a fast way to get out there in the world,” Creadell observed. “Of course we never did it, but we would talk about it.”
    They didn’t really need to sing pop, though, to see their reputations growing. Or to see the gospel world expanding far beyond the limits that might previously have been imagined. Mahalia’s hit single focused attention not just on the majestic voice of the woman who would some two years later headline the “first all-Negro spiritual gospel concert ever to be presented in famous Carnegie Hall” but on the commercial potential of the music as well. The speaker above the door of the Blue Jays’ record store at Thirty-sixth and Cottage Grove broadcast not only their own recordings but the recordings of such well-known local figures as Sallie Martin, the Roberta Martin Singers, and the Soul Stirrers, not to mention the nationally known groups who appeared on the Stirrers’ regular bimonthly programs at DuSable High School, including Cleveland’s influential Wings Over Jordan Choir, the Spirit of Memphis, the Fairfield Four out of Nashville, Detroit’s Flying Clouds, and Los Angeles’ Pilgrim Travelers, whose first release on the Specialty label, “I’m Standin’ On the Highway,” was outselling even the Stirrers.
    Chicago was a hotbed of gospel activity, as the Travelers’ new manager and tenor singer, J.W. Alexander, appreciatively recognized. “The competition was
very
strong. You had Robert Anderson and the Willie Webb Singers, Silas Steele was singing lead with the Blue