This Content Downloaded From 207.62.77.131 On Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC

Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist—A Reinvention in Three Songs
Author(s): Mark Burford

Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society , Vol. 65, No. 1 (Spring 2012), pp.
113-178
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological
Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2012.65.1.113
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
University of California Press and American Musicological Society are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Musicological Society
This content downloaded from

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist—A
Reinvention in Three Songs
MARK BURFORD
A Retreat from Listening?
F
or his victory speech on 4 November 2008, President-elect Barack
Obama addressed an emotionally charged sea of delirious supporters,
estimated at a quarter of a million people, who filled Chicago’s Grant
Park to overflowing, and millions more gathered at home, in bars, and in the
streets throughout the country and around the world. Obama offered the
election’s outcome as an answer to doubters—of the currency of the American
dream, of the promise of democracy, of the power of the people to bend “the
arc of history . . . once more toward the hope of a better day.” Then, barely
two minutes into his prepared remarks, Obama delivered the rhetorical
clincher the crowd had been waiting for, heralding the historic occasion as a
time of reckoning: “It’s been a long time comin’, but tonight because of what
we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come
to America.” Judging from the audible assent before he had even finished the
line, many in the audience immediately recognized Obama’s riff on the fa-
mous hook of “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a song written and recorded by
vocalist and music industry trailblazer Sam Cooke (1931–1964) in the year of
his death.1 Obama’s stirring allusion to Cooke’s swan song was perhaps
apropos in light of resonances in the reception of two African American men
I wish to thank Natalia King and David Schiff for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay;
Matthew Eilar for his technical assistance; Sheila Lloyd, Jeffery McMillan, Anna So, and Jennie
Wasserman for bringing helpful sources to my attention; the participants in the ALANA Studies
group at Reed College and the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute
“African American Struggles for Freedom and Civil Rights, 1865–1965” at Harvard University
for the opportunity to engage in thought-provoking dialogue; and the anonymous readers for this
Journal for their productive suggestions.
1. “A Change Is Gonna Come” was recorded on 31 January 1964, and initially released in
March on the RCA album Ain’t That Good News. Though the videotapes are now lost, Cooke ap-
parently debuted the song live on NBC television’s The Tonight Show on 7 February. See
Guralnick, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, 549–54. Cooke supervised subsequent edit-
ing of the recording from its full length of over three minutes to two and a half minutes to fit on a
45 rpm single released just weeks after his death in December. In the song, Cooke sings the re-
peated line: “It’s been a long, a long time comin’, but I know a change gon’ come. Oh, yes it will.”
Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 65, Number 1, pp. 113–178 ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN
1547-3848. © 2012 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission
to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,
www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jams.2012.65.1.113.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
114 Journal of the American Musicological Society
linked in the popular imagination to narratives of rapprochement: a newly

elected president whose mixed-race identity presaged a “post-racial” future
and a singer who continues to be remembered for his journey from celebrity
in black gospel music to path-breaking success as a pop star with an innovative
style and breadth of appeal that seemed to “transcend race.”2
The tango of black gospel and “white” pop singing has dominated discus-
sions of Cooke’s life and art. In most accounts of his career, Cooke is closely
linked to various forms of “crossover,” from sacred to secular music, from
black vernacular marginality to the “mainstream,” from the “chitlin circuit” to
the Copacabana, from the African American musician as a commodity traf-
ficked by the music industry to an agentive, entrepreneurial force within it.
Cooke, observes African American Studies scholar Craig Werner, formulated
the “ideal crossover style,” one that was “delicate, almost ethereal” while of-
fering “a clear alternative to pop crooning” grounded in the “gospel im-
pulse,” proving “you didn’t have to give up the grits to have the gravy.”3
Historian Brian Ward has identified Cooke as an exemplar of his times, which
had seen both “the high tide of pop biracialism” and “the maturing of a
generation of blacks who were simply much more relaxed about such sacred-
secular distinctions than their elders.”4 It was this canny, almost uncanny,
circumspection, writer Nelson George notes, that set Cooke apart and crystal-
lized his social and music historical iconicity for many of his admirers.
Pure pop tunesmith on one hand, soul record pioneer on the other, Cooke
tried to embrace mainstream success as defined by Sammy Davis, Jr., and yet
retain his roots as well. This balancing act between his instinct for integration
and love for undiluted black expression—then very much the music of a segre-
gated people—allowed him to fashion a career that spectacularly navigated the
dual tracks of black life after 1960.
Cooke “crossed over” to whites as well as any performer from the barri-
caded R&B world could dream. However, and this is crucial, he used his
money and free time to reach back and give other young blacks an opportunity
to share his rewards.5
2. For an astute historical analysis of the ambivalent investment in cultural hybridity as a

“passport to a future transcendence of race,” see Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz.
3. Werner, Change Is Gonna Come, 36, 41.
4. Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 124, 191.
5. George, Death of Rhythm and Blues, 81. To date, there is no musicological literature focus-
ing exclusively on Cooke, making his career a wide-open field of study. Cooke has, however, been
the subject of two major biographies targeted for a general audience: Wolff, You Send Me: The Life
and Times of Sam Cooke; and Guralnick, Dream Boogie. For other commentary on Cooke’s life
and career, see Shaw, World of Soul: Black America’s Contribution to the Pop Music Scene, 85–87;
idem, Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues, 268–72; Hirshey, Nowhere to
Run: The Story of Soul Music, 105–16; Boyer, Golden Age of Gospel, 195–99; Dyson, Between God
and Gangsta Rap, 60–67; Santoro, Stir It Up: Musical Mixes from Roots to Jazz, 59–65;
Kempton, Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music, 62–180; Hill’s liner notes to
The Man Who Invented Soul; Talty, Mulatto America: At the Crossroads of Black and White
Culture; A Social History, 151–71; Darden, People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist 115
And yet, many of these same kudos also harbor a sense of chagrin, a thinly
veiled disillusionment not with those recordings that make a case for Cooke’s
distinction as “The Man Who Invented Soul,” as he has been commemorated
and marketed since the late 1960s, but rather with those that suggest immod-
erate concession to the pop mainstream. George, while marveling at Cooke’s
ability to modulate eloquently between the cathartic passion of gospel and the
sentimental affect of pop balladry, characterizes the singer as one who, despite
his “love for undiluted black expression,” was a “contradictory figure, who
molded his talent to entice whites.”6 Likewise, as much as Werner can admire
the “extraordinary skills of translation and negotiation” requisite to communi-
cate through the stylistic idioms of gospel and pop, he interprets Cooke’s will-
ingness to record middle-of-the-road fare as indicative of a “complicated”
politics and a bite-the-bullet opportunism that made him “a dedicated deseg-
regationist willing to enter the mainstream to replenish his supply of dollar
bills.” But for all his “active interest in ‘white’ culture,” Werner reassures us,
“Cooke never passed . . . ‘into the mainstream, and oblivion.’ ”7 Indeed,
music critics, biographers, and cultural commentators alike have demonstrated
a remarkably consistent fealty to a narrative of gospel triumphalism that basks
in Cooke’s legacy of laying the foundation for 1960s soul music in spite of the
insidious lure of fifties pop schmaltz. Virtually without exception, the singer’s
recordings of “standards and show tunes,” as they are often described, are
viewed askance, if at all, much like the tacky cousin “you’ll have to excuse”
at an otherwise heartwarming family gathering.
This double-sided coin of celebration and skepticism at the core of Cooke’s
reception is linked to the reception of “middle-of-the-road” pop itself.
Certainly, the most lucrative success for popular musicians in the 1950s was
achieved, at least to some extent, by tapping the purchasing power of white
middle-class consumers, whether teenagers or their parents. In December
1956, Cooke’s first manager, Robert “Bumps” Blackwell (1918–1985) gently
corrected an associate who was brainstorming repertory that Cooke might
record as singles. “[Y]ou are confusing Blues with Rock ’n Roll (or Pop). We
are not interested in Blues at the present time,” Blackwell wrote. “In writing
the lyrics try to write ‘white’ for the teen-age purchaser rather than ‘race’
lyrics. It seems the white girls are buying the records these days.”8 Blackwell’s
Music, 227–33; Fitzgerald, “Black Pop Songwriting, 1963–1966”; Palmer, Blues and Chaos: The
Musical Writing of Robert Palmer, 189–94; Friedwald, Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and
Pop Singers, 734–39; and Trigg, “A Change Ain’t Gonna Come: Sam Cooke and the Protest
Song.”
6. George, Death of Rhythm and Blues, 79.
7. Werner, Change Is Gonna Come, 40–42. Here Werner quotes black novelist Julian
Mayfield. See also Jacob Ganz’s story for National Public Radio, “Sam Cooke at 80: The Career
That Could Have Been.”
8. Letter dated 28 December 1956 in the Specialty Records files, quoted in Guralnick,
Dream Boogie, 153.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
assessment communicates certain commonplace understandings of postwar

pop aesthetics, which tend to be raced as white, classed as middlebrow, and, in
accordance with frequent characterizations of pop fandom, gendered female.
But the qualifier “middle-of-the-road” was also part of music industry par-
lance since at least the early 1950s. Initially invoked in connection to jazz—
to distinguish swing from bebop vanguardism on the one hand and Dixieland
revival nostalgia on the other—“middle-of-the-road” came to be identified
with an age-stratified current within the pop mainstream that aligned less with
teenage purchasers than with their parents. More specifically, “middle-of-the-
road pop” was articulated through a nexus of considerations that included
repertory (familiar hit songs of today and yesteryear), accompaniment (big
band, jazz combo, or string backing), stylistic stability (not too explicitly
country, rhythm and blues, modern jazz, or classical), class and generational
appeal (marketable to middle-class adults), formatting (appropriate for long-
playing albums), and temporality of market logic (slower but more continu-
ous sales over a prolonged commercial life cycle).9
The respective roles of singles marketed to teens and adult-oriented long-
playing albums (LPs) in Cooke’s career presents an as-of-yet unexplored arena
of negotiation. Cooke’s galaxy of youth-targeted hit singles remains the cor-
nerstone of his reception. His gospel recordings, though considerably less well
known, have been cited frequently and anthologized in their entirety. Cooke’s
album work, however, has for the most part been musica non grata, almost
unmentionable and for the most part commercially unavailable, a bypass
merited, common consensus seems to suggest, by the artistic shortcomings
and pandering “whiteness” of their tracks.10 Examples of this dismissal are
manifold, but an assessment by the late music critic Robert Palmer is represen-
tative of the tenor of commentary on Cooke the album artist.
In those days, an “album” was usually one of several hit singles and a lot of
“filler.” In Cooke’s case, the “filler” was often Broadway-style tunes and stan-
dards for which he seemed to have little natural affinity. He could certainly hit
the note, as the more carefully chosen and sympathetically arranged standards
on the albums handily demonstrate. What is lacking in the less successful album
tracks is some evident emotional connection between the singer and his mate-
rial. What isn’t lacking—but should be—is overdone orchestrations and chirpy
“pop” vocal choruses, which only made matters worse.11
9. Keir Keightley has offered a valuable genealogy of popular musics associated with “middle-
brow” adult tastes—variously labeled “pop-standard,” “middle-of-the-road,” or “contemporary
adult”—which, he argues, comprise a populist “easy-listening era” extending from the end of
World War II until 1966, “the final year that adult-oriented LPs outsold teen ones.” See
Keightley, “Music for Middlebrows: Defining the Easy Listening Era, 1946–1966.” On the tem-
poral logic of long-playing album sales relative to singles, see idem, “Long Play: Adult-Oriented
Popular Music and the Temporal Logics of the Post-War Sound Recording Industry.”
10. The two Cooke albums typically excepted from this ambivalence are Night Beat and the
posthumous Live at the Harlem Square Club, which are, not coincidentally, commonly character-
ized as representing Cooke at his most authentically black.
11. Palmer, Blues and Chaos, 192.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Four recurrent themes in the discourse on Cooke the album artist turn up
in Palmer’s critique. First, Palmer identifies the problematic material, the
“filler,” on Cooke’s albums as “Broadway-style tunes and standards.” Second,
particular disparagement is reserved for the “pop” production treatment given
this material, the crux of which is sufficiently communicated by noting its
“overdone orchestrations.” Other writers have echoed Palmer’s appraisal in
characterizing these same recordings as “syrupy” “pop schlock” designed to
reach a white audience, as “middle-of-the-road pop confections” with “hover-
ing strings and whitebread backup vocals” “laden with banal rococo effects
of the sort thought to certify ‘good music.’ ”12 Third is the assessment that
the fatal flaw of many Cooke LPs may be rooted in personal limitations on the
part of Cooke himself, who demonstrates “little natural affinity” for being able
to convincingly perform well-crafted Tin Pan Alley standards. An early Cooke
album composed of material previously recorded by Billie Holiday, Daniel
Wolff writes, “tells as much about what Sam can’t do as what he can,” particu-
larly in the case of songs with “sophistication” and expressive depths that were
“beyond him.”13 The fourth and perhaps most telling feature of the passage is
the neglect to reference any particular recording. In Palmer’s defense, his dis-
cussion is part of a concise career overview. Yet even Cooke’s biographers,
Wolff and Peter Guralnick, address much of Cooke’s substantial body of al-
bum work either reluctantly or with curiously glib superficiality. Instead they
foreground its utilitarian function of establishing Cooke as an upscale night-
club singer.14
That explication of the shortfalls of Cooke’s LPs goes so unproblematically
without mention, or is offered through innuendos relying upon the custom-
ary reception of 1950s middle-of-the-road pop as, all at once, culturally under-
and overdetermined, suggests that there is something at play that should not
be confused with the vagaries of music-critical “he said, she said.” Situating
themselves as canaries in a coal mine, writers on Cooke, most of whom are his
devoted fans as well, have gained tremendous critical mileage communicating
their ambivalence through such coded language as “strings,” “orchestration,”
or “Broadway tunes” that functions largely as an ethnic signifier of whiteness
intended to warn away listener-consumers in search of the “real” Sam
Cooke.15 Expressions of wariness towards Cooke’s album work, along with
12. Wolff, You Send Me, 170; Dyson, Between God and Gangsta Rap, 63; Santoro, Stir It Up,
62; and Kempton, Boogaloo, 122.
13. See Wolff, You Send Me, 196.
14. A singular exception is Friedwald, in Biographical Guide, 737–38, who offers extended
comments on Cooke’s second album Encore, in his view “an absolutely tremendous LP” that to
his surprise is “barely mentioned by either Wolff or Peter Guralnick.”
15. An editorial review of the Cooke album Live at the Harlem Square Club by respected
British music critic Barney Hoskyns for Amazon.com’s catalogue of “Music Essentials” offers a
vivid illustration: “Most of Sam Cooke’s pop hits were sugary, blanched affairs. This album was
the real deal, giving us the church-reared R&B singer who liked to tear up the clubs along the
Southern chitlin circuit” (emphasis added).

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
the abstention from thoughtful critical discussion of the music, have thrived
almost exclusively within the domain of music journalism. Such criticism may,
however, serve as a renewed provocation for popular music scholars, particu-
larly those who work on African American popular music. Nearly two decades
ago, Stuart Hall cautioned students of circum-Atlantic black culture against
the temptation of “two continuous grand counternarratives” corresponding
to notions of center and periphery. These could offer but an “endless either/
or, either total victory or total incorporation, which almost never happens in
cultural politics, but with which cultural critics always put themselves to
bed.”16
This zero-sum game is reflected in a reception of “pop”—and, I believe, of
Cooke—framed by a still-cherished ethics of style informed by two discrete
solidarities traceable to the mid-to-late 1960s: the culturalism that asserted the
“corrective” soul force of a Black Aesthetic as “a means of helping black peo-
ple out of the polluted mainstream of Americanism,”17 and the strong genera-
tional allegiances cultivated among many white males during a rock era from
which “pop” emerged as rock’s evil Other. Whereas one focused on race and
culture, the other emphasized generational and class identities, though both,
in different ways and toward nonidentical political ends, tended to valorize
masculinized ideals of anti-commercialism, aesthetic autonomy, and social
rupture. At times, however, the attractiveness of these parallel and mutually re-
inforcing critical traditions within “boomer historiography” of popular music
has overshadowed other possible, complementary discursive pathways.18
Though for some listeners, 1950s adult pop continues to summon suffocating
white, middle-class sensibilities, to many African American vocalists, postwar
pop performances, particularly when circulated on LP, laid claim to not easily
granted forms of status, pleasure, social belonging, modern subjectivity, and
modes of behavior with both symbolic and concrete economic value. What I
hope to offer here is a counterbalance to the narrative of “The Man Who
Invented Soul” in the form of a reinvention of Cooke centering on his early
performances as a pop album artist, a body of work that has routinely been
referenced solely for the purpose of being dismissed.
16. Hall, “What is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” 106. For an analysis of such dis-
course in characterizations of jazz musicians, see Monson, “Problem with White Hipness: Race,
Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse.”
17. See Gayle’s introduction to Black Aesthetic (1971), repr. in Addison Gayle Jr. Reader,
297–303.
18. For a dialogue on the emergence and legacy of the “soul concept,” see the roundtable
discussion with Thulani Davis, Portia Maultsby, Ishmael Reed, Greg Tate, and Clyde Taylor,
“Ain’t We Still Got Soul?” in Guillory and Reed, Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure, 269–83.
On “rock vs. pop” discourse and “boomer historiography” of rock, respectively, see Keightley,
“Music for Middlebrows,” 327–29; and idem, “Long Play,” 376. The legacy of rock’s presump-
tive aesthetic highground has been a fertile topic within music criticism as well. See, for example,
Kelefa Sanneh, “The Rap Against Rockism,” New York Times, 31 October 2004; and Jody Rosen,
“The Perils of Poptimism,” Slate, 9 May 2006 (http://www.slate.com/id/2141418/).

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
In part, the arm’s distance at which writers have kept Cooke the album
artist is attributable to changes in taste since the 1950s, and to entirely sincere
personal preferences for certain musical sounds over others. But this critical
swerve also results from what I would describe as a retreat from listening, a
willful inattention to certain acts and facts of musical performance predicated
on ways we have come to prize and distinguish African American musical tra-
ditions. The phrase “retreat from listening” is inspired by Kofi Agawu’s tren-
chant critique of the familiar formulation “African rhythm.” Agawu notes how
reliance upon a presupposed “comparative framework . . . rarely leads to ex-
plicit comparison” and often results, with deceptive ease, in a “retreat from
comparison” and a correlating “retreat from critical evaluation” of musical
practices.19 Taking seriously Cooke’s endeavor to become an album artist and
asking why such a professional identity might have mattered to him opens
new avenues for listening to a richer spectrum of postwar African American
music. It allows us better to assess his abilities as a singer, his navigation of
shifting practices and philosophies of popular music production, and his nego-
tiation of the economies of prestige deriving from the positional relationship
between the LP and the hit single. Accounting for Cooke as a pop album
artist also enables us to register the metamorphosis in his posthumous recep-
tion. By historically situating both Cooke’s endeavor to be recognized as an
album artist and the subsequent occlusion and devaluation of this identifica-
tion, I hope to stimulate further critical music-historical dialogue on Cooke’s
complex career while also contributing to an accelerating trickle of scholarship
seeking to complicate in a productive way conventional representations of the
popular music “mainstream” as distinct from more racially and ethnically
marked performance styles.20
I will focus on Cooke’s first three LPs, recorded and released during his as-
sociation with the independent label Keen Records from June 1957 until the
end of 1959. My title sets a deliberate marker: my chief concern is with “Sam
Cooke as Pop Album Artist,” as opposed to “Sam Cooke’s Pop Albums.”
Rather than exploring the separate and also rich topic of the overall integrity,
holism, or broader textuality of his Keen albums, I will spotlight only one
track from each LP: “Danny Boy” (Sam Cooke), “My Foolish Heart” (En-
core), and “I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues” (Tribute to the Lady). These
tracks introduce us to a Cooke who, even if he was a watershed performer,
19. Agawu, “Invention of African Rhythm.”

20. Recent literature that has moved toward a more rigorous theorizing of the popular music
“mainstream” as an aesthetic, historical, economic, and discursive field includes Pecknold, Selling
Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry, 53–132; Carson, “ ‘Bridging the Gap’: Creed
Taylor, Grover Washington Jr., and the Crossover Roots of Smooth Jazz”; Keightley, “Music for
Middlebrows”; Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll; Zak, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody:
Remaking Music in 1950s America, 43–75; Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop
Music in the Age of Jim Crow, 215–74; and Roberts, “Michael Jackson’s Kingdom: Music, Race,
and the Sound of the Mainstream.”

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
exhibited salient continuities and contiguities with other figures and concerns:
“Irish tenor” Morton Downey and the intersections of ethnic and pop perfor-
mance; singer Billy Eckstine and the racial and sexual politics of the black bal-
ladeer; and the professional challenges of black studio musicians in 1950s Los
Angeles. My claim to “reinvention” is a play on two relevant senses of “inven-
tion”: the marketing and reception of Cooke as an “inventor” of soul singing
on the one hand, and Agawu’s discussion of the power of discourse to reify
ideological categories in the form of academy- and commodity-ready inven-
tions like “African rhythm,” on the other. If “The Man Who Invented Soul” is
another such invention—asserting Cooke’s meaningful importance to a spe-
cific cultural-political moment—the reinvention “Sam Cooke as Pop Album
Artist” does a different kind of work. Shifting the goalposts by emphasizing a
less celebrated facet of Cooke’s career expands the set of criteria according to
which music-historical significance tends to be ascribed habitually to Cooke,
to black music, and within popular music studies more generally: instigation of
stylistic change, chart success, auteurism, authenticity, resistance to commer-
cializing forces, and the enunciation of subaltern difference. The shift of per-
spective that I offer here has consequences not only for our understanding of
Sam Cooke and 1960s soul singers but also—as I will discuss later—for the
broader scholarly discourse on how race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality are
heard and accrue value in American popular music. With much of music’s his-
tory and history’s music placed on a perpetually receding back burner,
Cooke’s endeavor is a reminder of the value of balancing presentist determina-
tions of “achievement” with greater attentiveness to concrete performance
and professional choices by popular musicians.
Cooke’s Keen LPs and the “Album Artist”
Cooke, the son of a Holiness minister, was born 22 January 1931, in Clarks-
dale, Mississippi, and at the age of two migrated with his family to Chicago,
where by the late 1940s he had committed himself to becoming a professional
gospel singer.21 Cooke’s career as a recording artist can be divided into three
periods, demarcated by his affiliation with three record labels. In 1950, the
Soul Stirrers, a nationally famous Chicago-based black gospel quartet then fea-
turing the exuberant high tenor of Rebert H. Harris, left the Aladdin label and
signed with Specialty Records, started in Hollywood by Art Rupe. The depar-
ture of Harris from the Stirrers not long after the group joined Rupe’s label
created an opening for Cooke, the nineteen-year-old lead singer of the
21. Cooke’s family name was spelled “Cook” but Blackwell and other Keen executives later
suggested that he add an “e,” for variously explained reasons, when he became a pop artist.
Guralnick’s excellent Dream Boogie is the most authoritative source of information on Cooke’s bi-
ography, though Wolff ’s You Send Me, whose oral sources differ, is also valuable.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Highway QCs, a young but widely admired gospel quartet that apprenticed
under, performed with, and occasionally subbed for the Stirrers. With Cooke
as their new lead singer, the Soul Stirrers achieved even greater commercial
success, in part due to the postwar boom in the popularity of gospel music.
The singer’s youthful good looks, distinctive vocal style, and sensitivity to pop-
ular music trends helped gospel music extend its appeal to a younger genera-
tion of fans and singers. Cooke remained with the group until the summer of
1957, when he moved to Los Angeles and embarked on a career as a solo pop
artist, becoming by far the most high-profile gospel singer to date to have
done so.22
Shepherded by Blackwell, an enigmatic thirty-nine-year-old African
American impresario and up-and-coming artist and repertoire (A&R) man
whom Rupe had hired as a talent scout and house producer, Cooke moved to
another Los Angeles–based indie label, Keen Records. The B-side of Cooke’s
first Keen single, “You Send Me,” recorded by Specialty before he departed
the label, sold nearly two million copies, and made him a national star
overnight. Following a handful of encouraging follow-up sides, Cooke was
wooed by more prestigious record companies and eventually left Keen in
January 1960 to sign with major label RCA Victor. There, Cooke partnered
with the respected cousin team of producers, Hugo Peretti and Luigi
Creatore, on eight studio albums and an impressive string of hit singles that
charted on both the rhythm and blues and pop charts, including “Chain
Gang,” “Cupid,” “Twistin’ the Night Away,” and “Another Saturday Night.”
By 1962, Cooke had become RCA’s second biggest moneymaker in terms of
singles sales, behind only Elvis Presley. In a tragically tawdry incident on
11 December 1964, with still-unresolved circumstances, an African American
motel manager shot the inebriated Cooke after he forced his way into her
office in search of a woman companion who had apparently stolen his clothes,
ending his life at the age of 33. Cooke’s contributions to popular music his-
tory were acknowledged in 1986 when he became a charter inductee into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 1999 when he received a Grammy
Lifetime Achievement Award. In a ceremony on 18 June 2011, the city of
Chicago renamed a Southside stretch of East 36th Street near two of the
singer’s childhood homes “Sam Cooke Way.”
Cooke’s Keen years are noteworthy for the degree of autonomy he exer-
cised in charting a course for realizing his musical, professional, and socioeco-
nomic aspirations. Surrounding him was a coterie of official and unofficial
22. Several professional or semiprofessional gospel singers launched highly successful popular
music careers even before Cooke himself crossed over, including Dinah Washington, then known
as Ruth Jones, who was a singer and piano accompanist with the Sallie Martin Singers, Della
Reese (the Meditation Singers), Clyde McPhatter (the Mount Lebanon Jubilee Singers), Roy
Hamilton (the Searchlight Singers), Frankie Lymon (the Harlemaire Juniors), and the Larks, a
nationally known vocal harmony group that began as the Selah Jubilee Singers. None, however,
had approached the stardom in gospel attained by Cooke.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
advisors, most prominently Blackwell but also including fellow gospel singer
and close business associate James Woodie “J. W.” Alexander, Soul Stirrers
founder Silas Roy “S. R.” Crain, industry insider Jess Rand, William Morris
agent Larry Auerbach, arranger René Hall, and Clifton White, the former
Mills Brothers guitarist who became Cooke’s bandleader. At Keen, a four-
month-old label founded, largely as a hobby, by aerospace manufacturer and
music buff John Siamas, the strict production oversight that had been Rupe’s
modus operandi at Specialty was noticeably absent, and Blackwell, who be-
came one of the label’s heads of A&R, was effectively the only decision-maker
to whom Cooke had to answer.23 “If he said ‘Let’s have a session,’ we’d have a
session,” recalled Lou Adler, an assistant to Blackwell at Keen who went on to
become a major music and film producer. “It just came [to] a point where
Sam did what he wanted to do.”24 Though Cooke maintained considerable,
and in some ways atypical, artistic independence at RCA, he was, as a “Hugo
and Luigi” production, much more subject to in-studio guidance than he had
been at Keen. Accounting for Cooke’s creative carte blanche at Keen yields a
new perspective on the singular audacity of vision that he exhibited for the rest
of his career, particularly in harnessing his songwriting royalties by establishing
his own music publishing company, Kags Music, and launching a pair of
record labels, Sar and Derby Records, both in partnership with Alexander,
even before he signed with RCA. With singles that made him “one of the
most consistent chart makers in the pop field” and a four-star review of Sar’s
first release (the Soul Stirrers’ “Stand By Me Father” b/w “He’s Been a
Shelter for Me”), Cooke, by mid-1960, had already built a terraced career
within which the roles of hit-making singles artist and album artist each played
a particular strategic function.25
Cooke’s recordings for Keen included songs released as singles and material
that appeared on albums, the former most often originals targeted toward
younger consumers and the latter already-familiar repertory geared toward a
broader audience whose base constituency was “grown-ups.” This was com-
mon practice in the industry. “At that time standard product was all we would
do on an album,” said Capitol Records executive Alan Livingston, who signed
the slumping Frank Sinatra in 1953. “You might slip in a new song, but it was
unlikely. Whereas with a single, you try to make a hit out of it. Then if it was
23. See Rupe’s in-house instruction manual for Specialty employees reprinted in full in
Broven, Record Makers and Breakers: Voices of the Independent Rock ’n’ Roll Pioneers, 472–80. The
head of A&R at Keen when Cooke and Blackwell arrived was jazz clarinetist and future Del-Fi
record label owner Bob Keane, who in his memoir took credit for recognizing the hit potential of
“You Send Me,” calling Cooke “my first discovery.” See his Oracle of Del-Fi, 37–40.
24. Interview with Lou Adler, 3 January 2011.
25. Billboard, 8 August 1960, 28; and ibid., 2 November 1959, 62. On Sar and Kags, see
Guralnick, Dream Boogie, passim; Ray Funk, “Sar Records: Sam Cooke’s Soul Label,” Goldmine,
26 August 1988, 86–88; and the two-CD box set The Sar Records Story. “B/w” is a common
discographical abbreviation for “backed with,” indicating the flipside of a record release.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
a hit, you could [later] put it in an album, or name the album after it.”26 In
1956, Billboard magazine observed an evolving relationship between singles
and albums, from which emerged a new category of recording artist.
Tradition in the disk business dictates that a new artist starts a career on single
records. If he clicks with a few of these, he may reach the point of making an
LP. That’s a thing of the past. Artists are now being kicked off right and left on
LP’s and later on, if demand shapes up from dealers or operators, singles may
be pulled out of the album. The phenomenon has created what is thought of in
the trade as the “album” artist. Harry Belafonte is the prime example of the
artist who has had tremendous success with albums and yet can’t make a dent
with a single. . . .
In short, there is less risk in album production that there used to be. There
is far less chance of an album laying an egg today than formerly. Thus, it makes
more sense to kick off artists, who have a modicum of sophisticated appeal, on
albums.27
Cooke made no secret of his desire to craft a career as singer who could
dent the pop charts but who also possessed the “sophisticated appeal” to
make it as a successful album artist. The latter, he and Blackwell believed,
opened the door to extended engagements at upscale nightclubs, making
Cooke less reliant on hit singles and touring rhythm and blues packages play-
ing a grueling string of one-nighters. One model for Cooke’s vision was
Johnny Mathis, an African American singer four years younger, whose gos-
samer vocals appealed to teenage record-buyers and club-going audiences
alike. Columbia Records launched Mathis as an album artist in 1956 and his
recordings became best sellers both as LPs and as singles. Despite the differ-
ences in their training—as a teenager, Mathis studied with a classical voice
teacher for six years—Cooke and Mathis shared similar career goals. “I want
to build a many-sided career that will last,” Mathis said in 1958, explaining the
“plan” he and his manager Helen Noga were scrupulously following. “We
want adults as well as kids to get to know my voice.”28 But the artist Cooke
repeatedly cited as his personal benchmark for success was Harry Belafonte.
Belafonte’s 1956 album Calypso not only ushered in a calypso-music craze but
also became the first-ever million-selling LP by a solo artist. Beginning as a
pop crooner before remaking himself as a folk singer and the quintessential
album artist, Belafonte, just four years older than Cooke, released a series of
ten LPs for RCA Victor between 1954 and 1959 that established him as the
26. Quoted in Will Friedwald’s liner notes to Sinatra: The Complete Capitol Singles Collection
(Capitol 38089), 1996.
27. Ren Grevatt, “Fancy Facades Help Rocket LP Sales,” Billboard, 28 July 1956, 20, 40.
28. Wally George, “Teens and Adults Find Magic in Singing of Johnny Mathis,” Los Angeles
Times, 2 February 1958, E3. As another feature noted, such multigenerational appeal was not
commonplace: “Johnny Mathis rates as one of the very few pop singers who has a following
among both the youngsters and their parents.” Seymour Korman, “He ‘Made It’ in Chicago,”
Chicago Tribune, 30 March 1958, G34.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
label’s biggest cash cow. With a $750,000 per year salary making him “the
highest paid Negro entertainer in history,” record-breaking nightclub audi-
ences at a time when the struggling cabaret business rarely broke even, an ac-
tive movie career, his own music-publishing operation, and concert, motion
picture, and television production companies, Belafonte was by the end of
the decade a cross-racial sex symbol and a one-man “corporate enterprise.”29
“My goal is to someday be in the same singing league with Harry Belafonte,
Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra,” said Cooke in 1960. “But whether I achieve
my goal or not, I have organized my career on a business-like basis and I
know there will be well-paying jobs waiting for me even if my records stop
selling.”30
The album artist became linked to a specific set of sonic expectations
derived from the middle-of-the-road pop LP: skillful handling of “standards”
(or in Belafonte’s case folk songs), collaboration with A-list arrangers, accom-
paniment by a professional orchestra or jazz ensemble, upper-end production,
and a melody-focused performance that minimized the “excesses” of jarring
instrumental timbres, a too-aggressive beat, “far out” improvisation, or special
effects “gimmicks.” But the album artist also invoked a broader discourse
emerging at the intersection of other, sociocultural developments. Together,
new sound recording technologies, Cold War–era understandings of
American populism, reaffirmation of heteronormative domestic life through
the G. I. Bill and suburbanization, and sharpened record-marketing strategies
produced distinct market identities for teenagers and adults, both endowed
with greater disposable income. With the greatest asset of the LP, introduced
by Columbia Records in 1948, initially perceived to be its accommodation of
the length of extended classical compositions, the form itself acquired sym-
bolic capital that flowed to other musical content released on LP, including
Broadway musicals, movie soundtracks, instrumental “mood music,” jazz,
and “packages” featuring respected vocalists performing vintage material.31 As
29. “The Flivving Niteries,” Time, 7 July 1958, 58; “Lead Man Holler,” Time, 2 March
1959, 40–43; and Emily Coleman, “Organization Man Named Belafonte,” New York Times
Magazine, 13 December 1959, 35–42.
30. Sam Cooke, “Sam Cooke . . . Man with a Goal,” Pittsburgh Courier, 8 October 1960,
quoted in Guralnick, Dream Boogie, 344. Adam Green interprets such outlooks as reflective of a
marked postwar shift in attitudes among African American cultural producers who “were gener-
ally not middle class in strict sociological terms, [though] they pursued their crafts and modeled
their careers along lines of entrepreneurship and commercial ambition.” See Green, Selling the
Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955, 90–91.
31. Pierre Bourdieu has influentially theorized the struggle within the field of cultural pro-
duction between a more market-driven “heteronomous principle” based in “economic capital”
and an “autonomous principle,” circulating in the form of “symbolic capital,” that tends “to iden-
tify with a degree of independence from the economy, seeing temporal failure as a sign of election
[to the status of art] and success as a sign of compromise.” See his Field of Cultural Production,
37–43. See also Bourdieu’s delineation of the distinctions between economic capital, cultural cap-
ital, and social capital in the essay “Forms of Capital.”

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Keir Keightley’s work on postwar adult-oriented popular music has shown,

these associations and creative functions had broader social insinuations as the
LP began to be marketed and consumed as a “classier” format tethered to no-
tions of “adultness” that first began to emerge in the late 1930s.
The music industry’s marketing of the LP and the 45 rpm single as pre-
dominantly “adult” and “teen” formats, respectively, solidified the perception
of youth musical cultures as adult music’s constituent outside. Leisure hobbies
indicating conspicuous consumption—purchasing LPs and the equipment re-
quired to enjoy hi-fi stereo recording, for instance—were emblematic of this
“consumerist version of adultness.”32 These distinctions were also articulated
in economic terms. Whereas hit singles are often the tea leaves in which schol-
ars and critics read the story of 1950s popular music, it was the LP that had,
by the middle of the decade, become “the core commodity of the U.S. music
industry.”33 Designation as an album artist, then, carried with it prestige ac-
crued though public recognition of one’s sophistication as a performer,
mature taste and self-restraint, long-term marketing potential, and claims to
populist sensibilities and national selfhood evidenced by familiarity with what
would come to be known as the “Great American Songbook.” The multiple
forms of “long play” associated with the LP—an extended work featuring
repertory that has stood the test of time, circulating in a commodity form with
a prolonged commercial shelf life—were vital assets to young singers like
Belafonte, Mathis, and Cooke hoping to build careers that would also last.34
Cooke adroitly straddled the social worlds associated with the LP and sin-
gles markets. In interviews throughout his pop career, Cooke presented him-
self as an upwardly mobile, bourgeois consumer with “a wardrobe full of Ivy
league clothes” and eventually a sprawling home in Hollywood’s exclusive Los
Feliz neighborhood. He also revealed himself to be an indefatigable hobbyist:
a swimmer, golfer, tennis player, dabbling artist, photographer (“I have about
$1,500 in equipment now”), and voracious reader of the latest books.
Distinguishing himself from “one shot” singers who failed to “understand
showbusiness is a business,” Cooke was quick to verify his complete dedication
32. See Keightley, “Music for Middlebrows,” 315–16.

33. Ibid., 320–21; idem, “Long Play,” 378–80; and idem, “You Keep Coming Back Like a
Song: Adult Audiences, Taste Panics, and the Idea of the Standard.” Because of the retail price of
albums relative to singles, LPs, while representing on average only a quarter of all units sold (com-
pared to two-thirds for 45s), began to bring in over 60 percent of total revenue at record stores in
the mid-1950s. By the end of the decade, nearly 80 percent of all money spent on sound record-
ings in the United States went toward the purchase of LPs. Singles, in other words, were the
lifeblood of independent record companies and dominated the week-to-week chatter surround-
ing the Hit Parade, but LPs were the economic backbone of major labels and music retailers.
34. Keightley, “Long Play,” 386. Indeed, because the early LP often repackaged back catalog
material and carried the expectation of long-term sales, the album artist was sometimes referred to
as a “catalog artist.” Despite her popular single releases of “America’s greatest torch songs,”
singer June Valli, a Billboard review observed, “still has not attained status as a catalog artist.”
Review of Valli’s The Torch, Billboard, 8 October 1955, 22.

2:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
to his craft, having “for two years studied the pop market, listening to count-
less records, reading trade papers and rehearsing with Blackwell,” and at-
tended acting school “to improve his speech, enunciation, poise and singing.”
And no “organization man” beholden to “group think,” Cooke marched to
the beat of his own drummer. “Nobody tries to be an individual anymore,” he
lamented. “I’m always different from the current fad. They wear long jackets,
I wear short. They wear narrow lapels, I wear wide.” Casting his lot with the
consumer democracy that was a cornerstone of 1950s liberalism, Cooke rel-
ished the unfettered freedom of opportunity and choice rewarded by faith in
possessive individualism. “I like success,” he confessed. “For one thing I can
go into the smart men’s stores and buy any suit I want. There was a time when
this was impossible. I can also eat my favorite food, steak, three times a day. I
don’t, but I can.”35
At the same time, Cooke seemed to recognize that his breakthrough came
on the strength of his hit singles, and he remained attentive to his relationship
to that market as well. Whether to enable younger record buyers to identify
more easily with him or to present himself as a meteoric prodigy who had
not in fact been a professional gospel singer for nearly a decade, Cooke consis-
tently shaved four to six years off of his age.36 He was also attentive to the
intersection of racial and sexual politics in pop stardom. Cooke stopped
straightening his hair, his brother L. C. remembered, to cultivate an image
more suggestive of “the perfect American boy,” lest he appear too “slick” and
potentially threatening to the white fathers whose teenaged daughters were
buying his records hand over fist.37 The covers of Cooke’s first and second
Keen LPs document this transformation, as Cooke’s processed hair and knit-
collared, white leather bomber jacket on the cover of Sam Cooke gave way to a
close-cropped natural and narrow-cut, satin-lapelled grey suit on the cover of
Encore (see Fig. 1). Cooke’s efforts to project both fresh-faced youthfulness
35. “The Private Life of Sam Cooke,” Tan, April 1958, 22–25, 81; Reve Gipson, “Campus
Scribes Rate Sam Cooke ‘A Plus,’ ” Los Angeles Sentinel, 12 February 1959; Ernestine Cofield,
“Sam Cooke’s Big Decision,” Chicago Defender, 25 October 1958, 11; Sam Cooke, “Boy Singer
Makes Good,” New York Journal-American, 5 August 1960, 13; Maureen Cleave, “Disc Date,”
London Evening Standard, 20 October 1962, 6; Bob Hunter, “Singing Star Sam Cooke in New
Role,” Chicago Defender, 11 December 1962; and Guralnick, Dream Boogie, 386–87. Cooke’s
declaration of personal autonomy appears to be a direct response to William Whyte’s influential
best seller The Organization Man (1956), which argued that modern society’s encouragement of
“belongingness” as the most basic human need squelched the creative and independent individ-
ual. Writer Barbara Ehrenreich has characterized Whyte’s book as “openly nostalgic for competi-
tive capitalism and rugged individualism”; see Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight
from Commitment, 35.
36. Though interviewers may have gotten his age wrong on occasion, the consistency of the
error in article after article over a period of years suggests that Cooke, born in January 1931, was
providing false information. Cooke is, for example, said to be 22 in a March 1958 story in the Los
Angeles Sentinel, 23 in a June 1960 story in the Chicago Defender, and 27 in an October 1962
feature in the London Evening Standard.
37. Guralnick, Dream Boogie, 220.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Figure 1 Sam Cooke with Gertrude “Sugar” Hall, wife of Cooke’s musical director René Hall,
at Hollywood’s Brown Derby restaurant, 22 December 1957. Keen Records and the Los Angeles
press were celebrating the success of Cooke’s single “You Send Me,” which had sold one million
copies, and the release of his eponymous debut album. Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
and LP-worthy adultness brings into focus the complex topography of a ca-
reer founded upon a desire to keep the hit singles coming without devaluing
his brand as an album artist.
Though the middle-of-the-road pop LP became the music industry’s big
money maker in the late 1950s, Cooke’s bread-and-butter at Keen were his
singles, several of which featured his own songs. These reached higher on the
rhythm and blues charts, though eight Keen sides were also Top 30 pop hits.38
Hoping to capitalize quickly on the sudden rise of his former artist, Rupe is-
sued a Specialty single with two unreleased pop recordings made by Cooke in
1956, “I’ll Come Running Back to You” b/w “Forever.” Despite his disgust
with Blackwell’s decision to use white backup singers on “You Send Me,”
Rupe was too shrewd to deny the success of the record’s sound and hired the
same group to sing overdubbed background vocals on “I’ll Come Running
Back to You,” which reached number 18 on the pop charts.39
Cooke’s single and album repertory were, however, entirely distinct.
Palmer’s description of the typical 1950s LP as “several hit singles and a lot of
‘filler’ ” may have been true of singles artists whose better-known sides were
repackaged on albums, but this was not the case with bona fide or aspiring
album artists. In fact, with the exception of “You Send Me,” Cooke’s three
“true” albums for Keen—Sam Cooke, Encore, and Tribute to the Lady—
included none of the recordings originally released as singles (see Table 1).40
The variant forms of prestige conferred by hit singles and LPs in the late
1950s, which some in the industry associated with a distinction between
“commercial” and “good” music, were reflected in both repertory and pro-
duction.41 A fresh, novel sound helped pop singles catch listeners’ ears in the
38. Cooke’s Top 30 singles for Keen were “You Send Me,” “(I Love You) For Sentimental
Reasons,” “Lonely Island,” “You Were Made for Me,” “Win Your Love for Me,” “Love You
Most of All,” “Only Sixteen,” and “(What A) Wonderful World.” A ninth recording, “Everybody
Loves to Cha Cha Cha,” reached number 31.
39. The original version of “I’ll Come Running Back to You” is included on Sam Cooke and
the Soul Stirrers: The Complete Specialty Recordings. The Specialty release with the Lee Gotch
Singers can be heard on The Specialty Story, 1944–1964.
40. In 1963, Billboard reported: “LP’s rushed out to cash in on single record hit makers have
a much shorter tour on the selling end.” Whereas an LP by a “single hit artist” reaching the best-
seller charts remained there for just under seven weeks, a pop album featuring “evergreen fa-
vorites” averaged a stay of nearly thirty-one weeks once it charted. Original-cast recordings of
Broadway musicals were the most durable charting LPs, lasting an average of sixty-nine weeks.
See Jack Maher, “Singles Hit Makers Crash LP Charts Often, Fade Fast,” Billboard, 7 September
1963, 3. The 1959 Cooke album Hit Kit was a “greatest hits” collection, but it was assembled
and released by Keen executives “for quick commercial consumption,” as one trade magazine
noted, when it became apparent that Cooke was on the verge of leaving the label; Guralnick,
Dream Boogie, 308. In 1960, shortly after Cooke had already departed for RCA, Keen also re-
leased I Thank God, an album of religious repertory that included four performances by Cooke.
Hereafter, when referencing Cooke’s “Keen albums,” I will be indicating the LPs Sam Cooke,
Encore, and Tribute to the Lady, not the compilations Hit Kit or I Thank God.
41. “Good music” was a phrase that had long signified concert and light classical music in
trade publications and became a moniker under which many labels actively marketed classical mu-
sic and opera to general audiences in the 1950s. With the growing pop chart dominance of music

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Table 1 Sam Cooke’s Keen Albums
Song titles are as they appear on the albums.

Sam Cooke (Keen A2001) Encore (Keen A2003) Tribute to the Lady (Keen A2004)
Released January 1958 Released November 1958 Released April 1959
You Send Me Oh, Look at Me Now God Bless the Child

The Lonesome Road Someday She’s Funny that Way
Tammy Along the Navajo Trail I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues
Ol’ Man River Running Wild Good Morning, Heartache
Moonlight in Vermont Accentuate the Positive T’Aint Nobody’s Bizness (If I Do)
Canadian Sunset Mary, Mary Lou Comes Love
Summertime When I Fall in Love Lover Girl (Man)
Around the World I Cover the Waterfront Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
Ain’t Misbehavin’ My Foolish Heart Lover Come Back to Me
The Bells of St. Mary’s Today I Sing the Blues Solitude
So Long The Gypsy They Can’t Take That Away From Me
Danny Boy It’s the Talk of the Town Crazy in Love with You
That Lucky Old Sun
mid-1950s, encouraging the release of recordings of newer songs by younger

artists often produced with a do-it-yourself aesthetic. LPs, conversely, tended
more toward material with more established cachet—garnered through ex-
tended histories of performance, association with respected vocalists, or hit
recordings—and bigger-budget, professional production.42
We see these production and repertory tendencies in Cooke’s Keen al-
bums, which comprise thirty-seven songs. One manifestation of the retreat
from listening I described above has been a presumption of the sonic unifor-
mity of Cooke’s albums that misses the incremental shift toward more elabo-
rate production over the course of his first three LPs: from the bare-bones
rhythm section and backing singers on Cooke’s debut album, to the added
horns on half of Encore’s twelve tracks, to René Hall’s big band, string, and
choral arrangements for Tribute to the Lady.43 The repertory on Cooke’s Keen
reflecting teen-driven musical tastes, “good music” came to encompass not just “longhair” music
but also Tin Pan Alley repertory, jazz, and more generally albums exhibiting major label pop
arrangement and production techniques. The rise of the LP muddied distinctions between eco-
nomic and symbolic capital. “Many trade-wise people believed that it was a rarity when a record
was both ‘good’ and yet ‘commercial,’ ” one writer noted. “How much this has changed might
be illustrated with the example of Harry Belafonte, a maker of ‘good’ records. He has been a top
album artist for several years”; Gary Kramer, “More Good Disks Make Spins Tougher,” Billboard,
26 January 1957, 58.
42. On the “amateur” aesthetic in 1950s popular music, see Zak, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody,
83–97. By the time Cooke joined Keen, releases by independent labels dominated the singles
charts while the best-selling pop albums were the near exclusive domain of major labels, particu-
larly the “big four,” RCA Victor, Columbia, Decca, and Capitol. See “LP Mkt. to Majors, Indies
Top Singles,” Billboard, 20 April 1957, 22.
43. Wolff ’s and Guralnick’s respective discussions of Sam Cooke vividly exemplify this retreat
from listening, or as Agawu has put it, “writers’ initial prejudices [that] reemerge as their con-
clusions.” Despite the album’s spare accompaniment, Wolff “hears” tracks “orchestrated to a

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
albums (see Table 2) offered a mix of popular songs that appeared well before
World War II (e.g., “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “Running Wild,” and “I Cover the
Waterfront”), more recent “oldies” that became hits during and shortly after
the war (“Ac-Cen-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” and
“That Lucky Old Sun”), and, to a lesser degree, songs from contemporary
movie soundtracks (“When I Fall in Love” and “Tammy”). “Mary, Mary
Lou,” a rock and roll offering that had been recorded by Bill Haley and the
Comets, “Today I Sing the Blues,” a T-Bone Walker–flavored, bimodal
twelve-bar blues written by Clif White, and “You Send Me” are outliers.
Notably, Cooke’s closest advisors (Blackwell, Hall, Alexander, and White)
were all a decade or more older than the singer, and their consultation, indi-
vidually or collectively, perhaps helped shape an album repertory dominated
by “standard product” spanning four decades.44
What the inventory in Table 2 and casual references to Cooke’s album
repertory as “Broadway-style show tunes and standards” cannot reveal, how-
ever, are the performance histories of the songs he chose to record. If some
knew “Ol’ Man River” as Kern and Hammerstein, they may have also identi-
fied the song both with Paul Robeson’s Joe in Show Boat and as Sinatra’s dra-
matic showpiece at the zenith of bobby-soxer delirium. The vocal sound of
Nathaniel Shilkret’s “The Lonesome Road” could have been linked to 1920s
singer Gene Austin, whose style bridged vaudeville pep and relaxed micro-
phone crooning, or to gospel songster Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Fans of Ruth
Brown’s 1949 hit “So Long”—which put Atlantic Records on the map and
stamped the song as a soulful, rhythm and blues standard—may not have
known that for nearly thirty years it was the theme song of its co-composer,
sweet dance-band leader Russ Morgan—or vice versa. The ignominy ex-
pressed by Al Neiberg and Marty Symes’s lyric in “It’s the Talk of the Town”
was continually renewable, circulating through the voices of Southern belle
Connee Boswell in the thirties, the inimitably suave blues singer Charles
Brown in the forties, and Italian American pop star Joni James in the fifties.45
Each of the “standards” on Cooke’s early albums, in other words, had a
history of performance and production that in the process of recording could
be recalled or reimagined, referenced or revamped. Even if an LP was an os-
tensible whole, unified by its conceptual approach or choice of repertory, its
individual tracks had identities of their own. As Albin Zak has recently shown,
fare-thee-well” (You Send Me, 170); and Guralnick “hears” the arrangements for this same ensem-
ble as “much the same” as those for Encore and for the “orchestra of no less than fifteen or sixteen
musicians” on Tribute (Dream Boogie), 271.
44. Cooke did record a handful of standards that Keen released as singles, including the
Rodgers and Hart warhorse from the 1930s, “Blue Moon,” and two songs published in 1945:
“There! I’ve Said It Again,” popularized by baritone crooner Vaughn Monroe, and “(I Love You)
For Sentimental Reasons,” which the Nat “King” Cole Trio made a number one pop hit in 1947.
45. Brown recorded his version of “It’s the Talk of the Town” as lead singer of Johnny
Moore’s Three Blazers.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Table 2 Sam Cooke’s Keen Album Repertory
Listed chronologically by date of first publication. Songs titles appear as they were originally published.
m=music, l=lyrics
Song Songwriters Published Album
Pre 1945
Danny Boy (aka “Londonderry Air”) Traditional melody; Frederick Weatherly (l) 1913 Sam Cooke
The Bells of St. Mary’s A. Emmett Adams (m) and Douglas Furber (l) 1917 Sam Cooke
’Tain’t Nobody’s Bus’ness If I Do Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins (m and l) 1922 Tribute
Runnin’ Wild A. Harrington Gibbs (m) and Joe Grey and Leo Wood (l) 1922 Encore
Ol’ Man River Jerome Kern (m) and Oscar Hammerstein II (l) 1927 Sam Cooke
The Lonesome Road Nathaniel Shilkret (m) and Gene Austin (l) 1928 Sam Cooke
Lover, Come Back to Me Sigmund Romberg (m) and Oscar Hammerstein II (l) 1928 Tribute
She’s Funny That Way Charles Daniels (Neil Moret) (m) and Richard Whiting (l) 1928 Tribute
Ain’t Misbehavin’ Fats Waller and Harry Brooks (m) and Andy Razaf (l) 1929 Sam Cooke
I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues Harold Arlen (m) and Ted Koehler (l) 1932 Tribute
I Cover the Waterfront Johnny Green (m) and Edward Heyman (l) 1933 Encore
It’s the Talk of the Town Jerry Livingston (m) and Al Neiberg and Marty Symes (l) 1933 Encore
(In My) Solitude Duke Ellington (m) and Eddie DeLange and Irving Mills (l) 1934 Tribute

Summertime George Gershwin (m) and Ira Gershwin (l) 1935 Sam Cooke
207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC

Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off George Gershwin (m) and Ira Gershwin (l) 1937 Tribute
They Can’t Take That Away from Me George Gershwin (m) and Ira Gershwin (l) 1937 Tribute

Comes Love Sam Stept (m) and Charlie Tobias and Lew Brown (l) 1939 Tribute
So Long Russ Morgan, Remus Harris, and Irving Melsher (m and l) 1940 Sam Cooke
Someday (You’ll Want Me to Want You) Jimmie Hodges (m and l) 1940 Encore
Oh! Look at Me Now Joe Bushkin (m) and John DeVries (l) 1941 Encore
God Bless the Child Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr. (m and l) 1941 Tribute
Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist
Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?) James Davis, Roger Ramirez, and James Sherman (m and l) 1942 Tribute
Moonlight in Vermont Karl Suessdorf (m) and John Blackburn (l) 1944 Sam Cooke
Ac-Cen-Tchu-Ate the Positive Harold Arlen (m) and Johnny Mercer (l) 1944 Encore
131
132
Table 2 continued
Song Songwriters Published Album
Postwar
Good Morning, Heartache Dan Fisher, Ervin Drake, and Irene Higginbotham (m and l) 1945 Tribute
Along the Navajo Trail Dick Charles and Larry Markes (m) and Eddie DeLange (l) 1945 Encore
The Gypsy Billy Reid (m and l) 1946 Encore
My Foolish Heart Victor Young (m) and Ned Washington (l) 1949 Encore
That Lucky Old Sun Beasley Smith (m) and Haven Gillespie (l) 1949 Sam Cooke
Crazy He Calls Me Carl Sigman (m) and Bob Russell (l) 1949 Tribute
When I Fall in Love Victor Young (m) and Edward Heyman (l) 1952 Encore
Canadian Sunset Eddie Heywood (m) and Norman Gimbel (l) 1956 Sam Cooke
Around the World Victor Young (m) and Harold Adamson (l) 1956 Sam Cooke
Tammy Jay Livingston (m) and Ray Evans (l) 1957 Sam Cooke
Merry, Merry Lou Cayet Mangiaracina (m and l) 1957 Encore
You Send Me Sam Cooke (m and l) 1957 Sam Cooke
Today I Sing the Blues Clifton White (m) and Curtis Lewis (l) 1958 Encore
Journal of the American Musicological Society

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
many producers and consumers of popular music in the early 1950s, accus-
tomed to the prior commercial and philosophical subordination of recorded
sound to music notation, had difficulty making sense of the changing status of
recordings. By the latter part of the decade, however, a new generation of
recordists and listeners took for granted “the conception of a record as an inte-
grated artwork—a fusion of song, performance, and recorded sound.”46
Accounts of Cooke as a forerunning soul singer align him with the 1960s; a
narrative of Cooke as an aspiring pop album artist helps us consider his career
in conjunction with prevailing and emerging practices in 1950s popular music,
engaging issues from which he has largely been sequestered. Both stories, in-
vented or not, merit telling.
“A modern Morton Downey . . . with today’s POP

treatment”: “Danny Boy”
As chief architect of Cooke’s crossover to popular music, Blackwell identified

the wise selection of repertory as vital to the singer’s success. In December
1956, Rupe sent Blackwell and Cooke, still with the Soul Stirrers, to New
Orleans to record four secular songs that would test the market for Cooke as
a pop singer. Specialty released two of these the following month as a single
(“Lovable” b/w “Forever”) under the pseudonym “Dale Cook,” purportedly
to protect the Soul Stirrers from the backlash of disapproving gospel fans.47
After the session, Blackwell sent an update to Bill Cook, an African American
deejay and promoter who was also advising Cooke’s entry into the pop field.
The recordings “will make a good introduction for Sam,” Blackwell reported,
although “I know we can and will do a better job on our next release—with
stronger material.” Blackwell was convinced as to what this material should
be: “Sam is definitely a modern Morton Downey and concentrating commer-
cially with this in mind, and securing OLD DOWNEY HIT MATERIAL etc.,
with today’s POP treatment, should bring Sam to the front—with both the
teenagers and housewives.”48
In thinking about the makeovers given established repertory in 1950s pop,
I am attracted to Kobena Mercer’s notion of the “double take.” While some
exhibitions of style may initially suggest resemblances with or even mimicry of
models racialized as “white,” Mercer observes, “nuances, inflections and ac-
centuations introduced” can generate a performance that rests “on its ambi-
guity, the way it ‘played’ with the given outline shapes of convention only to
46. Zak, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody, 215.

47. On the “Dale Cook” session and its fallout for the Soul Stirrers, see Guralnick, Dream
Boogie, 153–68.
48. Letter dated 18 January 1955 in the Specialty Records files, quoted in Guralnick, Dream
Boogie, 160. Emphasis in the original. There was no family relation between Bill Cook and Sam
Cooke.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
‘disturb’ the norm and hence invite a ‘double take’ demanding that you look
twice.”49 Mercer describes the experience of encountering performances that
present us with something immediately recognizable as familiar yet nonethe-
less ask us, sometimes indirectly, to look/listen more closely. Blackwell’s two
emphases—Morton Downey repertory and pop production—reflect such a
strategy of reimagining something old through something new. His blueprint
was followed most literally in Cooke’s recording of “Danny Boy,” a song
closely associated with “Downey Boy,” as one writer referred to the popular
Irish American singer.50
A Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen and down the mountainside
The summer’s gone and all the roses falling
It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide
B But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow
Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow
It’s I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadows
Oh Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, I love you so
In his recording of “Danny Boy” for his eponymous first Keen album, Cooke
sings through the tune twice with the support of small backing band and a
group of female singers providing a wash of Theremin-sounding sustained
harmonies.51 His vocal performance is, however, notably devoid of the brim-
ming emotions, nostalgic reflection, or stagecraft offered in many readings of
the song—by, for instance, Downey, Bing Crosby, Al Hibbler, Judy Garland,
Mahalia Jackson, or Belafonte. Cooke’s laid-back, resolutely untheatrical de-
livery seems intent simply to deliver a familiar song in a personal style, though
with a recognizably up-to-date feel.
The “feel” and “sound” of a recording are admittedly ambiguous criteria
from the standpoint of conventional modes of musicological analysis, though
49. Mercer, “Black Hair/Style Politics,” 47.
50. Will Davidson, “Morton Downey at His Best at the Mayfield Room,” Chicago Tribune,
17 January 1943, C8.
51. Though Keen session information has not survived, the rhythm section on Sam Cooke in-
cluded René Hall and Clif White on guitars and possibly Adolphus Alsbrook on bass and Earl
Palmer or Bumps’s brother Charlie Blackwell on drums. Adler remembered the backing vocalists
on many of Cooke’s Keen records as being members of the Johnny Mann Singers; interview with
Adler, 3 January 2011. On a number of Keen releases, including Cooke’s first two LPs, Blackwell
credited himself as the leader of the backing ensemble. Before moving to Los Angeles, Blackwell
led a popular band in his native Seattle, the Bumps Blackwell Junior Band, which at various times
included Ray Charles, Ernestine Anderson, and Quincy Jones, though by almost all accounts, and
despite Blackwell’s repeated and often grandiose claims to the contrary, he himself was a marginal
musician. It is perhaps Blackwell playing vibraphone on the five Keen album tracks that use the
instrument: “Old Man River,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “Canadian Sunset,” “Around the
World,” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s.” Many of those who worked with Blackwell readily ac-
knowledged his personal charisma, tireless hustle, and nose for talent and hit sounds, but Hall was
the musician responsible for concrete musical direction in the studio during Cooke’s Keen years.
On Blackwell’s musical limitations, see De Barros, Jackson Street After Hours, 215; and Guralnick,
Dream Boogie, 173.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
from the 1950s on such features became increasingly central to the process
of conceptualizing and cutting popular music tracks.52 Cooke’s “Danny Boy”
offers hints of intertextual links with contemporaneous recordings that, while
perhaps marketed differently, were, in terms of feel, of a similar type. Produc-
tion of “Danny Boy” seems geared toward the type of mid-tempo song that
contributed to Fats Domino’s recent crossover success, exemplified by “Blue-
berry Hill” and “Valley of Tears,” which became significant hits on both the
rhythm and blues and pop charts in 1956–57. Even as the opening horn fan-
fare and tenor saxophone solo in “Valley of Tears” invoke rhythm and blues,
the record shares with “Danny Boy” the single-string guitar arpeggio patterns,
the gentle backbeat snare, and the high-registered textless backing chorus.
Influential bandleader Dave Bartholomew said of fellow New Orleanian
Domino, “We all thought of him as a country & western singer. Not real
downhearted, but he always had that flavor, not the gutbucket sound.”53
“Valley of Tears” and “Blueberry Hill” are, in fact, not very remote in feel
from records by country musicians that were also hitting the charts. Though,
stylistically, such releases as Tennessee Ernie Ford and Kay Starr’s “I’ll Never
Be Free,” Carl Perkins’s “Let the Jukebox Keep On Playing,” Elvis Presley’s
“I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” and Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Mid-
night” are closer to straightahead country, all share a similar feel with “Valley
of Tears” and “Danny Boy,” largely as a result of their falling within a range of
comparable tempos (roughly 85–115 beats per minute) and having similar ac-
companimental textures. The arpeggios, shuffle rhythms, backing vocals, and
Andante tempo on a rhythm and blues–influenced rockabilly ballad like
Wanda Jackson’s “Let Me Explain” make the sonic connections between
these recordings even more explicit. Such family resemblances—not least the
striking resonance of the Cooke recording with country singer Slim Whit-
man’s 1951 version of “Danny Boy”—extend an unexpected invitation to
hear Cooke’s “Danny Boy” as his first country-inspired recording.54 Cooke
performances like “Danny Boy” and his second version of “Summertime,”
both originally recorded and released as album tracks, moreover indicate a
debut LP that straddles prevailing approaches to adult and youth pop
production and the counterbalancing economies of familiarity and novelty in
1950s popular music.55
Though these recordings share similar feels, especially when heard side by
side, their respective voices and singing styles give each a distinctive sound. In
52. As Albin Zak has argued, a popular music recording’s “sound” is likely its “most essential
character” yet “remains, even at this late date, its least talked about aspect”; see Poetics of Rock, 22.
53. Quoted in Guralnick, “Fats Domino,” 50.
54. Subsequent and more explicitly country-western associated songs recorded by Cooke in-
clude “Along the Navajo Trail” and “One Hour Ahead of the Posse” for Keen and “South of the
Border,” “They Call the Wind Maria,” “Twilight on the Trail,” and “Wayward Wind” for RCA.
55. The version of “Summertime” that appears on Sam Cooke is a funkier, more up-tempo
take on the song that departs radically from the ballad performance originally recorded as the B-
side of “You Send Me.”

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Cooke’s “Danny Boy,” an Irish-identified song recorded with a country music

feel is performed in a vocal style drawing subtly but unmistakably on Cooke’s
experience as a gospel singer. The first time through the tune, many of the
song’s gospelisms appear as localized ornaments within a predominantly faith-
ful treatment of the melody—for example, the melismas at the ends of phrases
(on “I must bide,” “meadow,” and “shadows”) and the hint of deliberate rasp
on the highest note, sung on “here.” When the melody is repeated, the A sec-
tion adapts a technique Cooke employed regularly with the Soul Stirrers: the
backing vocalists harmonize the melody in strict rhythm while Cooke sings an
improvised countermelody with offset phrasing. This heterophony of word,
rhythm, and melody, heard as well in such Soul Stirrers’s recordings as “He’s
My Friend Until the End” and “Mean Old World,” can be observed in the ex-
cerpt from “Danny Boy” transcribed in Example 1a. In many postwar gospel
quartet performances, the back-and-forth exchange between soloist and
group is frequently structured such that the backing vocalists sing on the up-
beat and downbeat of a 4/4 bar and the lead’s line dominates the middle two
beats of the bar, or vice versa. This accounts for why so many of Cooke’s
phrases in this excerpt seem to avoid, yet play off of, the downbeat, often be-
ginning on or around beat two, almost as if he were hearing “and ONE” in
his head before initiating a new phrase (e.g., mm. 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, and 12).56
There are also clear traces of Cooke’s personal style. The constant return of
the E–D motive (shown in brackets in Ex. 1a), representing the seventh and
sixth degrees of the F-major scale, is one of the most characteristic features of
Cooke’s melodic approach and is definitive of his signet “yodel,” as some writ-
ers and Cooke associates have described the “whoa-oo-oh” wail heard in so
many of his recordings.57 The predominance of the major 6th and 7th above
the tonic partly accounts for the “pop” inflection detectable in many of
Cooke’s lead vocals for the Soul Stirrers, at a time when most gospel singers
drew on the pitch vocabulary of the blues scale, which tends toward the flatted
seventh and generally avoids the sixth scale degree altogether (Ex. 1b).
Part of the pleasure Cooke’s singing and success provided many African
American listeners derived from the recognizability of his gospel background
despite its pop context. In a 1959 interview, gospel diva Clara Ward identified
Ray Charles, Dinah Washington, and Cooke as her favorite secular singers,
56. Two secular illustrations of the vocal phrasing typical of this particular structure of solo-
group exchange is the alternation of Muddy Waters’s singing with the famous harmonica riff
during the verses of the blues song “Hoochie Coochie Man” and Aretha Franklin’s delivery of the
opening line of “Dr. Feelgood” (“I don’t want nobody / always / sittin’ around / me and my
man”). In personal communication, musicologist Guthrie Ramsey Jr., trained as a church pianist,
has described the gesture of leaning into the upbeat-downbeat inertia in gospel piano practice—
that is, the strongly articulated “four-and-a-ONE” that clears space for the vocalist—as “crowding
the cadence.”
57. See, for example, Guralnick, Dream Boogie, 94–96. In a 1958 feature story, Cooke re-
ferred to this vocal mannerism as “the ‘Oh, oh, oh’ gimmick, which is now becoming so popu-
lar.” See “The Private Life of Sam Cooke,” Tan, April 1958, 24.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Example 1a Sam Cooke, “Danny Boy,” 1:19–2:00, mm. 1–17
Œ . Œ œJ œJ œ œ . Œ . Œ œJ œ ‰ Œ . œ œj œ . œ œ œ œ .
Sam Cooke
V b 12
8 ∑
Dan-ny boy the pipes mmm Dan-ny boy
.
Backing Singers
& b 12
8 Œ. œ. œ. œ. ˙. Œ. œ. œ. œ œ. œ. œ. œ. ˙.
Oh Dan - ny boy, the pipes, the pipes are cal - ling
V b œ œ œ œ . œ œj œ . Œ œJ œJ œ œ œJ œ . œ œ œ. Œ j
5
Œ. J (œ)
I hear the pipes cal - ling from glen to glen and down from
& b Œ. œ. ˙. Œ. œ. œ. œ.
œ. œ. œ. œ.
from glen to glen and down the moun - tain
8
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ.
V b œ œJ œ J œ œJ œJ œ œ œJ œ J œ œ œ . Œ J
glen to glen to glen to glen and down the moun - tain side I know the sum-mer’s gone
& b w. Œ. œ. ˙. Œ. œ.
œ. œ.
side. The sum - mer’s gone and
œ œ ˙. Œ . œ œ œ œj œ œ œj œ œj œj
11
V b Œ. J j jj
œ œ œ œ œ œ.
and all sum - mer’s gone and all the ro - ses fal - ling
.
& b œ. œ œ. œ. œ. œ. ˙.
Œ. œ. œ. œ.
all the ro - ses fal - ling. It’s you, it’s
œ œ œ œ . Œ . œ j Œ œj
œ œj œ œj œ œj œ œj œ ‰
14 2œ œ œ
V b ‰ J J œ œ.
It’s you, it’s you must go and I it’s you must go and I must bide.
& b ˙. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. w. ∑
you must go and I must bide.
Example 1b Sam Cooke’s “Yodel”
œ œ œ
Two variants.
j
œ œ œ œ œ.
œ œ œ œ œ œ.
V b 12
8 J Œ. J
Whoa Whoa
œ bœ œ œ bœ
Blues-based gesture.
V b 12
8 J œ. Œ.
Whoa

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
calling attention to the “gospel quality” in their voices. Chicago-born gospel

singer Jeanette Robinson-Jones appreciated how Cooke brought a gospel
singer’s directness of communication and personal charisma to even his most
unabashedly pop performances: “I like songs with messages. . . . That’s why, I
guess, I grew to like the gospel music” and “why I say I liked him. . . . [H]e
was captivating and he could get your attention. To me that’s what made it in-
teresting in [‘You Send Me’] and in the gospel thing. It gets your attention.”58
Gospel and soul artist Otis Clay recalled that while “die-hards” in black con-
gregations may have disapproved of Cooke’s crossover, most gospel fans
“moved on with him. That was our boy.”59 The challenge of attaining pop
success that rendered group identity both noteworthy and incidental may well
have been one aspect of Cooke’s so-called balancing act, though it also points
to another important facet of Blackwell’s conviction that “Sam is definitely a
modern Morton Downey.” Born in 1901, in Wallingford, Connecticut, and
raised in Brooklyn, Downey was still in his early twenties when he was discov-
ered by bandleader Paul Whiteman and became the orchestra’s featured
singer. In the 1930s, radio made him both rich and an enduring star. An affa-
ble pitchman for Coca-Cola and a shrewd businessman in his own right,
Downey, nicknamed “the Irish Nightingale,” sang a repertory of Irish-themed
songs and the latest pop hits, though by the 1940s his considerable fame
rested solidly on his “Irish tenor” identity. It is reasonable to interpret
Blackwell’s interest in Cooke giving “old Downey hit material . . . today’s pop
treatment” as simply an eagerness to capitalize on a current vogue; Billboard
had recently cited Domino, Presley, and the Platters as part of a pronounced
“trend for top-flight rock and roll stars to revive old pop standards into the
hit class, via new rhythm styling.”60 Downey’s “tenor to page the angels” may
have also suggested promising parallels with Cooke’s crystalline voice. But
accounting for Downey’s reputation as “that perennial Irishman,” as “Mr.
Irish himself,” may help unpack Blackwell’s peculiar, even bizarre-sounding,
vision of Cooke, later dubbed “Mr. Soul,” as a modern, and black, Morton
Downey.61
58. Ward quoted in Ren Grevatt, “On the Beat,” Billboard, 9 March 1959, 8; and interview
with Jeanette Robinson-Jones, 10 June 2009.
59. Interview with Otis Clay, 4 June 2009, Chicago. The consternation and reproach of “die-
hards” notwithstanding, my interviews with several other gospel singers—some of whom crossed
over to secular music, others of whom did not—have corroborated Clay’s account of Cooke’s
continued popularity in the gospel world. Guralnick’s biography has also helped to debunk the
longstanding claim that the black gospel community categorically rejected Cooke when he
crossed over. Cooke, in fact, made cameo appearances with the Soul Stirrers on multiple occasions
after he became a pop singer.
60. June Bundy, “Desegregation of Chart Categories Earmark ’56,” Billboard, 26 January
1957, 48, 58. See also Ren Grevatt, “Rock & Roll on Standard Kick Reap Fat Loot for Pubbers,”
Billboard, 22 September 1956, 42.
61. Grace Kingsley, “Band is Headliner: Orpheum Bill Good from Beginning to End,” Los
Angeles Times, 13 November 1923; Davidson, “Morton Downey at His Best” (see note 50); and

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Peppering his public appearances with healthy doses of Irish brogue and
blarney, Downey played the popular performance of Irishness to the hilt, some
felt to the point of shtick. “Theoretically, one is inclined to sneer at profes-
sional Irishism, which is fed us in all sorts of ways from tinted travel brochures,
Morton Downey’s night club turn, Fifth Avenue’s St. Patrick’s Day parade
and almost any cop in the movies,” one writer mused with acid resignation.
“The idea that anything Irish is wondrous quaint, fey and lovable has me as
weary as most people, but the darn charm works.”62 Yet Downey’s role as an
“Irish tenor” called for entertaining audiences with both “delightful Irish
ditties” and popular standards, dispatching “It’s the Same Old Shillelagh” and
“Blue Skies” with equal aplomb.63 Whiteman acknowledged that he hired
Downey with the understanding that in the 1920s “the tenor voice has the
greatest appeal in singing America’s most popular type of music, the sentimen-
tal, lyrical stuff.” Ambling comfortably within the confines of the “Irish tenor”
persona for over three decades, Downey built a career on bridging cosa nostra
modes of performance and songs that were simply “America’s most popular
type of music.”64 In doing so, Downey embraced a strategy that resembles
what Paul Gilroy has described as a “flexible essentialism,” through which
performers variously feature or downplay ethnic identity according to their
performance context, historical moment, political stripe, family background,
personal ambition, or artistic prerogative.65 In a sense, then, Downey the
“Irish tenor” signified doubly: as a performer who sounded his ethnic particu-
larity while, at the same time, exhibiting mastery of broadly circulating musical
repertory. It is this dialectic tension between the salience and transparency of
cultural identity, between mainstreaming the vernacular and vernacularizing
Elizabeth Marshall, “Ethel Waters Rocks Staid Syria Mosque,” Pittsburgh Courier, 14 December
1946, 20; Jerry Mason, “Singer to Millions,” Los Angeles Times, 19 March 1944, F13; and “Non-
Swooners Also Eat,” Billboard, 23 October 1943, 13. Downey was the father of the late right-
wing radio and “trash talk” television host Morton Downey Jr.
62. Richard Coe, “O’Bing, O’Barry and O’Blarney,” New York Times, 12 September 1949,
B5.
63. “Press Club to Give Card to Roosevelt,” Washington Post, 26 March 1933, 12; and
Davidson, “Morton Downey at His Best” (see note 50).
64. “Friday, Thirteenth, Downey’s Lucky Day,” Washington Post, 21 November 1924, 8.
The “Irish tenor” is a recurrent stage persona dating to nineteenth-century urban variety theater,
though in the early decades of the twentieth century the moniker became most closely linked with
Irish-born tenor John McCormack (1884–1945). As an opera singer, McCormack was a rival to
Enrico Caruso and was partnered regularly with the day’s greatest operatic soprano, Luisa
Tetrazzini, though he perhaps garnered his most prominent and politically charged celebrity
through his recital and commercially recorded performances of Irish ballads against the backdrop
of “the Troubles” in Ireland. On McCormack, see Ledbetter, Great Irish Tenor. Writers who cast
Downey as “the most gifted Irish tenor to have appeared since John McCormack’s debut” were
surely referring less to vocal similarities between the two singers than to their performances of
beloved Irish-identified songs; “Silver-Toned Tenor Begins New Contract,” Washington Post,
10 March 1929, A3.
65. Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, 99.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
the mainstream, that I believe captures the crux of Cooke’s unorthodox

crossover strategy.66
There are important private contexts in which performers and audiences
savor shared group identities in differently calculated ways—Jewish Americans
at a Catskill Mountain resort, for instance, or African American patrons
at the black nightclubs where Cooke consciously “started reworking his
act [with] that gospel approach” around 1962.67 But other, more public
performances—by an Irish tenor on a national radio broadcast or a black vocal
ensemble at a gospel brunch for tourists—introduce knotty relationships be-
tween the production/consumption of ethnicity and economic opportunity,
between doing particularity and being national subjects. Such concerns, like
“pop” itself, are not simply a matter of black and white. Recognizing the
interplay of desires for national belonging, positive cultural representation,
and economic prosperity from a broad perspective reveals how not only
rhythm and blues and country-western singers but also “white” urbanites like
Downey—and other “double-voiced” purveyors of ethnically marked musical
performance in the 1950s like Italian novelty song specialist Lou Monte,
Yiddish parodist Mickey Katz, Cuban singing-conguero Desi Arnaz, and
Cooke, the gospel-trained pop balladeer—made interventions within pop that
accent the multiple interrogations of postwar middle-class whiteness.68
In this light, what seems most remarkable, and forward-looking, about
Cooke’s crossover, what demands our double take, particularly in an industry
that overwhelmingly favored certain familiar types of black musical perfor-
mance, is his own doggedly flexible practice of voice. To settle, however, for
the trite metaphor of a “balancing act” in assessing Cooke’s career as a vocalist
is to suggest a singer working toward an ideal point of equilibrium between
two relatively self-contained practices, or their dialectical synthesis, when in
fact his recordings—gospel, pop singles, and albums tracks—taken as a body
of work, exhibit constantly shifting practices of gospel and pop singing that
66. For comparative perspectives, see Rocco Marinaccio’s meditation on the reception of the
“ethnic” and “American” Sinatra, “I Get No Kick from Assimilation or, ‘My’ Frank Sinatra
Problem,” 179–97; and Josh Kun’s discussion of the career of Jewish bandleader Mickey Katz in
Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, 48–85. See also Roberts’s discussion of “hyperracial” and
“transracial” pop performances in “Michael Jackson’s Kingdom,” 24–26.
67. David Schiff has offered illuminating perspectives on this point in personal communi-
cation and in his recent composition Borscht Belt Follies. On Cooke’s revamping of his act, see
J. W. Alexander’s comments and Guralnick’s discussion in Dream Boogie, 431–33.
68. In a formulation resonant with W. E. B. Du Bois’s earlier conception of African American
“double-consciousness,” Mikhail Bakhtin characterizes the hybrid subject as “not only double-
voiced and double-accented . . . but also double-languaged; for in it . . . two individual conscious-
nesses, two voices, two accents . . . come together and consciously fight it out on the territory of
the utterance.” See “Discourse in the Novel” in Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 360. Arguing
that “the black [literary] tradition is double-voiced,” Henry Louis Gates has in turn built upon
Bakhtin’s notion of double-voiced discourse in developing his paradigmatic theory of
“Signifyin(g),” a specifically African American act of “textual revision” that stands in metaphori-
cally for “the figure of the double voiced.” See Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American
Literary Criticism.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
fray the edges of fixed categorical positions and render both gospel and pop as
“partial cultures.”69 This can be especially eye-opening in the case of material
that Cooke recorded both with the Soul Stirrers and as a solo pop singer. Such
performances exhibit a range of strategies: from the simple rewording of
gospel songs to produce pop tunes (compare “(He’s So) Wonderful” and
“Lovable”); to systematic transformations of gospel performances into pop
balladry (compare “Any Day Now” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” or the two
recordings of Cooke’s own composition “That’s Heaven to Me”); to secular
records that sound more gospel-influenced than the gospel original. In the
Soul Stirrers’s recording of “Mean Old World,” made during Cooke’s final
session with the group, the doo-wop-style “dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum”
lead-in and sheer élan of Cooke’s lead vocals suggest an ensemble following its
front man toward a more pop-oriented sound. The organ, piano, and slow
burn of Cooke’s later recording of the same song for the 1963 album Night
Beat, on the other hand, produce a track that seems to reach back for some-
thing far more homegrown.70 We hear further evidence of Cooke’s flexible
practice of voice on the posthumous album Live at the Harlem Square Club,
exceptional for its documentation of a Cooke performance for a predomi-
nantly black audience, and when Cooke, a stickler for diction both as a vocalist
and as a producer, makes a point of singing “a change gon’ come,” a rhetori-
cal gesture surely intended to drive home the meaning of his “civil rights
song.”71 If Cooke was indeed “a modern Morton Downey,” it was for the
ways in which his performances conveyed an understanding of ethnicity as
an identity that can affirm important solidarities, but also as an accessory to
musical performance capable of giving pleasure in any number of ways.
The Challenge of the Black Balladeer: “My Foolish Heart”
The biggest all-around payoff comes from the solid love ballad.72
Give me Sinatra’s money and I will give him my voice.73
69. Homi Bhabha casts “partial cultures” as “the contaminated yet connective tissue between
cultures—at once the impossibility of culture’s containedness and the boundary between them.
It is indeed something like culture’s ‘in-between,’ bafflingly both alike and different.” See
“Culture’s In-Between,” 54. See also idem, Location of Culture, 70–74, 121–31.
70. “Lovable” was singer Tony Harris’s rewording of Virginia Davis and Theodore Frye’s
gospel song “He’s So Wonderful” for the “Dale Cook” session that took place shortly after the
Soul Stirrers recorded the Davis-Frye original. “Any Day Now” was Faidest Wagoner and Jean
Butler’s gospel contrafact of “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” a popular sentimental ballad during the
interwar period that was given a second life in 1945 through Bing Crosby’s performances of the
song in the film The Bells of St. Mary’s and on record.
71. On the status of “A Change Is Gonna Come” as a civil rights song, see Guralnick, Dream
Boogie, 512–13, 547–48; and Trigg, “Change Ain’t Gonna Come.”
72. Nat “King” Cole quoted in “Cole Wary of Disk Juve ‘Exclusivity,’ ” Variety,
30 December 1953, 43.
73. Billy Eckstine quoted in Travis, Autobiography of Black Jazz, 319.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
The 1 June 1957 session that produced Cooke’s career-launching hit “You
Send Me” has become the stuff of legend. Having carefully “plotted” in ad-
vance how the song was to be recorded, Rupe gave Blackwell the assignment
of producing the session’s tracks, originally intended for release by Specialty.
Unbeknownst to Rupe, however, Blackwell had hired the Lee Gotch Singers,
a veteran close-harmony group often used for pop backing vocals. “I
assumed—which was an error—that he would have . . . either a gospel group
or black singers. Instead he had white singers, and that annoyed me,” Rupe
recounted. “I didn’t think the sound was the sound that our market de-
manded: heavy emphasis on the black experience, the so-called black
sound.”74 What Rupe had determined were to be gospel-rooted rhythm and
blues sides was sonically diverted toward what was for Hall, the session’s musi-
cal director, “something new in the creative world . . . pop music with a gospel
flavor.” The recollections of the session’s participants make clear that the con-
flict hinged on philosophical differences over what a crossover Sam Cooke
should sound like. Rupe “raised hell!” said Blackwell. “Wanted to know what
those white singers were doing singing behind a black gospel singer. Those
‘no-soulful white singers’!” Both Blackwell and Hall took the outburst as evi-
dence of an unwritten rule that black singers were “not allowed to be bal-
ladeers.” Rupe “could see no sense in recording someone in the ballad style,”
remembered Hall, “and when he walked into his own studio and Bumps
Blackwell and myself were running an arrangement through on ‘Summer-
time,’ he just exploded and said, ‘Who in the hell is going to buy Gershwin
and Opera and all that stuff.’ ”
Saxophonist, composer, and activist Harold Battiste, who pulled together
the Gotch Singers’ backing harmonies for the session, perceived Rupe’s
attitude to be “well, we understand you people and this is what you do best.”
Battiste sensed that it was the rub of performance styles that produced
discomfort.
Art felt that “You Send Me” wasn’t characteristic of Sam . . . it wasn’t charac-
teristic of Specialty. There was something wrong: all those pretty “oohs” and
“aahs,” Sam singing like Morton Downey or something like that—he was a
gospel singer. And I guess Art, having had [Little] Richard and having had
Lloyd Price, he had shouters, that may have been a little difficult to make that
quick transition. Here’s a balladeer; here’s a new thing altogether.75
74. [Various], Art Rupe in His Own Words, Ace 2542, CD.
75. In addition to the Gotch Singers, the musicians playing on the session were Hall and
White on guitar, Ted Brinson on bass, and Earl Palmer on drums. For first-hand accounts of the
“You Send Me” session, including the quotations above, see Wolff, You Send Me, 143–50;
Guralnick, Dream Boogie, 171–79; Sinclair, “Harold Battiste: Prophet with Honor in His Own
Land” (April 1994); Colman, “Many Sides of René Hall”; and Broven, Record Makers and
Breakers, 307.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Notably, the “new thing” was not simply “pop music with a gospel flavor”; it
was the very endeavor of an African American male vocalist seeking commer-
cial success performing as a “balladeer.” After the phenomenon of “You Send
Me,” the black press, which as a matter of practice celebrated high-visibility
achievements by African Americans, proudly heralded Cooke as a “rags to
riches story,” as the youngster who started out crooning Bill Kenny’s hits with
the Ink Spots on the street corner, “developed [his] easy style from singing
spirituals,” and then “sky rocketed to the top as a ballad singer.” “The dapper
song stylist,” gushed the Atlanta Daily World, was “America’s newest and
most widely-acclaimed male vocalist,” the “dynamic song star, who quit the
famous Soul Stirrers gospel unit, to climb to musical heights such as achieved
by Roy Hamilton, Billy Eckstine, and Johnny Hartman.”76
In actuality, then, the black balladeer was not altogether new. Nor was the
agitation that haunted the reception of these singers. For white men already
vigilant of the erotically charged intimacy enjoyed by the female fans of pop
crooners like Downey, Rudy Vallee, Russ Columbo, Crosby, and Sinatra—
singers who since the 1920s voiced a disembodied surrogate for the absent,
idealized, or wholly fantasized male lover—black balladeers like Hamilton,
Eckstine, Hartman, and Nat “King” Cole triggered deep seated animosities.77
Few singers exemplified and consciously struggled to navigate this segregation
of musical performance more than Eckstine. Born in Pittsburgh in 1918,
Eckstine started singing “strictly ballads” in local clubs and eventually wound
up in Chicago, where he was discovered by pianist Earl Hines.78 In the early
1940s, Eckstine recorded such romantic standards as “You Don’t Know What
Love Is,” “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good,” and “Skylark” with the Hines
band, but to him this was the exception that proved the rule. “[T]hey weren’t
ready for black singers singing ballads and love songs,” said Eckstine. “It
76. Ernestine Cofield, “Close Look at Sam Cooke,” Chicago Defender, 18 October 1958,
11; idem, “Sam Cooke’s Big Decision,” Chicago Defender, 25 October 1958, 11; and anon.,
“Song Star Sam Cooke to Make Tour of Deep South,” Atlanta Daily World, 17 September
1958, 3. Over the course of Cooke’s six and a half years and nine studio sessions with the Soul
Stirrers, he recorded several gospel ballads, including “I Have a Friend Above All Others,” “He’ll
Make a Way,” “That’s Heaven to Me,” and the two recordings that perhaps represent the apex of
Cooke’s gospel ballad performances, “Any Day Now” and “Jesus Wash Away My Troubles.”
77. For a discussion of the sexual and gender politics of female fandom surrounding the early
pop crooner, see McCracken, “ ‘God’s Gift to Us Girls’: Crooning, Gender, and the Re-Creation
of American Popular Songs, 1928–1933.” Krin Gabbard has analyzed filmmaker and actor Clint
Eastwood’s enlistment of Hartman’s disembodied voice to bolster his character’s on-screen mas-
culinity in the 1995 movie The Bridges of Madison County; see his Black Magic: White Hollywood
and African American Culture, 51–72.
78. On Eckstine, see Southern’s two-part “Conversation with William Clarence ‘Billy’
Eckstine: ‘Mr. B’ of Ballad and Bop”; Travis, Autobiography of Black Jazz, 311–19; DeVeaux,
Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History, 333–63; Hajdu, “Billy Eckstine: The Man Who Was
Too Hot”; and Jeske’s liner notes to Everything I Have Is Yours: The Best of the M-G-M Years
(Polygram 819442), 1994.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. We weren’t supposed to sing about love, we
were supposed to sing about work or blues or some dumb shit.”79 After lead-
ing a big band with a rotating roster of jazz modernists from 1944 to 1947,
Eckstine achieved a major professional and symbolic breakthrough when he
was signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) to be featured on the movie
production company’s newly established record label.80 During his seven years
with MGM, “Mr. B” was consistently acclaimed as the most popular male
singer in the country, white or black, a crossover triumph so complete, so un-
precedented, and so seemingly unqualified by race that it was especially grati-
fying for many African Americans. Singer Joe Williams remembered Eckstine
as “a romantic balladeer when it wasn’t popular for Blacks to be.” “We were
proud of him because he was the first Black popular singer singing popular
songs in our race. We, the whole music profession, were so happy to see him
achieve what he was doing,” vibraphonist Lionel Hampton remarked upon
Eckstine’s death in 1993. “He was our singer.”81
Although ambivalence toward black balladeers had abated somewhat in the
1950s, it nonetheless persisted, adding significance to parallels drawn in the
black press between Cooke’s rise and the success of other black ballad singers.
Tensions were most acute in the South where, especially since the institution
of de jure segregation in the 1890s, the defense of white womanhood from
black male sexuality was habitually invoked as justification for even the most
spectacularly grotesque acts of violence.82 The notorious incident during a
1956 performance in Birmingham, Alabama, by Cole, the state’s native son,
recalls this history and exposes the fault lines alluded to by Eckstine. Having
already circulated photographs of Cole with white female fans bearing incen-
diary boldface captions reading “COLE AND HIS WHITE WOMEN” and
79. Jeske, liner notes to Everything I Have Is Yours; and Travis, Autobiograpahy of Black Jazz,
316. Eckstine told Travis that the rationale given for not allowing black singers to debut new
pop ballads was “the bullshit that people couldn’t understand us because we had Southern ac-
cents.” As Karin Sotiropoulos has documented, the expectation that onstage expressions of
romantic love would be “completely off-limits” for African American performers extended back
to at least the nineteenth century. Celebrated black vaudevillian George Walker, who enjoyed a
successful partnership with Bert Williams, remarked in 1908: “The colored man’s love affairs are
like his ragtime music and his dialect poems. No matter how carefully written they must not be
otherwise than amusing.” See Sotiropoulos, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the
Century America, 189–90.
80. Eckstine also played trumpet and can be heard soloing on a handful of recordings with his
band, which at various times included Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, Gene
Ammons, Lucky Thompson, Fats Navarro, John Malachi, Tommy Potter, and Art Blakey. On the
Eckstine band, see DeVeaux, Birth of Bebop, 336–50.
81. Williams and Hampton quoted in “Billy Eckstine Cremated Following Private Rites; Stars
Pay Tribute to Him,” Jet, 28 March 1993, 18. Eckstine was named “Top Male Vocalist” in Down
Beat’s readers poll from 1948 to 1952 and by Metronome magazine from 1949 to 1954.
82. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, 280–83, 299, 306,
312–15.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
“COLE AND YOUR DAUGHTER,” members of the North Alabama

Citizens’ Council, dedicated to resisting implementation of Supreme
Court–mandated desegregation, physically assaulted Cole onstage. The most
intense vitriol by Cole’s assailants, before and after the incident, was directed
toward rock and roll, the “sensuous Negro music” through which “white girls
and boys were turned to the level of the animal.” But it is telling that their
attack was inflicted upon Cole, the genial jazz pianist–cum–pop crooner
whom few would confuse with Chuck Berry. To white supremacist segrega-
tionists like Asa Carter, the mastermind behind the premeditated Birmingham
assault, suave black balladeers like Cole were Trojan horses, an even more in-
sidious threat than strutting rhythm and blues singers. It was but “a short step
. . . from the sly, night club technique vulgarity of Cole, to the openly animal-
istic obscenity of the horde of Negro rock ’n’ rollers.”83
The attack on Cole was only the most famous of multiple incidents that
called attention to the “problem” of the black pop balladeer. Hamilton, an ex-
act contemporary of Cooke and also a former gospel singer, has been written
out of popular music histories, but he was a major star in the late 1950s,
launched by the enormous success of his 1954 recording of “You’ll Never
Walk Alone,” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel.
Hamilton became an album artist for Columbia subsidiary Epic Records and a
major inspiration in Presley’s maturation as a vocalist.84 Interpreting popular
standards with a full-voiced, throaty baritone and a dramatic delivery,
Hamilton’s most successful recordings appeared on the rhythm and blues
charts. His brother-in-law, Ted Adams, characterized his style differently,
however: “He wasn’t exactly a rhythm and blues singer. He was more of a
crooner,” said Adams. “He was a balladeer. That’s what he was, a balladeer.
And he had one or two songs that were sort of . . . upbeat, but most of his
stuff was ballads. You know, slow ballads.” As part of a teenaged doo-wop
group that Hamilton took on the road as an opening act, Adams, around
1960, witnessed first-hand how serious a threat white men perceived in black
crooners and how “potential trouble” arising from these anxieties “limited”
Hamilton’s performances in southern states.
83. Carter’s comments appeared a month after the Cole attack in The Southerner, a newspa-
per published by his statewide coordinating organization the Alabama Citizens’ Council, and are
quoted in Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 100. Ward (95–105) offers the most detailed and nu-
anced account of the attack on Cole and its aftermath. See also Sprayberry, “Interrupted Melody:
The 1956 Attack on Nat ‘King’ Cole.” In a recent pop-cultural reference to these very sexual pol-
itics, on an episode of the television show Mad Men set in the early 1960s, white Irish Catholic
copywriter Peggy Olsen quipped, “I remember my mother talking about Nat ‘King’ Cole in such
a way that made my father throw out all his records.” Male hostility toward crooners, white and
black, had impact not only on the singers themselves but also on women, whose musical tastes
were invalidated and suppressed, either through derision or through threatened or outright acts
of violence. See McCracken, “ ‘God’s Gift to Us Girls,’ ” esp. 373–84.
84. Guralnick, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
We traveled the South a lot and it was segregated at the time and we did a lot of
. . . shows for whites, but you know it was difficult for him to croon to the
white females. You understand what I’m saying? He kind of held back on that,
especially in the South. We had an incident once—I forgot where it was, some-
where in the South—where a woman ran up on the stage and like she got
down on her knees, [and her] husband attacked her right there because she was
touching a black man. . . . Yeah, but that was the challenge of being a balladeer
in the white segregated South. . . .
If we were in the Apollo Theater, for instance, he would really croon to the
ladies and he would go to the edge of the stage and really sort of make out with
the ladies, you know? But he would not do that in the South. He better not do
that in the South, ’cause we had that one bad experience and I think that lim-
ited him.85
A decade earlier, Eckstine was untracked at the height of his career by the
same anti-miscegenation hysteria when Life magazine published a feature
spread on Eckstine and his devoted “Billy soxers.” Following the singer and
his retinue for a week, photographer Martha Holmes captured a shot of
Eckstine surrounded by ecstatic young white female fans, including one, gig-
gling with thrilled disbelief, collapsed against his chest (see Fig. 2). After in-
tense editorial debate about the risks of publishing the photo, Life included it
in the piece, though with a caption, intended to defuse the charge of the im-
age, noting that Eckstine’s admirers “profess to have a maternal feeling toward
him”—“He’s just like a little boy.”86 Many did not buy it. “I am disgusted
with Life for printing the picture of Billy Eckstine and his admirers,” wrote
Frank Roy Jr. of Columbus, Georgia. The one-sentence letter to the editor
needed no further explanation. “If that was my daughter,” John Edmonson of
Fairfield, Alabama, announced to Life’s readers, promising the violence that
would later erupt at the Cole and Hamilton concerts, “she would be lucky to
be able to sit down in a week when I finished with her.”87 Handsome,
debonair, and a fashion trendsetter, Eckstine came to MGM with promises
that he would become a pop and film star, and with recordings of ballads like
“My Foolish Heart” and “I Apologize” selling in the millions, the path
85. Telephone interview with Adams, 8 September 2010.

86. “Mr. B,” Life, 24 April 1950, 101–2, 104. Holmes, a contributor to Life for forty years,
broke barriers as a female photojournalist. According the Life’s longtime director of photography
Bobbi Burrows, the Eckstine image was “Holmes’s favorite photo.” See Dennis Hevesi, “Martha
Holmes, 83, Pioneer in Photography, Dies,” New York Times, 30 September 2006, C10. For an
account of the Life magazine controversy, see Hajdu, “The Man Who Was Too Hot,” 12–15.
87. Life, 15 May 1950, 14. A remarkable letter in the June 5th issue of Life, by young
Barbara Jean Kelly of Atlanta, offered a dissenting perspective: “I am a Southerner. I love the
South, but sometimes I am pretty ashamed of the way people here act. I am referring to John H.
Edmonson’s letter about how he would wallop the girl hugging Billy Eckstine if she were his
daughter. I would have been proud to be the girl in the picture. . . . I want to be a good
American. I can’t be if I hate everyone who is not like myself. My parents will probably make it
difficult for me to sit down too if they read this, but I had to let everyone including my parents
know what I think.”

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Figure 2 Singer Billy Eckstine and his fans in May or June 1949, following a performance at
New York’s Bop City. Photo by Martha Holmes. Life, 24 April 1950. Michael Ochs Archives /
Getty Images.
seemed charted.88 After the controversial Life feature, Eckstine’s stardom,

while still robust, lost significant luster, and one by one many of the big-ticket
opportunities fell by the wayside. “It was such a complete shock that one
photo hurt his career,” said Eckstine’s close friend and fellow singer Tony
Bennett. “It changed everything—before that, he had a tremendous follow-
ing.” “The girls loved him, everything was great,” the late pianist Dr. Billy
Taylor remembered. “But the coverage and that picture just slammed the
door for him. I mean there are a lot of things that would have happened to
88. Even before signing with MGM, Eckstine had broken the Top 30 on five separate occa-
sions with ballads that he recorded with his own band for the independent label National
Records, including the million sellers “A Cottage for Sale” and “Prisoner of Love.”

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
him and had been happening to him prior to that that were not open to him
anymore.”89
Cooke’s admiration for Belafonte may have stemmed in part from the ways
in which Belafonte used his pop-cultural celebrity to confront the sexual poli-
tics of race surrounding black vocalists. In Darryl Zanuck’s 1957 film Island
in the Sun, set on the fictional West Indian island of Santa Marta, Belafonte
plays David Boyeur, a folk-singing trade-union leader who has an ambigu-
ously implied romance with white liberal socialite Mavis Norman, played by
actress Joan Fontaine.90 Island in the Sun became a scandal across the South,
where blockades of drive-in theaters, picketing robed members of the Ku Klux
Klan, and sabotaged power lines disrupted screenings of the film. Despite
the film’s respectable commercial success nationally—driven in part by the
controversy—southern resistance to Island in the Sun erupted at grassroots
and official levels, coming from armed vigilante mobs, censor boards in cities
like Atlanta and Memphis where the film was officially banned, and the South
Carolina state legislature, which weighed a bill levying a $5,000 fine on any
theater within its jurisdiction that showed the film.91
I document these episodes in order to highlight a concrete occupational
hazard faced by these singers: the challenge of safely navigating the racial and
sexual politics brought into play by white male response to white female re-
ception of black male pop vocalists. Whatever the prevalence of “crossover”
artists or recordings during this period, these experiences cumulatively under-
score how depictions of African American middle-of-the-road pop perfor-
mances as conciliatory, “sell-out” assimilation obscure the resolute and often
ferocious nationwide resistance to desegregation. “All I was trying to do was
get over, just be in competition—singing with strings and such,” Eckstine
recalled. “And all of a sudden they started thinking that I may steal their sis-
89. Quoted in Hajdu, “Billy Eckstine: The Man Who Was Too Hot,” 13. Eckstine’s some-
what mannered style may have also contributed to the cooling off of his popularity in the mid-
1950s, as opposed to Cole, whose appeal Capitol Records continued to refresh well into the
1960s through a series of concept albums.
90. A subplot in the film was the more explicit interracial relationship between a black shop-
keeper and a British bureaucrat, played by Dorothy Dandridge and John Justin, respectively.
91. “Defenders Chief Seeks Ban on ‘Island in Sun,’ ” Washington Post, 4 April 1957, D7;
Jack Hamilton, “The Storm over Belafonte,” Look, 25 June 1957, 138–42; “Memphis Censors
Ban Movie Island in the Sun,” Chicago Tribune, 4 July 1957, B1; “Film Picketed in Florida,”
New York Times, 17 August 1957, 7; “Groups Protest Film,” New York Times, 18 July 1957, 14;
“Klan Film Pickets in South Dispersed,” New York Times, 2 September 1957, 26; “Georgia
Injunction Bars Film,” New York Times, 22 October 1957, 24; and “Belafonte Movie Halted by
Mob in Alabama,” Washington Post, 22 July 1958, B5. These sexual politics cut both ways. When
Belafonte and his African American wife Marguerite divorced and Belafonte subsequently wed
Julie Robinson, the only white member of Katherine Dunham’s dance company, a black newspa-
per columnist reminded readers of an adage popular in the 1920s: “Give a Negro man fame and
fortune, and he’s got to have a white woman, a Packard, and a bulldog”; Betty Granger, “The
Real Harry Belafonte Story,” Amsterdam News, 20 April 1957, 1.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
ters.”92 Cooke was sensitive to these dynamics as well, though unlike Eckstine,
Cole, and Hamilton, who made a concerted effort to steer clear of backlash,
he seemed to draw self-empowerment from taking them on directly. The
prodigious scale of Cooke’s sexual exploits on the road—despite his wife,
Barbara, and children living in Los Angeles—were common knowledge to
most who knew him.93 Singer and guitarist Bobby Womack, a former gospel
singer and a Cooke protégée who was part of Cooke’s touring band in the
early 1960s, recalled an incident in Texas during which he, Cooke, and a white
radio station program director and his wife were socializing in Cooke’s room
at a motel where the band was relegated to stay because hotels in more central
locations refused service to African Americans. After several drinks, the pro-
gram director passed out on Cooke’s bed; while he was unconscious, Cooke
had sex with the man’s wife in the adjoining bathroom, concealing the sound
by turning on the shower full blast. Womack vividly remembered Cooke’s
claim afterwards that the escapade was in part a subversive protest of the infu-
riating paradox of a white woman’s sexual advances amid the humiliation of
Jim Crow accommodations.94
While the circumstances of Cooke’s death—also involving a sexual en-
counter with a woman at a motel—were for many of his fans incongruous
with his public persona, it was nonetheless consistent with behavior for which
he was notorious, yet which seemingly ran at safe parallel distance from the
middle-class propriety and impeccable, gentlemanly style he also sought to
project as an album artist. In fact, this dense weave of celebrity, mature artistry,
class identity, chic, and bad-boy sexual conquest constituted a particularly
masculinized category of fame to which Cooke aspired. For many singers, this
complex ideal was most epitomized by Sinatra. On tour in Memphis, Cooke’s
car ran out of fuel. While Cooke’s older brother Charles, the band chauffeur,
went in search of gasoline, a passing policeman demanded that Cooke move
the car, even if he had to push it himself. If he were Sinatra, Cooke pointedly
told the officer, “you wouldn’t ask him to push no car. You may not know
who I am, but your wife does. Go home and ask your wife about me.”95 As
deeply as Cooke admired Cole, Sinatra symbolized the attainment of a brand
of celebrity virtually unavailable to African American singers bound either by
conventional representations of blackness in popular culture or by a “politics
of respectability.” Adler, one of Cooke’s closest personal friends, illuminated
the qualitatively different types of stardom associated with Sinatra and Cole, a
92. Jeske, liner notes to Everything I Have Is Yours.

93. Though Guralnick does not sensationalize this aspect of Cooke’s life, interviews cited in
Dream Boogie make clear that this was a prevailing perception on the part of Cooke’s friends, fam-
ily, and associates.
94. “These motherfuckers come down with their women and shit,” Womack remembered
Cooke saying, “and their women looking at me—yet I can’t stay [on their side of town], I gotta
stay in this motel.” Guralnick, Dream Boogie, 483.
95. The story is recalled by Charles Cooke in ibid., 369.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
comparison that hints at the titillation Sinatra’s public persona elicited for
some African American performers.
I think if you were a black singer at that time your ambition wasn’t to be Nat
“King” Cole as much as it was to be Frank Sinatra, to really break not only in
the sales of records, which Nat “King” Cole obviously did, and broke down a
lot of barriers, but I think to live the life of those guys—you know, Sinatra and
Martin—that lifestyle. Sam was that person in a way. Sam, he dressed very dif-
ferently than the successful R&B singers. Sam, you know, he wore a fedora, he
wore tweed coats, totally different. He didn’t have a big Cadillac. He had a
Ferrari. . . .
I think [Cole] was a family man . . . and maybe it’s the reason that he ended
up with TV shows and those kinds of things as a black man, that he was accept-
able to sponsors and whoever was in that world that decided it was OK for him
to have a TV show. But the lifestyle—he wasn’t living the same lifestyle as
Sinatra and those guys, was not in the paper for the amount of women or the
caliber of woman that he was with as far as star power. So it’s not a very deep
thing that I’m talking about. It’s very surface. But they were the ones who
were making the magazines and the columns and although Nat “King” Cole
was making the records he wasn’t getting that kind of notoriety.96
Singer Marvin Gaye, who aspired to become a pop balladeer from childhood,
was also an open and ardent Sinatra devotee. For Gaye, the desire to “be-
come” Sinatra was multilayered.
My dream was to become Frank Sinatra. I loved his phrasing, especially when
he was very young and pure. He grew into a fabulous jazz singer and I used to
fantasize about having a lifestyle like his—carrying on in Hollywood and be-
coming a movie star. Every woman in America wanted to go to bed with Frank
Sinatra. He was the king I longed to be. My greatest dream was to satisfy as
many women as Sinatra. He was the heavyweight champ, the absolute.97
The swift convergence of Gaye’s admiration for Sinatra the consummate

vocal artist and for Sinatra the unsurpassed object of female sexual fantasy
highlights the competing mythologies of artistry, stardom, race, class, and sex-
uality that intersected in the figure of the male pop balladeer. The endgame of
a politics of respectability within black communities, as documented by histo-
96. Interview with Adler, 3 January 2011.
97. Quoted in Ritz, Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, 29. Gaye, who held Cole in high
esteem as well, recorded and released a tribute album in Cole’s memory not long after his death.
When Eckstine was fronting his big band in the mid-1940s, he was frequently billed as “the sepia
Sinatra.” African American jazz vocalist Earl Coleman, who was deeply influenced by Eckstine, ac-
knowledged the space Sinatra’s fame carved out for all pop vocalists: “Even the great Mr. B, in all
his glory, would have no place to go if not for Sinatra.” Quoted in Friedwald, Biographical Guide,
734. The historical reception of the music and persona of the Italian American Sinatra among
African American musicians and fans presents a rich, complicated, and, with very few exceptions,
underanalyzed phenomenon. For two considerations, focusing primarily on hip-hop culture, see
Gennari, “Passing for Italian: Crooners and Gangsters”; and James Kaplan, “Straight Outta
Hoboken,” New York Times, 11 December 2010, “Week in Review,” 9.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
rian Evelyn Higginbotham, was confirmation of the social preparedness of

middle-class-identifying African Americans, based on demonstrated behavior
distinguishable, for instance, from the “lifestyle” of late-night revelry and sex-
ual promiscuity stereotypically associated with blues and jazz musicians.98
Yet the comments of Gaye and Adler suggest that for some younger black
singers in the 1950s, also meaningful in its own way was the freedom to em-
body the “acceptability” purportedly requisite for crossover success while still
claiming—and, if one chose, flaunting—the sexual opportunities and indul-
gences uniquely available to a performer with the talent and personal charisma
of Sinatra. The discrepancy between this liberty and the cautiousness with
which Cole felt he needed to approach even his expression of outrage at the
Birmingham attack could not be more striking. At the same time, the racial
and sexual politics of the pop balladeer articulated other types of difference.
Cooke’s and Gaye’s desire for a Sinatra “lifestyle” could not, for example, be
shared equally by women, who were still confined by prevailing gendered sex-
ual mores, a reminder of how the pursuit of certain forms of racial equity often
reproduces sex and gender inequities.
The highly charged professional and social landscape for postwar black
male pop vocalists clearly indicates that Cooke’s self-presentation as an inter-
preter of popular standards, as an album artist, and as a balladeer was not sim-
ply a matter of “I gotta right to not sing the blues.” Still, for Eckstine, a pillar
of the prestige that came from signing with MGM was the opportunity “to
record all the songs that were ‘number-one’ pop songs in their pictures,”
which “put me in the competition with the backing of strings and everything
that Sinatra and others had.”99 On his second LP, Encore, Cooke included
“My Foolish Heart,” a ballad closely associated with Eckstine, whose 1950
recording of the song went gold, reached number six in the pop charts, and
remained in the top 100 for nearly five months.100 “My Foolish Heart” de-
buted in the 1949 MGM film of the same name, scored by one of Holly-
wood’s most prolific film composers, Victor Young, to lyrics by Ned
Washington. The song has an ABAC structure.
A The night is like a lovely tune—beware, my foolish heart
How white the ever-constant moon—take care, my foolish heart
B There’s a line between love and fascination
That’s hard to see on an evening such as this
For they both give the very same sensation
When you’re lost in the magic of a kiss
A Her lips are much too close to mine—beware, my foolish heart
But should our eager lips combine, then let the fire start
98. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church,
1880–1920, 185–229. On perceptions of the jazz “lifestyle,” see Monson, “Problem with White
Hipness.”
99. Southern, “Conversation with ‘Billy’ Eckstine, Part II,” 58.
100. A gold record is a single or LP that is certified as having sold over a million units.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
C For this time it isn’t fascination or a dream that will fade and fall apart
It’s love, this time it’s love, my foolish heart
Young is credited most often for his exceptional gifts as a tunesmith—“to the
casual observer,” wrote film historian Tony Thomas, “it seemed that all Young
had to do was sit at the piano and the melodies fell out of his sleeves”—and
the elegant sweep of his voice-flattering melodic lines seemed to appeal to
Cooke, who on his first two albums included two other Young film songs,
“When I Fall in Love” and “Around the World.”101
Recordings of “My Foolish Heart” prior to Cooke’s 1958 version help us
assess Cooke as an aspiring balladeer and also register the multiplication of
sonic ideals in the 1950s popular music mainstream. Margaret Mears sang
the title song in My Foolish Heart, but after the film was released, at least five
singers recorded the ballad in 1950, with four of them—Mindy Carson,
Gordon Jenkins, Margaret Whiting, and Eckstine—breaking into the Top
30.102 After a lull of several years, interest in the song was revived in 1957,
sparked most likely by tributes to Young following his sudden fatal heart at-
tack in November 1956. Albums released in 1957 by Joni James, former Stan
Kenton band vocalist Donna Fuller, and the Del Vikings, and in 1958 by
Tony Bennett and Cooke, all included the song. James and Bennett were al-
ready stars, but for Fuller and the Del Vikings, a mixed-race vocal harmony
group that had achieved a gold record with “Come Go with Me,” these were
their first albums, suggesting that by the late 1950s “My Foolish Heart,” a
stately ballad with a solid pedigree and a track record of popularity, had already
become an album-worthy standard that could lend gravitas to an LP by up-
and-coming or crossover artists like Fuller, the Del Vikings, or Cooke.
Advances in recording technology and efforts to entice record buyers with
tracks endowed with a greater sense of individuality—or as music critic John
Wilson put it, more skeptically, “a frantic search for what recording people
consider ‘new sounds’ ”—destabilized prevailing approaches to pop produc-
tion in the 1950s.103 The modern, experimental spirit in mid-1950s record
production can be detected in recordings of “My Foolish Heart.” Though
there are appreciable differences in the five 1950 versions of the song, there is
an equally notable uniformity in their sound, which tends toward a more cine-
matically romantic sound-profile featuring some combination of sweeping
string accompaniment, sighing backing choruses, rippling arpeggios, and the
coloring of brass or woodwind instruments. The vocal performances them-
101. Thomas, Music for the Movies, 43. “When I Fall in Love” (lyrics by Edward Heyman)
appeared in the movie One Minute to Zero (1952) and was popularized through versions by Doris
Day with Percy Faith and by Cole with Gordon Jenkins. “Around the World” (lyrics by Herb
Adamson) was introduced in an instrumental version in Around the World in Eighty Days (1956).
Several other Young songs, including “Sweet Sue,” “Street of Dreams,” “I Don’t Stand a Ghost
of a Chance with You,” and “Stella by Starlight,” have become both vocal and jazz standards.
102. The fifth 1950 recording of “My Foolish Heart” was made by Richard Hayes.
103. John Wilson, “Creative Jazz,” New York Times, 5 April 1953, X9.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
selves also take similar expressive approaches. The later versions, while refer-
encing certain elements of the earlier ballad performances—the inclusion of
strings, for instance—offer more variegated soundscapes: including the light
bossa nova–like feel, flute touches, and cool detachment of James’s perfor-
mance and the heavier beat, climactic doo-wop harmonies, and gawky
earnestness of Norman Wright’s vocals on the Del Vikings recording.
Cooke, too, gives the song a different cast, exemplifying the growing
tendency toward sounding “recognizable references but exemplifying no
established genre or style.”104 On the one hand, the B section introduces an
unidentified pianist playing the rising and falling broken chord triplets heard
in the Whiting recording and, while discarding violins, preserves the innuendo
of strings with a bowed double bass. The somewhat incongruous piano inter-
lude in a light-classical Ferrante and Teicher vein also calls to mind the sound
of the Carson version and especially the extraordinarily popular Jenkins
record. On the other hand, a rhythmic ostinato chorded on the guitar, slightly
reminiscent of the chanting backing singers in a gospel quartet, and a soft
backbeat clash of the hi-hat cymbals give the recording an ambiguously ur-
bane character. The piano solo leads to Cooke’s repetition of the lovely final
couplet, given Young’s rhetorical touch of the drop of a minor sixth on “fall
apart.” Far from the grand Hollywood soundstage moment summoned in
earlier recordings, the spare, almost ad hoc feel of Cooke’s backing captures
the accidental intimacy of an after-hours flirtation.
Depending on a listener’s judgment, Cooke’s performance of “My Foolish
Heart” could be heard as reflecting either a lack of idiomatic polish, a fresh in-
dividual style, or both. Cooke’s preoccupation with diction throughout his ca-
reer comes through both in his own performances and in his work with
younger artists as a producer. Especially in his early pop performances, Cooke
worked conspicuously to enunciate clearly, and at times exaggerate, the song’s
lyrics.105 There is considerable contrast between Cooke’s explosive final
consonants—in “night” and “like” in the opening line, for example—which
occasionally interrupt the melodic flow, and Eckstine’s plainspoken, liquid de-
livery and continuously unfolding phrases that extend vowels and elide and
nearly evaporate these same word endings. Cooke’s labored articulation of
“hard to see” has a clunky diligence reminiscent of a high school chorus. His
performance nonetheless bears features of a distinctive style. The gentle hum
leading into the second half of the chorus, the melismatic caress on the word
“love,” and the “whoa-oo-oh” leading into the piano solo bring to the song a
subtle sensuousness less sentimental than seductive. Cooke’s voice is particu-
larly effective in its upper register, and the timbral shading in the final restate-
ment of the C couplet—above all, the come-hither sotto voce at the beginning
104. Zak, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody, 53.

105. At the same time, Cooke alters the original words when he mistakenly sings “How wise
the ever constant moon” and “But should her eager lips meet mine.”

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
of the final line—exhibit an expressive tool kit for which Cooke is certainly
known, but that, when applied to the melody and lyric of a well-crafted popu-
lar ballad, is experienced in an entirely fresh dimension. If its particular alloy of
song, performance, and production results in a fickle chemistry, “My Foolish
Heart,” like many other Keen album tracks, conveys less a gratuitous accom-
modation of white record-buyers than a singer grappling, on a case-by-case
basis, with how to make these three elements coalesce into an original, broadly
appealing style in an LP setting.
Eckstine spoke of recording ballads as an opportunity to be part of what he
repeatedly described as “the competition.” Signing with a major label “put me
right in the middle [of] the competition,” Eckstine told Eileen Southern. “I
saw this as a chance to get into competition with white singers if MGM was
going to be behind me.”106 Eckstine’s provocatively blunt offer to exchange
his unmistakable voice for Sinatra’s paycheck reveals that this was not idle
competition. Meeting and beating Crosby, Sinatra, and Perry Como as a col-
league in a shared field, not as a specialist in a racially circumscribed market,
brought “the biggest all-around payoff,” as Cole noted, but also the dignity of
escaping the familiar, more spectacularized roles African American men inhab-
ited on screen and in the recording studio: the down-and-out bluesman, the
streetwise stud, the affable farceur, or the outright buffoon. Belafonte saw in
the images of Eckstine in Life not encroaching mongrelization but a black per-
former having achieved fame on terms that were both his own and those of
white singing stars: “When that photo hit, in this national publication, it was
as if a barrier had been broken.”107 Indeed, contra crooner stereotypes,
Eckstine represented his performance of ballads as a radical act: “They had this
stereotype thing that they wanted us all to look alike and I’ve always rebelled
against that kind of bullshit. If being a rebel is the only way I can be a man,
then I’ll be a rebel.”108
And yet, criticism of Cole and Eckstine for having purportedly severed their
ties with jazz suggests still another challenge of the black balladeer.
Some creeps said I “forsook” jazz in order to be commercial. So I saw one of
those creeps, a jazz critic, and I said, “What are you, mad at me because I want
to take care of my family? Is that what pisses you off? You want me to wind up
in a goddamn hotel room with a bottle of gin in my pocket and a needle in my
arm, and let them discover me laying there? Then I’ll be an immortal to you.” I
said, “It ain’t going to work that way with me, man, I want to take care of my
family and give them the things that I think they deserve.”109
106. Southern, “Conversation with ‘Billy’ Eckstine,” 58.

107. Quoted in Hajdu, “The Man Who Was Too Hot,” 13.
108. Travis, Autobiography of Black Jazz, 316.
109. Quoted in Jeske’s liner notes to Everything I Have Is Yours. Eckstine’s equivocal histori-
cal status is communicated even in the go-to sources in our field. Kernfeld’s entry on Eckstine in
The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz notes: “Eckstine’s achievements were inconsistent: on the one
hand he supported young avant-garde jazz musicians, on the other he sang conservative popular

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Eckstine’s career has held the interest of music historians sixty years after its
zenith almost exclusively because he led a band populated with many of
bebop’s acknowledged pioneers. So too has Cooke escaped the “oblivion” to
which so many pop vocalists of his time have been relegated because of his
eventual laurels as “The Man Who Invented Soul.” That both bebop and soul
music are popularly cast as styles emblematic of a reasserted black identity that
resisted the homogenizing commerciality of “mainstream” musical tastes is
hardly coincidental. Artists of all varieties have had to face the charge of “sell-
ing out.” For African American popular musicians, however, there seems to
persist the additional dynamic of being granted or denied music-historical sig-
nificance according to the degree to which they renounce the status and
lifestyle benefits attainable through pop and recognizably instantiate the alter-
ity of what listeners like Rupe understand as “the black experience, the so-
called black sound.” The explicit and implicit activism of musical performers
ranging from Billy Eckstine to James Brown—some choosing to speak low,
others saying it loud—indicate not only a whole gamut of African American
experiences and sounds but also a multiplicity of strategies and meanings of
the black freedom struggle.
Singers, Songs, and Studio Players: “I’ve Got a Right to

Sing the Blues”
Like Eckstine, who gauged his success by the extent to which he was in league
with the top “competition,” Cooke did not take matters of economic, profes-
sional, and artistic prestige lightly. Touring England with Little Richard
in 1962, Cooke made sure an interviewer knew that at RCA he was “on
the same royalty basis as Elvis Presley and Harry Belafonte.”110 In a column
ghostwritten for Cooke by Rand and approved by the singer, Cooke was
quoted as saying “I burn with ambition to achieve the same kind of showbusi-
ness stature that Harry Belafonte and Nat ‘King’ Cole have achieved. Or, the
kind of stature Jackie Robinson and Dr. Ralph Bunche have achieved in their
fields.” Such standing could be parlayed into “material gain,” but could also,
more than the message in any song, put him in a position “to do so much for
the Negro people and for the human race.”111 Cooke’s resolve to play New
ballads.” For Cole’s frank retort to criticism that he was “fluffing off jazz” in favor of “pop songs,
pretty ballads and novelty stuff,” see Gourse, Unforgettable: The Life and Mystique of Nat King
Cole, 114–15; and Epstein, Nat King Cole, 133–35. For a discussion of the discursive opposition
of jazz and pop singing that considers “crooning” as a vocal practice over time, see Stephens,
“Crooning on the Fault Lines: Theorizing Jazz and Pop Vocal Singing Discourse in the Rock Era,
1955–1978.”
110. Cleave, “Disc Date,” London Evening Standard, 20 October 1962, 6.
111. Cooke, “Boy Singer Makes Good,” New York Journal-American, 5 August 1960, 13.
On Cooke’s approval of the article, see Guralnick, Dream Boogie, 335–36.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
York’s prestigious Copacabana just nine months after leaving the Soul Stirrers
reflected this hunger for prestige, but so too did the vocalists Cooke named as
among his “favorite singers”—Martin, Mathis, Belafonte, Cole, Sinatra, and
Doris Day—all of whom were in the late 1950s recognized as top album
artists and, with the exception of Belafonte, respected interpreters of standards
and newer popular songs.112 Especially esteemed was Sinatra, whose “phrasing
and intonation are the greatest,” Cooke told Billboard, and it is surely no co-
incidence that his Keen albums include several songs that were part of
Sinatra’s repertory.113
By the late 1950s, commemoration of the popular songbooks of “great
American composers” was a well-established album concept and marketing
strategy, but LPs paying homage to respected vocalists began to appear as
well. LaVern Baker, Dinah Washington, South Pacific star Juanita Hall, and
Ronnie Gilbert of the Weavers all released albums saluting vaudeville blues
singer Bessie Smith in 1958. Contemporaneous tributes by Jerry Vale to
Buddy Clark and Russ Columbo, by Maurice Chevalier to Al Jolson, by Joni
James to Hank Williams, and by Cooke to Billie Holiday contributed to the
active postwar construction of a canon of popular-music composers, songs,
and singers, developments reinforced by the cultural hierarchies associated
with the LP format itself. Even prior to recording Tribute to the Lady, a collec-
tion of “songs recorded and made famous by Billie Holiday,” Cooke acknowl-
edged his admiration for Holiday on multiple occasions. In the album’s notes
he placed her at the top of his list. “Even when I was singing exclusively in
church,” he told Benny Carter, who played on the album and wrote the liner
notes, “I was listening to all the pop singers, and Billie Holiday moved me the
most. She was, and still is the greatest that ever lived for my money.”114
Tribute to the Lady attested to Cooke’s lofty ambitions as a singer, but it
also represented an important undertaking for the album’s 46-year-old
arranger and conductor René Hall (1912–1988). Despite being born in New
Orleans just five years after Carter and, like Carter, getting his start as a jazz
112. Ren Grevatt, “On the Beat,” Billboard, 30 January 1958, 40; Stanley Robinson, “How
Sam Cooke Sends ’Em,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 6 March 1958, B1, 10; Reve Gipson, “Campus
Scribes Rate Sam Cooke ‘A Plus,’ ” Los Angeles Sentinel, 12 February 1959. In 1963, Cooke flatly
stated on The Merv Griffin Show that he “bombed” during his three-week run at the Copacabana
in March 1958 because he “wasn’t ready,” though he made a more successful return to the club
in June 1964. On Cooke’s first Copacabana appearance, see Wolff, You Send Me, 171–74; and
Guralnick, Dream Boogie, 222–25.
113. Grevatt, “On the Beat,” Billboard, 30 June 1958, 40. “Ol’ Man River,” “Oh! Look at
Me Now,” “The Lonesome Road,” and “That Lucky Old Sun” were among the songs previously
recorded by Sinatra.
114. Carter, liner notes to Tribute to the Lady. In his notes, Carter, whose extraordinary ca-
reer as a multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, and educator spanned eight decades, pre-
sented himself as the link between the two singers. Carter documented his close work with
Holiday since the 1930s and with Cooke, whom he “had the opportunity to arrange and play ses-
sions for” and “spent many hours listening to Billie’s records” with in preparation for recording
an album that gave Cooke “even greater stature.”

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
musician in the 1920s, Hall enjoyed a long, wide-ranging career that took a
distinctly different trajectory. A banjo player, guitarist, musical director, and
respected voice of leadership in the music industry, Hall cultivated a remark-
able professional life that encompassed riverboat dance bands, modern jazz,
rhythm and blues, pop, doo-wop, rock and roll, and Motown soul. With
Blackwell largely out of the picture by 1959, Tribute to the Lady was Cooke
and Hall’s baby. Hall gave the twelve songs chosen by Cooke two types of in-
strumentation. On eight of the tracks, Cooke is backed by “a swinging all-star
big band composed of six brass, five reeds, and four rhythm [instruments].”115
The remaining four songs (“Crazy in Love with You,” “God Bless the Child,”
“Good Morning, Heartache,” and “She’s Funny That Way”) omit brass and
feature strings, reeds, and a choir. If the modest backing band on Cooke’s first
LP was flexible enough to make its repertory of standards marketable to
younger listeners and his second promised record buyers a taste of the live
nightclub act Cooke was actively refining throughout 1958, on Tribute, the
quality of the ensemble, the balance and miking of the instruments (the bass
and drums especially), and the ambition of the charts result in more crisp and
vibrant sounding band than that on Encore.116 Hall was able to recruit L.A.’s
elite African American studio musicians, including Carter on alto saxophone;
Plas Johnson, Buddy Collette, and Bill Green on tenor saxophone (with
Johnson and Collette doubling on flute); Gerald Wilson on trumpet; Red
Callender on bass; and Earl Palmer on drums. When he was reminded of the
album’s personnel, Johnson noted: “That was most of the black musicians [in
L.A.] that were involved with the studio music at that time.”117
In his brief discussion of the album, Guralnick describes Hall’s arrange-
ments as “stuffed with harps, cellos, violas, clavinets, and overblown vocal
choruses. The effect, not infrequently, is disconcerting as Sam seems unable to
subordinate the easy fluency of his voice to the deeper meaning of the song.”
On certain tracks—“They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” for instance—
Cooke does seem preoccupied with how the song can be a vehicle for his
voice, rather than vice versa. Though there are distinguishing touches in some
115. Carter, liner notes for Tribute to the Lady. Cooke apparently gave Hall a skeletal concep-
tion for the arrangements, which Hall brought to fruition. Hall also wrote the arrangement for
“A Change Is Gonna Come,” the only time Cooke gave him completely free rein as an arranger.
Hall told a BBC interviewer that “A Change Is Gonna Come” was “the only tune that I can ever
recall where he said, ‘I’m going to leave that up to you.’ ” Guralnick, Dream Boogie, 547.
116. In Encore’s liner notes, Adler confirmed the LP’s concept: “This album has been created
to record permanently some of these memorable performances which have excited hundreds of
thousands of patrons on the after-dinner circuit.” One can easily hear Encore tracks like “Some-
day,” “Running Wild,” and “Accentuate the Positive” as flashy show openers.
117. Johnson and Collette were given rare opportunities to play on Sinatra sessions for
Capitol in the 1950s because of their acquaintance with white arranger and producer Dave
Cavanaugh, “an old tenor player himself.” Interview with Plas Johnson, 6 January 2011. Hall and
Wilson had worked together as early as the mid-1940s. Hall wrote arrangements for a 1946
Mercury Records session in Chicago for Dinah Washington, backed by one of Wilson’s earliest
bands, from which only “Oo Wee Walkie Talkie” was released. Interview with Gerald Wilson,
19 January 2011.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
of Hall’s big band charts—the relaxed dialogue between bass clarinet, flutes,
and muted trumpets in the introduction to “Solitude” is particularly
effective—there is also a tendency toward recurrent musical gestures that lends
a sameness to some of the tracks featuring brass, four of which are in the same
key of B flat. For some listeners, the opening track, “God Bless the Child,”
which receives the most grandiloquent arrangement and production—
beginning with cascading harp, Norman Luboff–style choir, timpani rolls, and
crashing piano chords—may get the album off on the wrong foot. The album
does, however, have considerable peaks as well: if in “Good Morning,
Heartache” and “Lover Come Back to Me” one hears the intonation prob-
lems that occasionally cropped up throughout Cooke’s career, especially in
chromatic or modulating passages, the pacing, vocal register, and more tem-
perate arrangement of “Lover Girl” provide a tailor-made setting for Cooke to
deliver a performance that lends the song a satisfying freshness.
“I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues” is exemplary of many of the arrange-
ments on the album while also being arguably its strongest track. Holiday
recorded the 1932 Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler song twice, in 1939 for
Commodore and in 1955 for Norman Granz’s Clef label. Cooke may have
been familiar with both versions, but his performance is clearly indebted to the
earlier record since he takes a similar tempo, follows Holiday’s alteration of
Koehler’s lyric, and in certain instances reiterates phrases sung by Holiday on
the Commodore record almost verbatim.118 Hall’s arrangement opens with a
musical quotation of his own: the four-bar introductory brass fanfare is lifted
directly from “Floyd’s Guitar Blues,” recorded in 1939 by Andy Kirk and His
Twelve Clouds of Joy, featuring Floyd Smith’s electric slide guitar. With Hall,
Smith, Charlie Christian, and Eddie Durham having belonged to the small
fraternity of jazz musicians pioneering the electric guitar in the late 1930s, it is
no surprise that Hall knew the widely popular Kirk recording.119
For Wolff and Guralnick, Cooke’s major shortcoming on the album is his
inability to match the “touch of experience” and “spare astringency” so
closely associated with Holiday.120 Some songs on the album (“Solitude,” for
instance) may indeed invite this interpretive approach. With Callender’s rock-
solid walking bass and the closely miked sizzle of the ride cymbal establishing
a firm bottom and sense of groove absent on Encore, however, one could also
argue that Cooke, if anything, too often does not swing enough. Cooke is
locked in with the rhythm section most compellingly on “I’ve Got a Right to
118. Compare, for example, the embellishment of the melody sung to the words “got a right
to moan and sigh, got a right to sit and cry” at 0:47–0:55 on the Holiday record and 0:45–0:51
on the Cooke recording. Holiday takes a much slower tempo in her 1955 recording, recasting a
song typically performed as a blithe vaudeville-style number as a bluesy ballad.
119. Another more tongue-in-cheek musical reference by Hall on Tribute is heard in “Crazy
in Love with You,” which opens with a quotation of the famous curtain-raising clarinet trill and
glissando from Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.
120. Wolff, You Send Me, 196, 200, 252; and Guralnick, Dream Boogie, 270.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Sing the Blues,” with slightly behind-the-beat phrasing that from the opening
line maintains a clarity and verve that deftly plays off the rest of the band. Like
Frankie Newton on the Holiday recording, Wilson’s Harmon-muted trumpet
provides running commentary behind Cooke’s vocals. The only solo on the
track is by Johnson, the ubiquitous session player whose tenor saxophone
was in subsequent years featured in Mancini’s and Neal Hefti’s familiar theme
songs for the movie The Pink Panther and the television series The Odd
Couple, respectively. Johnson’s meaty tone summons both the honking saxo-
phone of 1940s rhythm and blues and the tough tenor sound being popular-
ized in the late 1950s by “soul jazz” stylists like Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis.
During the song’s stop-time chromatic ascent on “all I see for me is misery,”
Cooke’s pitches are somewhat approximate, but his coolly delivered, gospel-
inspired word repetition coming out of the tenor solo (“I’ve gotta right,
gotta right, gotta right to sing the blues”) produces a delicious moment of
polyrhythmic tension, then release, that answers Johnson’s ecstatic climax.
There is certainly ennui but also plentiful joie de vivre in Holiday’s music, par-
ticularly on such Commodore recordings as “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues”
and two others Cooke covered on Tribute, “He’s Funny That Way” and
“Lover, Come Back to Me.” “I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues” and several
other tracks on Tribute are most inspired by the latter quality, as Cooke’s per-
formances pay tribute less to Lady Day’s tragic persona, it would appear, than
to her subtly spirited sense of play and sheer enjoyment of a song.
For Cooke’s biographers, Tribute to the Lady settled any questions about
Cooke’s true calling as a singer and, to an extent, the limitations of his aspira-
tions. To Wolff, the album not only missed the mark musically; it pointed to
Cooke’s fundamental deficiencies as an interpreter of standards. Communi-
cating the “world-weariness” of “God Bless the Child,” the “sophistication”
of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” the “desperation” of “Solitude,” and
the “energetic defiance” of “T’Aint Nobody’s Bizness (If I Do)” was deemed
simply to exceed his capabilities. The conclusion, Wolff writes, is clear:
“Tribute ends up presenting overwhelming evidence that while he was sin-
cerely moved by jazz singing, Cooke did his best pop work when recording
his own songs.”121 Guralnick concurs, noting that despite the “unassailable
confidence, even cockiness” that drove Cooke’s “insistence on radical re-
interpretation” of standards, “what was missing was a sense of the songs
themselves.” But Guralnick, whose biography of Cooke so persuasively
demonstrates how the singer consistently took the long view in strategizing
his career, goes a step further in pinpointing what he perceives as Tribute’s
deeper flaw.
“This is a sincere album,” veteran saxophonist Benny Carter . . . would write in
his liner notes—and indeed it is. And yet, like so many well-intentioned stabs at
121. Wolff, You Send Me, 196.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
social and musical mobility, it is a mistaken one, a rare instance in which Sam’s
innate capacity to assess a situation clearly, then bring his skills to bear upon it,
is overwhelmed by the impatient need, bred in him since childhood, to take his
place at the table.122
By reducing the moral of Tribute to the Lady’s story to Cooke falling short
of Holiday’s artistry, or falling prey to pathological social climbing, other im-
portant implications of the album slip through the cracks. The LP was
recorded in Los Angeles over the course of four sessions in January and
February 1959, a time and place at which the issue of expedient racial integra-
tion was a pressing issue. This stemmed both from the uncertain imple-
mentation of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board ruling and from
developments in L.A.’s music scene. After much debate, including the com-
mitted diplomatic efforts of Carter, the segregated Los Angeles chapters of the
American Federation of Musicians (AFM), the white Local 767 and the
African American Local 47, were “amalgamated” on 1 April 1953, a hopeful
first step toward ending inequities in the hiring and payment of union musi-
cians. Just as Cooke hoped to transition from the rhythm and blues circuit to
more stable and lucrative cabaret gigs, many black instrumentalists in L.A.,
largely reliant on unequally compensated nightclub work, sought to end their
virtual exclusion from better-paying jobs in musical theater, on television, and
with studio orchestras on movie score and album recording sessions. While
white liberals, especially within the jazz community, tended to place foremost
value on the social justice and interracial communion that would come with
integration, for many African Americans desegregation—and, for that matter,
cultural nationalism—was a means, not an end. “Although work in the night-
clubs and concert halls carried more prestige among jazz aficionados (and
produced the recognized innovators in the tradition),” Ingrid Monson ob-
serves, “the more anonymous world of the studio offered one of the best
paths to financial security.”123 Johnson, who moved to Los Angeles in 1954,
remembered that the “best musical job in town” was playing in a full-time
contract orchestra for movie studios, which came with guaranteed hours, vaca-
tion pay, and overtime, but was virtually a “closed enterprise” for black musi-
cians. The only two black musicians that Johnson remembered as having
landed jobs in contract orchestras were Callender and Collette, both of whom
were part of Cooke’s Tribute band.124 Collette was thus one of very few black
jazz musicians in Los Angeles to have an active career playing both club gigs
and sessions for movie studios and record companies.
122. Guralnick, Dream Boogie, 271. Friedwald expressed similar reservations about Tribute to
the Lady: “Cooke was clearly not ready to take on the greatest female singer of slow ballads that
ever was.” Biographical Guide, 738.
123. Monson, Freedom Sounds, 37–49.
124. According to Johnson, discrimination in orchestras at movie studios was more absolute
that at album sessions for record companies where black arrangers like Carter could occasionally
recommend black players to producers on a freelance basis. On major labels, all-white backing

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
It was like living in two worlds. There were the so-called jazz guys, who only
did the clubs on a Friday or Saturday night, or a jam session, and they’d be try-
ing to borrow a couple of bucks from you. Then I’d meet this other group of
people—studio players—and they were talking about building and selling
homes. Right away you’d get a feeling: “Now this is more inviting. I could stay
in LA and wouldn’t have to go out on the road.”125
Cooke’s desire to garner the cachet and remuneration that he believed

came with becoming a successful album artist and the activism by black studio
players for employment equity were not discrete endeavors. The complete
personnel on Tribute is not known, but as Wilson pointed out, the band was
dominated by African American musicians who had been actively involved in
the amalgamation campaign in the early 1950s.126 Representations of Tribute
as a hasty snatch and grab at predictable tokens of white-defined status can
mask the significance of a late-1950s album featuring a black former gospel
singer from Chicago performing popular standards associated with a black
jazz singer from Baltimore backed by a studio orchestra composed mostly, if
not entirely, of black Los Angeles musicians playing charts written and con-
ducted by a black arranger and producer from New Orleans. When Cooke
and Alexander launched Sar Records in September 1959, it was to facilitate
Cooke’s ambitions as a producer, songwriter, and record executive, but it also
affirmed his ongoing commitment to dignifying recording opportunities for
black gospel singers, including the Soul Stirrers, who had by then been
dropped by Specialty. Similarly, even as Tribute reflected Cooke’s effort to
“get into competition” as an album artist, these personal desires, however im-
patient, were resonant with more broadly shared aspirations for professional
and socioeconomic opportunity that shaped the careers of the many African
American musicians in the 1950s striving to break the color line in the record-
ing studio.
Re-vernacularizing “Pop”
in your day there was sinatra presley

(you hated him / wouldn’t let us watch his flicks)
and some cat named
sam cooke
orchestras were the norm, however, Johnson said, even on sessions for black vocalists like
Fitzgerald, Cole, or Sarah Vaughan. “It gets to be not a private club, but it just gets to be a way of
doing business,” said Johnson, who described the concentration of black studio players on
Tribute as “unusual.”
125. Collette quoted in Monson, Freedom Sounds, 49.
126. The only exception among the known bandmembers was Johnson, who arrived in Los
Angeles just after AFM amalgamation. For Wilson’s account of his involvement with the amalga-
mation campaign, see Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, ed. Clora Bryant et al.,
337–40.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
all the time / “sam cooke can sing sam

cooke sang real songs
simple and real”
i was in high school / the first

time i heard your mix tape of
cooke classics and / i fell
in love with his voice / smooth / smooth
and i fell in love with

the daddy i thought / all
this time talking about
some sinatra presley like guy
not this sweet / sweet music127
In the years immediately following his death in 1964, Cooke was remembered
as a hit-maker, a nightclub performer, a songwriter, and an album artist who
was a measuring stick for up-and-coming African American singers seeking le-
gitimacy and success as entertainers in the broadest and most sustainable
terms. Writers summoning Cooke’s name often recalled “an exceptional pop
singer with a gospel background” and “a highly-paid pop crooner” whose
“songs ranged from ballads to blues.”128 Cathy Aldridge’s society column for
the Amsterdam News praised rhythm and blues singer Maxine Brown’s perfor-
mance at a “formal dance at the Riviera Night Club” for having “captivated
the most sophisticated audience in the world” with “her infectious Sam
Cooke–like touch.”129 Gaye’s efforts to mold his professional identity carefully
through his album work and through appearances at venues like New York’s
Copacabana and the Trip in Los Angeles also brought Cooke to mind.
“Mixing in beautifully arranged ballads with his numerous rock and roll hits”
in a fashion “either an avid rock ’n’ roller or a more conservative music lover
would enjoy,” wrote Billboard ’s Eliot Tiegel, Gaye was a “mobile artist,” a
singer “of the Sam Cooke–Mel Carter school.”130 Hearing Gaye in this vein
was a “pleasant surprise,” noted Raymond Robinson of the Amsterdam News,
as “somehow one would not think of him as a night club entertainer.” Still,
“the way he roamed around the audience, chatting as he moved, was reminis-
127. Excerpt from Suheir Hammad, “Daddy’s Song,” in Anglesey, Listen Up! Spoken Word
Poetry, 46–47.
128. Stereo Review 15 (1965): 31; Louie Robinson, “Tragic Death of Sam Cooke,” Ebony,
February 1965, 92–96; “Sam Cooke’s Widow to Wed Hubby’s Guitarist-Pal This Month,” Jet,
18 February 1965, 54–59.
129. Cathy Aldridge, “P.S.,” Amsterdam News, 1 October 1966, 20.
130. Eliot Tiegel, “Gaye at the Trip Yeah-Yeah Stint,” Billboard, 4 December 1965, 12.
Cincinnati-born Mel Carter, a former gospel singer who recorded with the Raymond Rasberry
Singers, was another Cooke protégé. Carter gained the first major attention in his successful
career as a crossover pop singer during his affiliation with Cooke’s Derby Records before being
signed by Imperial Records to be “developed as catalog artist” in “a Johnny Mathis image.” See
“Music as Written,” Billboard, 27 June 1964, 55.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
cent of the manner of the late, great Sam Cooke.”131 Meanwhile, sixteen-year-
old Stevie Wonder, like Cooke and Mathis a decade earlier, was trying to bal-
ance success in both the teen and adult pop markets. Wonder “leaped into a
big new musical league” and “proved himself to be a polished performer in his
first night club appearance,” read a Los Angeles Times review of a Wonder
show at the Trip. “Dressed in a traje de luces tuxedo with a ruffle front shirt,
he was propelled by an 11 piece band through a sophisticated musical act too
slick for the Phil Spector World and aspiring toward the Ray Charles–Sam
Cooke–Sammy Davis axis.”132
Several memorial recordings appeared in these years, including albums of
Cooke songs by Diana Ross and the Supremes, saxophonist King Curtis, and
Cooke’s brother L. C., and an original song, “Dedicated to the Greatest,”
written and performed by blues singer-guitarist Johnny Copeland. Cooke re-
ceived a unique tribute in June 1966 when singer Eddie Holmes presented his
“musical biography” Tribute to Three Greats to a standing-room-only audi-
ence at the Studio Theater in midtown Manhattan, performing “a program of
songs and music of Nat King Cole, Cole Porter and Sam Cooke,” all of whom
had died within the past eighteen months. Also telling of Cooke’s status was
an otherwise innocuous Billboard report on a Maryland radio station that had
made a switch away from “hard r&b” programming in 1966.
One of the newest formats on the scene, just debuted by WUST in nearby
Bethesda, Md., is “Soft Soul” and the station reports a large audience increase
already. An experiment at programming the softer r&b sounds in singles mixed
with album artists like Sam Cooke, Ella Fitzgerald, Lou Rawls, Frank Sinatra,
Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Nancy Wilson and Percy Faith, received good re-
sponse and the station began aiming its programming about two weeks ago
primarily toward an adult Negro audience.133
Cooke, though no doubt best known for his hit singles, had at the time of his
death secured a reputation as a nightclub performer and as an album artist
whose work was, to some listeners, distinguishable not only from “hard r&b”
but even from “softer r&b sounds in singles.” Indeed, if mid-1960s discourse
provides any indication, it is difficult not to conclude that Cooke’s project of
establishing himself as a performer mentioned in the same breath with Cole,
Bennett, Davis, Fitzgerald, and Sinatra qualified as a success. It is a qualita-
tively different kind of success, to be sure, than the “invention of soul”—and a
form of success many writers have represented as tantamount to aesthetic,
131. Raymond Robinson, “Marvin Gaye a Pleasure at the Copa,” Amsterdam News,
13 August 1966, 20.
132. Digby Diehl, “Wonder Boy’s Act Grows Up,” Los Angeles Times, 24 September 1966,
21.
133. “New York Beat,” Jet, 12 May 1966, 10; “Who Makes Music and Where,” New York
Times, 12 June 1966, D16; and “WUST Gaining with a Soft Soul Format,” Billboard,
17 December 1966, 26.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
even cultural, failure—but success nonetheless, at least according to the terms

Cooke set for his attainment of professional identity and usable prestige.
On the heels of first-wave “soul music” discourse, RCA began to promote
Cooke with the moniker “Mr. Soul” beginning with his 1963 album of the
same name, though reviews acknowledged that the LP’s content (“standards,
mixed with several Cooke hit revivals and new items”) was consistent with
what one would expect from an adult pop album.134 It was not until the re-
lease of the posthumous compilation album The Man Who Invented Soul in
April 1968 that the notion of Cooke as the forebear of a distinct musical lin-
eage began to take firm root. The album again comprised older standards
(e.g., “Willow Weep for Me”), postwar hits (“The Great Pretender” and
“Blowin’ in the Wind”), and even a pair of Keen albums tracks (“Tain’t
Nobody’s Bizness” [sic] and “Danny Boy”). This time, however, RCA’s strat-
egy of tapping the energies of the black pride movement and the burgeoning
popularity of soul singers gained traction. African American identities became
radicalized and more positively asserted in the late 1960s and, as historian
Peniel Joseph has argued, “Black Power loomed over the year 1968” in par-
ticular. In a year indelibly marked with the image of John Carlos’s and
Tommie Smith’s defiant Black Power salutes at the Mexico City Olympic
Games and that saw the release of James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and
I’m Proud),” the “contemporaneous and symbolic currency of ‘soul music,’
an important idea in black nationalist discourse” was never more precious.135
134. See Billboard, 23 February 1963, 31. What I am calling “first-wave” discourse on “soul
music” flourished between roughly 1958 and 1963 and centered predominantly on the jazz
world. “Soul jazz” was most closely linked to such musicians as alto saxophonists Julian
“Cannonball” Adderley, Lou Donaldson, and Hank Crawford; vibraphonist Milt Jackson; organ-
ists Jimmy Smith and Brother Jack McDuff; and pianists Horace Silver, Bobby Timmons, Ray
Charles, and Les McCann (“King of the collard-green flavored ‘soul music’ ”), among others. See
Lerone Bennett Jr., “The Soul of Soul,” Ebony, December 1961, 111–20; “How Good is Les
McCann’s Piano?” Los Angeles Sentinel, 20 July 1961; and John Tynan’s cover story on the soul
“movement”—reflecting “the Gospel, or ‘holiness,’ influence in today’s jazz”—“Funk, Groove,
Soul,” Down Beat, 24 November 1960, 18–19. See also Barbara Gardner’s feature “Timmons in
a Tempest,” in the same issue of Down Beat, 14. For an account of the critical coverage and mar-
keting of soul jazz, see Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics, 175–78. Common
understandings of “soul music” began to shift decisively toward soul singers in the mid-to-late
1960s.
135. Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America,
205; and Ramsey, “Who Hears Here? Black Music, Critical Bias, and the Musicological Skin
Trade,” 8–12. Cooke’s career unfolded contemporaneously with what has been described as
the “classical period” of the civil rights movement (1954–65). For differing interpretations of
Cooke’s relationship with the black freedom struggle, see Wolff, You Send Me, 284–92;
Guralnick, Dream Boogie, 368–71, 489–94, 509–13; Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come, 40–44;
Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 289–93; and Trigg, “Change Ain’t Gonna Come.” In the final
year of his life, Cooke provided financial backing for Battiste’s project of opening “Soul Stations,”
storefront establishments in low-income Los Angeles neighborhoods where aspiring though
not yet professional black musicians could rehearse, audition, and develop new material. See
Guralnick, Dream Boogie, 541–43, 548–49.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
The powerful political and communal transformations of the period helped

to catalyze a shift in Cooke’s reception. Through a peculiarly neat intersection
of progressive political energies, alert corporate marketing, and discursively
nimble music-historical revision, a performer whom the black press just years
earlier had identified as a “pop crooner” was reinterpreted as a founding father
of soul. From the 1970s on, acknowledgement of Cooke as a pioneering soul
singer became increasingly commonplace, particularly with the new availability
of previously unreleased material in the mid-1980s, including the album Live
at the Harlem Square Club. Though the black Miami nightclub show docu-
mented on the LP took place on 12 January 1963—advance publicity in the
Miami Herald lured audiences with the promise that the live recording of
the show would result in “Sam Cooke’s Newest R.C.A. Album”—release of
the album was delayed for over twenty years due to uncertainty about how
such a Cooke performance would be received. Indeed, two decades after his
death, the notion of Cooke as soul man remained for many a hitherto unfa-
miliar concept. “The smooth sound showcased by the vocalist on many of his
hits and especially on his previous live album, At the Copa, is almost diametri-
cally opposed to the gritty, swaggering, hard-core soul of the new release,”
observed one reviewer of the Harlem Square Club album in 1985. “I believe
it’s going to surprise the hell out of people. Because Sam Cooke was the be-
ginning of the ’60s soul movement,” Cooke’s last manager, Allen Klein, said
of the LP. “Nobody has heard him sing this way.”136 Nonetheless, with this fi-
nal marketing push the metamorphosis of Cooke’s historical persona was
completed. Sam Cooke, Ebony magazine explained matter-of-factly in a 1988
story on black celebrities who died before their fortieth birthday, “began his
career as a gospel singer and later switched to soul music.”137
Charting this discursive mutation, as the politics of ballad singing in the
1950s was superceded by the politics of soul singing in the decade that fol-
lowed, is not to devalue the tectonic shift in black sensibilities that took place
in the 1960s. The reinterpretation of Cooke’s career, though an invention in
some respects, also conveyed important truths. Indeed, as I hope to have
shown, both inventions of Cooke, as soul singer and as pop album artist, are
highly meaningful and need not be interpreted hierarchically or in terms of an
“endless either/or.” A notion of Cooke as “The Man Who Invented Soul”
never would have been viable had it not been for the many soul singers in the
late 1960s and 1970s, including Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Al Green,
and Sam Moore, who cited Cooke as a seminal inspiration, and the countless
other singers who, to this day, bear his influence. Moreover, to be identified as
a “soul man” in the 1960s and early 1970s, not unlike the “race man” of the
136. Fred Goodman, “Sam Cooke Getting Big Push,” Billboard, 25 May 1985, 62.
137. Marilyn Marshall, “Why Famous Blacks Died Young,” Ebony, December 1988, 89. It is
telling that Phyl Garland’s Sound of Soul, probably the earliest attempt to narrate a history of soul
music as it was understood in the late 1960s, barely mentions Cooke, and even then solely as
being admired by Aretha Franklin.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
1920s and 1930s, had politically vital significance to an entire generation of

African Americans. To call Cooke a “soul singer” is to register the sense of col-
lective achievement and the declaration of independence that his career came
to symbolize for many African Americans. His continued contact with the
gospel world and calibrated deployment of gospel’s vocal practices gave a
shout out to black listeners from within the pop mainstream, much as
Downey’s performances, regardless of his fame, audience, or venue, repeat-
edly asked: “Are there any Irish in the house?” To appreciate, equally, what it
meant for Cooke to be, or even to aspire to be, recognized as an album artist
and a popular entertainer of the highest standing is to acknowledge the long,
hidden history of black performers for whom “pop” success on a level playing
field of competition, attained through full access to the institutions and eco-
nomic prosperity commensurate with their talent and ambition, has been
stubbornly contested, both explicitly by the popular music industry and im-
plicitly by popular music’s historical narratives.
Cooke the album artist also broadens our thinking about the meanings of
modernity in postwar America, and in black America in particular. As Monson
has argued, the “modern artist” was often understood “as part of the broader-
based transformation of African America from rural to urban, an effort that
brought with it the inexorable demand for citizenship and inclusion in moder-
nity’s promise of equality and justice for all.”138 To both Blackwell and Cooke,
a gospel singer embracing the role of pop balladeer gave expression to a dis-
tinctly modern autonomous self. “Our forebears thought you couldn’t sing
[both] pops and spirituals,” said Cooke, “but I have rationalized this. I can do
anything I want and still have my religious beliefs. My philosophy in life is: Do
whatever is best for Sam Cooke.” Blackwell, who does not appear to have
identified with the church, dismissed the notion that a gospel singer “can’t
sing a pop song” as “superstition and ignorance.”139 Envisioning alternatives
to the purportedly more “natural” path from gospel to rhythm and blues and
embracing the challenges faced, and posed, by the black pop balladeer was it-
self a form of resistance to entrenched practices of discrimination within the
music industry. However problematic Blackwell’s intraracial condescension
toward working-class black vernacular culture may be, his imagination of
Cooke as a “modern Morton Downey” suggests a variant and less obvious
manifestation of the “Afro-modernist” sensibilities analyzed by numerous
scholars.140 Blackwell’s prescription for Cooke giving evergreen standards
138. Monson, “Problem with White Hipness,” 407; and idem, Freedom Sounds, 70.
139. Cleave, “Disc Date,” London Evening Standard, 20 October 1962, 6; and Wolff, You
Send Me, 122.
140. “Gospel songs intrigued me,” said Blackwell, explaining the inspiration for his pioneer-
ing gospel music revue Portraits in Bronze, starring Bessie Griffin. “I discovered untrained and
undisciplined singers who possessed little education but owned a tremendous natural ability for
delivering gems of expression.” “Gospel Singers in Coffee Houses,” Sepia, March 1960, 62. For a
sampling of perspectives on music and Afro-modernism, see Werner, Playing the Changes: From

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
“today’s POP treatment”—with telling emphasis on the word “pop”—and

Hall’s appreciation of Cooke the balladeer as “something new in the creative
world . . . pop music with a gospel flavor” convey the productive tensions
between conservation and a spirit of experimentalism at the heart of 1950s
popular music.
As Stuart Hall and others have suggested, assimilation, or even biracial
common ground, need not be the default meaning of pop performances by
African Americans. The work of literature scholar Terry Kawashima offers
another possible way of thinking about the “whiteness” of pop. Kawashima,
like Mercer, has noted our socially conditioned tendency to read visual culture
“in specifically racialized ways that privilege certain cues at the expense of
others.” The “seamless conflation of so-called ‘white features’ with ‘white-
ness’ ” becomes “so natural that we fail to grasp the opportunity to examine
the very mechanisms through which ‘race’ is constructed.” As an alternative,
Kawashima proposes a “politics of fragments,” readings of cultural production
that “regard the ‘parts’ as commodified ‘accessories,’ adornments of the body
that take on different (yet still loaded) meanings in a new context.” Rather
than take for granted a configuration in which a person of color either
fetishizes or rejects whiteness in varying degrees, “fragmented accessoriza-
tion” can produce pop performances in which “the appropriated feature is
worn more as an accessory than as a signal of submission to a ‘white privileg-
ing’ worldview.”141 Racial identity may be a factor in the selection of frag-
ments, but so too may be class identifications, sex and gender roles, political
views, patriotic feeling, transnational politics, the prevailing market, or per-
sonal taste. Choice is not, of course, radically open. Also to be taken into ac-
count are the limitations placed on the choices one is permitted to make, and
by whom, on what basis, and in what manner these limitations are enforced.
Listening that is attentive to a politics of fragments does, however, enable us
to acknowledge how facets of a performance, or of a musical career, can work
together in harmonious ensemble while also recognizing the occasional resis-
tance of some parts—whether repertory, manner of performance, production,
or intertextual references—to the whole.
Such practices of listening to and studying popular music may also lead us
to historical analyses of Cooke, both as a performer and as a catalyst for
change in the music industry, that account for his possible desires as much as
they do our own. Palestinian-American spoken-word poet Suheir Hammad’s
elegant panegyric “Daddy’s Song” succinctly captures the politics of
Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse, 183–211; Ramsey Jr., Race Music, 96–130; Green, Selling
the Race, 1–17, 51–91; and Monson, Freedom Sounds, 71–73.
141. Kawashima, “Seeing Faces, Making Races.” See also Daphne Brooks’s study of “spec-
tacular performances” through which performers “defamiliarize the spectacle of blackness” by
“doing” their body in novel ways, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and
Freedom, 1850–1910.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
difference—and sameness—that condition Cooke’s present-day reception.

Hammad remembers a tight father-daughter bond forged from a shared love
for Cooke’s smooth, sweet voice, but also founded upon their satisfaction that
this classic singer, so “simple and real,” was decidedly not “some sinatra pres-
ley like guy,” that Cooke was, perhaps, in the 1950s pop mainstream but not
of it. What does it mean to cherish a singer for not being Sinatra or Presley
when that singer’s measure of professional success and status is Sinatra and
Presley? It is a question that I believe continues to vex writers grappling with
the awkwardness of having to explain away or simply burke so much of the ca-
reer of a singer whom popular music history has closely linked to gospel and
soul yet whose recordings betray an artistic, professional, and social invest-
ment in a middle-of-the-road pop aesthetic. Too little of his output, it seems,
fits his present-day reception or squares with the Cooke so many have come to
value the most. An approach to aurality that “critiques and reconceptualizes
the paradigm in which all partial appropriations can only ultimately sustain
white privilege” may help us to listen more closely to performances that have
been too uncritically relegated to, or purposefully differentiated from, a total-
ized “sinatra presley” pop mainstream.142 In Cooke’s “Danny Boy,” we might
hear discrete yet dialogic traces of Irish, rhythm and blues, country-western,
and gospel musical sensibilities that remind us of the ways in which numerous
groups have experienced the ambivalence of “assimilation” and the meanings
of “Americanization,” and have, moreover, been constitutive of, not deviant
from, pop. Cooke’s performance of “My Foolish Heart” may invite us to re-
consider the historical significance of the careers of such vocalists as Eckstine,
Belafonte, Hamilton, Mathis, and Carter, singers whose performances have so
often prompted knee-jerk skepticism of their cultural-political bona fides; it
may also—alongside such recordings as Brown’s “Prisoner of Love,” the
Supremes’ “My Heart Stood Still,” the Impressions’ “Satin Doll,” Franklin’s
“I Surrender, Dear,” and Redding’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re
Down and Out,” among many other examples—encourage us to probe more
deeply the relationships that a broad spectrum of 1960s soul singers, and not
only the often maligned “integrationist” Motown artists, preserved with
“standards and show tunes.”143 Tribute to the Lady may perhaps hint at a reach
“for the brass ring of cultural achievement,” but the studio sessions that
brought the album into being may also exemplify the production of social
spaces where racial, ethnic, and other social identities can be reaffirmed and
politically activated not only in opposition to pop but also from within its fluid
bounds.144 Pop, like the “mainstream” itself, becomes racialized as “white”
not because it is white, but rather because of the barriers, caveats, bargains,
142. Kawashima, “Seeing Faces, Making Races,” 182; emphasis in the original.
143. For one such study, see Bowman, “Determining Role of Performance in the
Articulation of Meaning: The Case of ‘Try A Little Tenderness.’ ”
144. Dyson, Between God and Gangsta Rap, 63.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
and apologias performers of all races and ethnicities have faced when attempt-
ing to perform and voice complex selves through it.
Hearing and re-vernacularizing “pop” in this way does not obviate or de-
value the additional task of value judgment; some accessories—a soul singer
cloaked with chirpy background singers or lush strings, for instance—may
very well be disruptive, distracting, disturbing, or simply distasteful for a par-
ticular listener. Rupe acknowledged that he experienced Cooke’s rerouted
“You Send Me” session as a form of personal betrayal: “I just sat in the booth
sulking in anger because I feel I had been crossed in the crossover.”145 But this
simply means that Cooke’s purportedly “complicated” politics may in fact be,
after all, more our own. The ability to recognize fragments as indicative of on-
going conversation among distinguishable voices, and not simply of member-
ship in a neatly assimilated chorus, requires a commitment to taking individual
acts of musical performance seriously. It also necessitates, within black music
studies, a willingness to temper our fascination with divining musical blackness
and “black consciousness” with more committed scholarly attention to the
perspectives, desires, and full range of alternatives chosen, for politics, profit,
and pleasure, by African American musicians and their audiences. In our justi-
fiable and well-placed urge to celebrate the triumph of the “gospel impulse”
through 1960s soul music, a development that has genuinely revolutionized
global popular culture, we may too reflexively foreground our own ambiva-
lence toward musical performances by the “pre-soul” generations that strate-
gically pursued the artistic laurels, economic stability, lifestyle pleasures, and
social leverage attendant with pop success as defined by their times. Before
swiftly and selectively turning our attention away from such performers and
performances, and the social work that they may facilitate, we might choose
to remain open to the possibility of a surprising double-take when we allow
ourselves to stop, look, and, above all, listen.
Discography
Date indicates year of initial release. Entries for a performer are listed by year
of release. All recordings are single releases unless otherwise indicated as LP,
EP, or CD.
Austin, Gene. “The Lonesome Road.” RCA Victor 21098. 1928.

Baker, Laverne. LaVern Baker Sings Bessie Smith. Atlantic 1281. LP. 1958.
Belafonte, Harry. Calypso. RCA Victor LPM 1248. LP. 1956.
———. “Danny Boy” on An Evening with Belafonte. RCA Victor LPM 1402. LP.
1957.
Bennett, Tony. “My Foolish Heart” on Long Ago and Far Away. Columbia CL 1186.
LP. 1958.
145. Wolff, You Send Me, 146.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Boswell Sisters. “It’s the Talk of the Town.” Brunswick 6632. 1933.
Brown, James, and His Famous Flames. “Prisoner of Love.” King 5739. 1963.
———. “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.” King 6187. 1968.
Brown, Ruth. “So Long.” Atlantic 879. 1949.
Carson, Mindy. “My Foolish Heart.” Victor 20-3581. 1950.
Carter, Mel. When a Boy Falls in Love. Derby LPM 702. LP 1963.
Chevalier, Maurice. A Tribute to Al Jolson. MGM 3773. LP. 1959.
Cline, Patsy. “Walkin’ After Midnight.” Decca 30221. 1957.
Cole, Nat “King.” “(I Love You) for Sentimental Reasons.” Capitol 304. 1946.
———. “Around the World” on Around the World. Capitol EAP 1-813. EP. 1957.
———. “When I Fall in Love” on Love Is the Thing. Capitol W 824. LP. 1957.
Cook, Dale (aka Sam Cooke). “Lovable” b/w “Forever.” Specialty 596. 1957.
Cooke, L. C. Sings the Great Years of Sam Cooke. Blue Rock MGB 24001. LP. 1965.
Cooke, Sam. “You Send Me” b/w “Summertime.” Keen 34013. 1957.
———. “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons.” Keen 34002. 1957.
———. “I’ll Come Running Back to You” b/w “Forever.” Specialty 619. 1957.
———. Sam Cooke. Keen 2001. LP. 1957.
———. “You Were Made For Me” b/w “Lonely Island.” Keen 34009. 1958.
———. “Win Your Love for Me.” Keen 32006. 1958.
———. “Love You Most of All” b/w “Blue Moon.” Keen 32008. 1958.
———. Encore. Keen 2003. LP. 1958.
———. “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha.” Keen 32018. 1959.
———. Tribute to the Lady. Keen 2004. LP. 1959.
———. “Only Sixteen.” Keen 32022. 1959.
———. “There, I’ve Said It Again” b/w “One Hour Ahead of the Posse.” Keen
82105. 1959.
———. Hit Kit. Keen 86101. LP. 1959.
———. “(What A) Wonderful World.” Keen 82112. 1960.
———, the Gospel Harmonettes, and the Original Blind Boys. I Thank God. Keen
86103. LP. 1960.
———. “South of the Border” on Cooke’s Tour. RCA Victor LPM 2221. LP. 1960.
———. “The Wayward Wind” on Hits of the 50’s. RCA Victor LSP 2236. LP. 1960.
———. “Chain Gang.” RCA Victor 7783. 1960.
———. “They Call the Wind Maria” on Swing Low. RCA Victor 2293. LP. 1961.
———. “Twilight on the Trail” on Swing Low. RCA Victor 2293. LP. 1961.
———. “Cupid.” RCA Victor 7883. 1961.
———. “Twistin’ the Night Away.” RCA Victor 7983. 1962.
———. Mr. Soul. RCA Victor LPM 2673. LP. 1963.
———. “Another Saturday Night.” RCA Victor 8164. 1963.
———. Night Beat. RCA Victor LPM 2709. LP. 1963.
———. “A Change Is Gonna Come” on Ain’t That Good News. RCA Victor LPM
2899. LP. 1964.
———. “A Change Is Gonna Come” b/w “Shake.” RCA Victor 8496. 1964.
———. The Man Who Invented Soul. RCA Victor LPM 2970. LP. 1968.
———. One Night Stand!—Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963. RCA 5181. LP.
1985.
———. The Man Who Invented Soul. RCA/BMG 67911. CD. 2000.
Copeland, Johnny. “Dedicated to the Greatest.” Wand 1114. 1966.
Crosby, Bing. “Danny Boy.” Decca 18570. 1943.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
———. “The Bells of St. Mary’s.” Decca 18721. 1945.

———. “Around the World.” Decca 30120. 1956.
Curtis, King. Plays the Hits Made Famous by Sam Cooke. Capitol T 2341. LP. 1965.
Day, Doris. “When I Fall in Love.” Columbia 39786. 1952.
Del Vikings. “Come Go with Me.” Dot 15538. 1957.
———. “My Foolish Heart” on They Sing—They Swing. Mercury MG 20314. LP.
1957.
Domino, Fats. “Blueberry Hill.” Imperial 5407. 1956.
———. “Valley of Tears.” Imperial 5442. 1957.
Dorsey, Tommy (with Frank Sinatra). “Oh! Look at Me Now.” RCA Victor 27274.
1941.
Downey, Morton. “Danny Boy.” Rex 8926. 1936.
———. “It’s the Same Old Shillelagh.” Columbia 35496. 1940.
———. “Blue Skies.” Majestic 1046. 1946.
Eckstine, Billy. “A Cottage for Sale.” National 9014. 1945.
———. “Prisoner of Love.” National 9017. 1946.
———. “My Foolish Heart.” MGM 10623. 1950.
———. “I Apologize.” MGM 10903. 1951.
Ford, Tennessee Ernie, and Kay Starr. “I’ll Never Be Free.” Capitol 1124. 1950.
Franklin, Aretha. “I Surrender, Dear” on The Electrifying Aretha Franklin. Columbia
CL 1876. LP. 1962.
———. “Dr. Feelgood (Love is a Serious Business)” on I Never Loved a Man the Way I
Love You. Atlantic 8139. LP. 1967.
Fuller, Donna. “My Foolish Heart” on My Foolish Heart. Liberty LRP 3024. LP.
1957.
Garland, Judy. “Danny Boy” on Miss Show Business. Capitol W676. LP. 1955.
Gilbert, Ronnie. The Legend of Bessie Smith. RCA Victor LPM 1591. LP. 1958.
Hall, Juanita. Juanita Hall Sings the Blues. Counterpoint 556. LP. 1958.
Hamilton, Roy. “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Epic 9015. 1954.
Hayes, Richard. “My Foolish Heart.” Mercury 5362. 1950.
Hibbler, Al. “Danny Boy.” Atlantic 911. 1950.
Hines, Earl, and His Orchestra (with Billy Eckstine, Madeline Greene, and the Three
Varieties). “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good.” Bluebird 11374. 1941.
——— (with Billy Eckstine). “You Don’t Know What Love Is.” Bluebird 11394.
1941.
——— (with Billy Eckstine). “Skylark.” Bluebird 11512. 1942.
Holiday, Billie. “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues.” Commodore 527. 1939.
———. “Lover, Come Back to Me.” Commodore 559. 1944.
———. “He’s Funny That Way.” Commodore 569. 1944.
———. “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” on Velvet Mood. Clef 713. LP. 1956.
Impressions. “Satin Doll” on The Never Ending Impressions. ABC-Paramount 468. LP.
1964.
Jackson, Mahalia. “Danny Boy” on Great Songs of Love and Faith. Columbia CL 8264.
LP. 1962.
Jackson, Wanda. “Let Me Explain.” Capitol 3688. 1957.
James, Joni. “It’s the Talk of the Town” on Little Girl Blue. MGM E 3347. LP. 1956.
———. “My Foolish Heart” on Songs by Victor Young and Frank Loesser. MGM E
3449. LP. 1957.
———. Joni James Sings Songs of Hank Williams. MGM E 3739. LP. 1959.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Jenkins, Gordon. “My Foolish Heart.” Decca 24830. 1950.

Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers (with Charles Brown). “It’s the Talk of the Town.”
Modern 131. 1946.
Kirk, Andy, and His Twelve Clouds of Joy. “Floyd’s Guitar Blues.” Decca 2483. 1939.
Mantovani. “Around the World.” London 1746. 1957.
Monroe, Vaughn. “There! I’ve Said It Again.” RCA Victor 20-1637. 1945.
Morgan, Russ, and His Orchestra. “So Long.” Decca 25080. 1947.
Perkins, Carl. “Let the Juke Box Keep On Playing.” Sun 224. 1955.
Presley, Elvis. “I Forgot to Remember to Forget.” Sun 223. 1955.
Redding, Otis. “Nobody Knows You (When You Are Down and Out)” on The Soul
Album. Volt 419. LP. 1966.
Reynolds, Debbie. “Tammy.” Coral 61851. 1957.
Robeson, Paul. “Ol’ Man River.” Victor 35912. 1928.
Sinatra, Frank. “Ol’ Man River.” Columbia 55037. 1945.
———. “That Lucky Old Sun.” Columbia 38608. 1949.
———. “Oh! Look at Me Now” on A Swingin’ Affair! Capitol W 803. LP. 1957.
———. “The Lonesome Road” on A Swingin’ Affair! Capitol W 803. LP. 1957.
———. “Around the World” on Come Fly with Me. Capitol W 920. LP. 1958.
Soul Stirrers. “Stand By Me Father” b/w “He’s Been a Shelter for Me.” Sar 101.
1959.
Soul Stirrers (with Sam Cooke). “He’s My Friend Until the End.” Specialty 859.
1954.
———. “Any Day Now.” Specialty 868. 1954.
———. “(He’s So) Wonderful.” Specialty 892. 1956.
———. “Jesus Wash Away My Troubles.” Specialty 896. 1956.
———. “He’ll Make a Way” on The Gospel Soul of Sam Cooke, Vol. 1. Specialty 2128.
LP. 1970.
———. “I Have a Friend Above All Others” on That’s Heaven to Me. Specialty SPS
2146. LP. 1972.
———. “Mean Old World” on That’s Heaven to Me. Specialty SPS 2146. LP. 1972.
———. “That’s Heaven to Me.” Specialty 930. 1973.
———. The Complete Specialty Recordings. Specialty 4437. CD. 2002.
Supremes. We Remember Sam Cooke. Motown 629. LP. 1965.
———. “My Heart Stood Still” on Sing Rodgers and Hart. Motown MLP 659. LP.
1967.
Tharpe, Sister Rosetta. “The Lonesome Road.” Decca 2243. 1941.
Vale, Jerry. I Remember Buddy. Columbia CL 1114. LP. 1958.
———. I Remember Russ. Columbia CL 1164. LP. 1958.
Various. Art Rupe in His Own Words: The Specialty Records Story. Ace 2542. CD.
1998.
Various. The Specialty Story. Specialty 5SPCD-4412-2. CD. 1994.
Various. The Sar Records Story. Abkco 2231. CD. 1994.
Washington, Dinah. “Oo Wee Walkie Talkie.” Mercury 8010. 1946.
———. Dinah Sings Bessie Smith. Mercury MG 36130. LP. 1958.
Waters, Muddy. “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man.” Chess 15601. 1954.
Whiting, Margaret. “My Foolish Heart.” Capitol 934. 1950.
Whitman, Slim. “Danny Boy.” Imperial 8201. 1953.
Young, Victor. “Around the World.” Decca 30262. 1957.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Works Cited
Books and Articles

Agawu, Kofi. “The Invention of African Rhythm.” This Journal 48 (1995): 380–95.
Anglesey, Zoë, ed. Listen Up! Spoken Word Poetry. New York: Ballantine, 1999.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated
by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Bhabha, Homi. “Culture’s In-Between.” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by
Staurt Hall and Paul du Gay, 53–60. London: Sage, 1996.
———. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993.
———. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology
of Education, edited by John Richardson, 241–58. New York: Greenwood Press,
1986.
Bowman, Rob. “The Determining Role of Performance in the Articulation of
Meaning: The Case of ‘Try A Little Tenderness.’ ” In Analyzing Popular Music,
edited by Allan Moore, 103–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Boyer, Horace Clarence. The Golden Age of Gospel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1995.
Brackett, David. “The Politics and Practice of ‘Crossover’ in American Popular Music,
1963 to 1965.” Musical Quarterly 78 (1994): 774–97.
Brooks, Daphne. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom,
1850–1910. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Broven, John. Record Makers and Breakers: Voices of the Independent Rock ’n’ Roll
Pioneers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
Bryant, Clora, Buddy Collette, William Green, Steven Isoardi, Jack Kelson, Horace
Tapscott, Gerald Wilson, and Marl Young, eds. Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los
Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Carson, Charles. “ ‘Bridging the Gap’: Creed Taylor, Grover Washington Jr., and the
Crossover Roots of Smooth Jazz.” Black Music Research Journal 28, no. 1 (2008):
1–15.
Colman, Stu. “The Many Sides of Rene Hall.” New Kommotion 25 (1980): 37–38.
Darden, Robert. People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music. New York:
Continuum, 2004.
De Barros, Paul. Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle. Seattle:
Sasquatch Books, 1993.
DeVeaux, Scott. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997.
Dyson, Michael Eric. Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from
Commitment. New York: Anchor Books, 1983.
Epstein, Daniel Mark. Nat King Cole. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999.
Fitzgerald, Jon. “Black Pop Songwriting, 1963–1966: An Analysis of U.S. Top Forty
Hits by Cooke, Mayfield, Stevenson, Robinson, and Holland-Dozier-Holland.”
Black Music Research Journal 27, no. 2 (2007): 97–140.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Friedwald, Will. A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers. New York:
Pantheon, 2010.
———. Liner notes to Frank Sinatra, The Complete Capitol Singles Collection. Capitol
38089, 1996.
Gabbard, Krin. Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
Ganz, Jacob. “Sam Cooke at 80: The Career That Could Have Been.” http://www
.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/01/21/133090570/sam-cooke-at-80-the-
career-that-could-have-been. Accessed 12 January 2012.
Garland, Phyl. The Sound of Soul. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969.
Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary
Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Gayle, Addison. The Addison Gayle Jr. Reader. Edited by Nathaniel Norment Jr.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Gennari, John. Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006.
———. “Passing for Italian: Crooners and Gangsters.” Transition, no. 72 (1996):
36–48.
George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm and Blues. New York: Plume, 1988.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993.
Gourse, Leslie. Unforgettable: The Life and Mystique of Nat King Cole. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
Green, Adam. Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Guillory, Monique, and Richard C. Green, eds. Soul: Black Power, Politics, and
Pleasure. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
Guralnick, Peter. Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley. New York: Little, Brown
and Company, 1999.
———. Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. New York: Little, Brown and
Company, 2005.
———. “Fats Domino.” In The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, edited
by Anthony DeCurtis and James Henke, 48–51. New York: Random House, 1992.
Hajdu, David. Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture.
Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009.
Hall, Stuart. “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” Social Justice 20 (1993):
104–14.
Higginbotham, Evelyn. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black
Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Hill, Michael. Liner notes to The Man Who Invented Soul. RCA/BMG 67911, 2000.
Hirshey, Gerri. Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music. New York: Da Capo Press,
1994.
Hoskyns, Barney. Review of Sam Cooke, Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963.
http://www.amazon.com/Live-Harlem-Square-Club-1963/dp/B000002W7N.
Accessed 12 January 2012.
Jeske, Lee. Liner notes to Everything I Have Is Yours: The Best of the M-G-M Years.
Polygram 819442, 1994.
Joseph, Peniel. Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in
America. New York: Holt, 2006.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Kawashima, Terry. “Seeing Faces, Making Races: Challenging Visual Tropes of Racial
Difference.” Meridians 3, no. 1 (2002): 161–90.
Keane, Bob. The Oracle of Del-Fi: My Life in Music with Ritchie Valens, Frank Zappa,
Barry White, Sam Cooke, and Other Legends. Los Angeles: Del-Fi International
Books, 2006.
Keightley, Keir. “Long Play: Adult-Oriented Popular Music and the Temporal Logics
of the Post-War Sound Recording Industry.” Media, Culture and Society 26, no. 3
(2004): 375–91.
———. “Music for Middlebrows: Defining the Easy Listening Era, 1946–1966.”
American Music 26 (2008): 309–35.
———. “You Keep Coming Back Like a Song: Adult Audiences, Taste Panics, and the
Idea of the Standard.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 13 (2001): 7–40.
Kempton, Arthur. Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Kernfeld, Barry. “Eckstine, Billy.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. Grove Music
Online. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music
/08527. Accessed 11 January 2012.
Kun, Josh. Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005.
Ledbetter, Gordon. The Great Irish Tenor. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977.
Litwack, Leon. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York:
Vintage Books, 1998.
Marinaccio, Rocco. “I Get No Kick from Assimilation or, ‘My’ Frank Sinatra
Problem.” In Frank Sinatra: History, Identity, and Italian American Culture,
edited by Stanislao Pugliese, 179–97. New York: Palgrave, 2004.
McCracken, Allison. “ ‘God’s Gift to Us Girls’: Crooning, Gender, and the Re-Creation
of American Popular Songs, 1928–1933.” American Music 17 (1999): 365–95.
Mercer, Kobena. “Black Hair/Style Politics.” New Formations, no. 3 (1987): 33–54.
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of
Jim Crow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Monson, Ingrid. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007.
———. “The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions
in Jazz Historical Discourse.” This Journal 48 (1995): 396–422.
Nyong’o, Tavia. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of
Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Palmer, Robert. Blues and Chaos: The Musical Writing of Robert Palmer. Edited by
Anthony DeCurtis. New York: Scribner, 2009.
Pecknold, Diane. The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Ramsey, Guthrie P. Jr. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip Hop. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003.
———. “Who Hears Here? Black Music, Critical Bias, and the Musicological Skin
Trade.” Musical Quarterly 85 (2001): 1–52.
Ritz, David. Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye. New York: Da Capo Press, 1991.
Roberts, Tamara. “Michael Jackson’s Kingdom: Music, Race, and the Sound of the
Mainstream.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 23 (2011): 19–39.
Santoro, Gene. Stir It Up: Musical Mixes from Roots to Jazz. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997.

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Shaw, Arnold. Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues. New York:
Collier Books, 1978.
———. The World of Soul: Black America’s Contribution to the Pop Music Scene. New
York: Cowles Book Co., 1970.
Sinclair, John. “Harold Battiste: Prophet with Honor in His Own Land,” John
Sinclair (blog, April 1994). www.johnsinclair.us/index.php?option=com_
content&task=view&id=751&Itemid=2. Accessed 12 January 2011.
Sotiropoulos, Karen. Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Southern, Eileen. “Conversation with William Clarence ‘Billy’ Eckstine: ‘Mr. B’ of
Ballad and Bop.” Black Perspective in Music 7 (1979): 182–98.
———. “Conversation with William Clarence ‘Billy’ Eckstine: ‘Mr. B’ of Ballad and
Bop, Part II.” Black Perspective in Music 8 (1980): 54–64.
Sprayberry, Gary. “Interrupted Melody: The 1956 Attack on Nat ‘King’ Cole.”
Alabama Heritage, no. 71 (2004): 16–24.
Stephens, Vincent. “Crooning on the Fault Lines: Theorizing Jazz and Pop Vocal
Singing Discourse in the Rock Era, 1955–1978.” American Music 26 (2008):
156–95.
Talty, Stephen. Mulatto America—At the Crossroads of Black and White Culture: A
Social History. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Thomas, Tony. Music for the Movies. South Brunswick, NJ, and New York: A. S. Barnes
and Company, 1973.
Travis, Dempsey. An Autobiography of Black Jazz. Chicago: Urban Research Institute,
1983.
Trigg, Christopher. “A Change Ain’t Gonna Come: Sam Cooke and the Protest
Song.” University of Toronto Quarterly 79 (2010): 991–1003.
Wald, Elijah. How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of
American Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and
Race Relations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Werner, Craig. A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America. New
York: Plume Books, 1998.
———. Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Whyte, William H. Jr. The Organization Man. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1956.
Wolff, Daniel, with S. R. Crain, Clifton White, and G. David Tenenbaum. You Send
Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke. New York: W. Morrow, 1995.
Zak, Albin J. III. I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
———. The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records. Berkeley: University of
California, 2001.
Newspapers and Magazines

Amsterdam News
Atlanta Daily World
Billboard
Chicago Defender

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Chicago Tribune
Down Beat
Ebony
Goldmine
Jet
Life
London Evening Standard
Look
Los Angeles Sentinel
Los Angeles Times
Metronome
New York Journal-American
New York Times
New York Times Magazine
Newsweek
Pittsburgh Courier
Sepia
Slate
Southerner
Stereo Review
Tan
Time
Variety
Washington Post
Interviews by Author
Adams, Ted. Telephone interview. 8 September 2010.
Adler, Lou. Telephone interview. 3 January 2011.
Clay, Otis. Interview. Chicago, 4 June 2009.
Johnson, Plas. Telephone interview. 6 January 2011.
Robinson-Jones, Jeanette. Telephone interview. 10 June 2009.
Wilson, Gerald. Telephone interview. 19 January 2011.
Abstract
Though African American singer, songwriter, and entrepreneur Sam Cooke

(1931–1964) is commonly celebrated as a pioneering soul singer, the prepon-
derance of Cooke recordings suggesting to many critics a “white” middle-of-
the-road pop sound has troubled this reception. From June 1957 until the
end of 1959, Cooke recorded for the independent label Keen Records, where
he charted a course for realizing his professional and socioeconomic aspira-
tions, including his determination to harness the prestige attached to the long-
playing album and the “album artist.” This article explores relationships
between the repertory, performances, and production on three Keen album
tracks: “Danny Boy,” “My Foolish Heart,” and “I’ve Got a Right to Sing the

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC
Blues.” These recordings reveal Cooke’s seldom-noted proximity to contem-

poraneous figures and concerns: “Irish tenor” Morton Downey, who built a
career on the fluidity between ethnic identity and pop’s transparent “white-
ness”; Billy Eckstine, who struggled to navigate the racial and sexual politics of
the pop balladeer; and the black studio musicians whose campaign for em-
ployment equity in 1950s Los Angeles found resonance with Cooke’s vision.
Taking Cooke’s endeavor seriously positions us to assess freshly Cooke’s skills
as a vocalist, the processes through which “pop” becomes racialized as white,
and intractable methodological challenges in black music studies.
Keywords: Sam Cooke, popular music, long-playing album, African American

vocalists, reception history

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC

This Content Downloaded From 207.62.77.131 On Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

This Content Downloaded From 207.62.77.131 On Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist—A Reinvention in Three Songs

Author(s): Mark Burford

This content downloaded from

A Retreat from Listening?

This content downloaded from

linked in the popular imagination to narratives of rapprochement: a newly

2. For an astute historical analysis of the ambivalent investment in cultural hybridity as a

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

assessment communicates certain commonplace understandings of postwar

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

19. Agawu, “Invention of African Rhythm.”

This content downloaded from

Cooke’s Keen LPs and the “Album Artist”

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

Keir Keightley’s work on postwar adult-oriented popular music has shown,

32. See Keightley, “Music for Middlebrows,” 315–16.

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

Table 1 Sam Cooke’s Keen Albums

Song titles are as they appear on the albums.

You Send Me Oh, Look at Me Now God Bless the Child

mid-1950s, encouraging the release of recordings of newer songs by younger

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

Song Songwriters Published Album

This content downloaded from

207.62.77.131 on Fri, 08 May 2020 07:09:32 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Song Songwriters Published Album

This content downloaded from

“A modern Morton Downey . . . with today’s POP

As chief architect of Cooke’s crossover to popular music, Blackwell identified

46. Zak, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody, 215.

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

Cooke’s “Danny Boy,” an Irish-identified song recorded with a country music

This content downloaded from

Example 1a Sam Cooke, “Danny Boy,” 1:19–2:00, mm. 1–17

Example 1b Sam Cooke’s “Yodel”

This content downloaded from

calling attention to the “gospel quality” in their voices. Chicago-born gospel

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

the mainstream, that I believe captures the crux of Cooke’s unorthodox

This content downloaded from

The Challenge of the Black Balladeer: “My Foolish Heart”

Give me Sinatra’s money and I will give him my voice.73

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

“COLE AND YOUR DAUGHTER,” members of the North Alabama

This content downloaded from