Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963

Colin Fleming

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501355554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Shelved for over 20 years, Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, stands alongside Otis Redding's Live in Europe and James Brown's Live at the Apollo as one of the finest live soul albums ever made. It also reveals a musical, spiritual, emotional, and social journey played out over one night on the stage of a sweaty Miami club, as Cooke made music that encapsulated everything he had ever cut, channeling forces that would soon birth "A Change is Gonna Come, " the most important soul song ever written. This book covers Cooke's days with the Soul Stirrers, the gospel unit that was inventing a strand of soul in the 1950s, and continues on to his string of hit singles as a solo artist that reveal far more about this complex man and the complex music he was always fashioning. A writer and an agent of social change, he absorbed the teachings of Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan while reconciling his own identity and what fans expected of him. Fleming explores how this towering soul artist came to reconcile so many disparate elements on a Florida stage on a winter night in 1963-a stage that extended well into the future, beyond Cooke's own life, beyond the 1960s, and into a perpetual here-and-now. Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 will resonate so long as we all have need to look into ourselves and square our differences and become more human, and more connected with others in our humanity.

1

The Man Who Went

From the very first time I heard him sing—a mere two bars of the voice of voices—I have known and experienced Sam Cooke’s genius as an art of sending us where we need to go, oftentimes before we even know it. I think that’s what our greatest artists do and can’t help but do. Over the course of decades, I’ve made regular journeys with Sam Cooke, and he has led me into places in my life, and periods, that I likely would not have come to on my own, which play a role in who I am, who I become, as I’m certain Sam Cooke has done for many others, each in our own way.

Some of these stages had obvious plot points and readily translate to story form, what you share with a buddy. Others have been of an internal nature, the schema of precious innards, the heart that is behind the physical heart, where pain and hope register the most.

Oftentimes now we simply see “Sam Cooke, inventor of soul,” the soundbite-style appellation we’re increasingly presented with in an age of fake news and lazy labels that can stand in the way of the vital journeys a Sam Cooke impels us to make. And maybe it’s akin to throwing mud on a mirror, but I’ve never thought it matters if Sam Cooke invented soul, because even if he did, that accomplishment would feature around the lower rungs of his achievements, given the towering nature of much of everything else he did. Sam Cooke was a master of transcending labels. Transcendence: that’s a pretty good place to start with Sam Cooke.

One song—the song Sam Cooke was most about and remains most about—cannot be placed in a single box, is not a “type,” or a “kind,” no more than Cooke himself was at his considerable best, as on a night in Miami, in the winter of 1963, when he cut a live album redefining our collective sense—as we listen from our various backgrounds, demographics, ages—of what a concert and field recording could be, both in the moment of its making and with a future it would help to shape.

I think what I like best about music—and it took me years to pinpoint this—is energy. You cite “energy” to someone, and they’ll often think you mean pep, being able to get out of the bed all ready to go in the morning, power through the deadline at night. But that’s not what artistic energy really is, what Sam Cooke’s energy was about. There’s no greater quotient of energy in any slab of sound than there is with Live at the Harlem Square Club, the record cut that night in Florida. Or if there is, I don’t know about it. If sound could put its hands on your shoulders and shake you into trying to do more than you’ve been doing, it’s this record.

I used to be hesitant to approach people as a kid, but when I heard Harlem Square Club playing at a record store, knowing what it was, I remember walking over to the man behind the counter, asking if he might turn it up.

“Happy to,” he said, like we both needed that jolt, the “carry on better in your day” jolt, which can take all kinds of forms.

At times in my life, this record has given me courage to do what I didn’t think I could do. What maybe I couldn’t have done without it. It’s taught me about myself, about writing, about people I might have nothing in common with but whom I’d like to be closer to.

Great teachers have great energy, and the best records number among our best teachers. You return to them again and again, and even when the lesson looks to be what the lesson was before, you don’t experience that way. It’s always new, there’s more to be had, a different level to be glimpsed. And, with Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, we certainly never hear the lesson the same way. If Sam Cooke was but the inventor of soul, if that was his box, this album, this lesson, this energy, this piece of expansive human life, could not be what it is. And it’s a doozy. It’ll change your life, as I believe it has helped changed the world around all of us.

* * *

In order to arrive in that Miami club on that winter night, such that we may be fully present for what Cooke wishes us to hear, we must first consider the man’s sense of responsibility, traffic in his code of guiding conduct. Dig down into an ethos that fashioned the marching orders of how a goodly amount of an artistic life would be approached.

For a lot of people, “You Send Me”—Cooke’s opening attempt to land a pop hit in 1957—is the primary Cooke number they knew. Waxed in LA in June, released in September on the Keen label—before Cooke makes his jump to RCA—the song was a mega-hit—though no one, save maybe Sam, expected it to do too much—that has never gone away, despite being the intended B-side of the George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” which seems like a de rigueur number for people to cut at the time.

Not only was “You Send Me” #1 on Billboard’s Rhythm and Blues Record Chart, it attained the same mantle in the Hot 100. It was a hit with white people, which Cooke’s buddies hadn’t anticipated. There were crossover artists, but this was a time of boxes, and especially racial boxes, with the likes of Pat Boone covering Little Richard numbers. Obviously no one was told what the official reason was, but the material is hard to hear without concluding that a point of de-Blacking Black music was being made.

Richard would say that white people always liked his work—which is true, going by the charts—but flamboyance had the ironic effect of situating him within his own particular category. Whereas, if Cooke didn’t invent soul—and he has his case—then he made soul and rhythm and blues music, by way of a gospel background. People knew those groupings, and they were Black as could be. But from the start, Sam Cooke held a belief that he was for everyone.

So long as there are oldies stations and a vogue for the tuneful past, there will be “You Send Me.” The song is laden with pronouns, and as the Beatles discovered—in large part thanks to Cooke—when you use pronouns you tend to foreground immediacy. The song as whisper-in-the-ear to that one person. Who, of course, may well be three million people. We see from this earliest, pre-Miami 1963 moment—the start of the journey to Miami—that Cooke was a master of connection and cross-pollination.

“You Send Me” was not my first personal connection to Cooke. I had a musical go-between, after a fashion. At fifteen I was heavily into the Animals, the band with the toughest sound of all the British Invasion acts. The Beatles were in thrall to Black music, and the Rolling Stones did a Modernistically bastardized version of it—a sort of blue s Cubism—but the Animals played legit rhythm and blues with heavier doses of felicity than other devotees like the Pretty Things. They weren’t amazing writers themselves—covers were their bag, and if that’s how you’re going to roll, you not only need redoubtable skills in at least partially making something your own, you need good taste. Put another way, a badass record collection.

Eric Burdon and his mates must have had that, because they did a cover of Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me” that made me think—or maybe inwardly demand/scream—that I had to hear the original.

Cooke’s rendition possessed a higher swing quotient. He might as well have employed the Count Basie band to back him, this juggernaut of rhythm, but the thing was, most of that rhythm, remarkably, came from the polyphonies generated by one voice.

There was also Lou Rawls on backing vocals providing considerable assistance—I mean, look, it’s Lou Rawls—but the one-man-chorus-of-voices thing was new to me. How could it not be? Cooke seemed to sing both his own melody and his own harmony. Plain nuts, as if you were witnessing someone defying musical physics. I’d read about jazz musicians à la John Coltrane being able to split notes. Now I honestly wondered if one dude out there had split his entire voice.

Later I’d listen to Robert Johnson and wonder how there were only two hands on that particular guitar. Cooke was the singing version of this suspension of belief, a near-orgastic bafflement—that is, the confusion was pleasurable because it produced awe and a craving to learn and hear more—and when such a force enters your life, it will remain by your side—on all your sides, given Cooke’s refulgent, prismatic vocal style.

But the Cooke ethos, and what will become the journey to the Harlem Square Club and, in following, the composition of the most significant of all American pop songs, is encapsulated in “You Send Me.”

The verb is notable, telling—it is everything. When we are sent somewhere, there is an element of duty. For instance, we are not sent to the store, when we are young, for a pack of baseball cards. That’s our treat, procured on our time, at the cost of some allowance money, etc. We’re sent for a carton of milk. For the family. To make mom’s day easier. We’re sent away again to work on our math homework. The duty of self-improvement and what those who love us and know better esteem as necessary. Fetch our sister at the neighbor’s. Your partner sends you into the baby’s room to tend to her crying because it’s your turn this time. There is a built-in idea of duty to being sent. The commander sends the troops out of the boats and up a beach in Normandy.

Horatio Hornblower, the hero of C.S. Forester’s nautical novels, has this mad crush on duty. No matter how difficult a situation, if duty calls, well, duty is the end all, be all. What the execution of duty requires is a measure of character and also some iteration of self-awareness.

Forester rendered the character in this manner because he was writing for adolescent boys he was trying to help become men, to do what instilling he could for them, and with them, in those intervening years. Likewise, Franz Schubert’s 1827 song-cycle Winterreise commences with its nameless young protagonist standing outside of the home of his beloved in the middle of the winter night. There is little lambency. Not, really, unlike being in that Miami club that Sam Cooke commandeers in 1963, only with garment-penetrating frigidity in the air rather than sweat running down the walls. We have the sense of a mission, a sending, the tacit realization of a matter of gravest consequence, but no additional details. The sending is everything. I think the best artists understand this better than anyone. Sam Cooke is one of them.

* * *

In spring 1964, Cooke appeared on American Bandstand, sitting down with Dick Clark—so close, in fact, that their thighs touched, which was as shocking in its way as Elvis dry-humping the air on TV in 1956, given that this was a Black man and a white man—for a quick interview in which Clark asks Cooke when and how it all began for him. Cooke goes right back to 1957 and “You Send Me.”

You can tell Clark is an honorable person. He also knows his Sam Cooke history. Prior to “You Send Me,” Cooke sang with the Soul Stirrers, a gospel band and a guaranteed paycheck. There was security in that gig, if not riches. Gospel often differed primarily from rhythm and blues in large part because of its subject matter, not its actual timbre. But if you didn’t understand the English language and only understood, as we all can, a kickass beat, you wouldn’t have known this wasn’t Chuck Berry riffing away with pianist Johnny Johnson, or the glorious—and streetwise—Five Royales cutting loose on “The Slummer the Slum.”

A band like the Stirrers couldn’t be massive, but they could be a national presence. The top gospel units toured the same Chitlin Circuit south of the Mason-Dixon line as the proto-soul, swamp blues, and jazz guys, only their quorums centered on the Lord, and less about what John Lennon later said were mostly songs about fucking.

Cooke is a half-dozen years deep into a successful career, but Clark, who clearly looks up to the guy, asks him why he struck out on his own in the first place, and Cooke baldly states, “My economic situation.” He wanted more iron, as they say.

We have to realize what a risk the solo venture was for Cooke. You leave gospel, you cannot go back. You’ve been out in the world, tainted, rendered less pure in the eyes of the gospel audience, never mind how sexual in nature a gospel concert by the Soul Stirrers could be. We have this same tacit understanding with whatever decision the protagonist of Winterreise has made. Sing secular songs, at this time, and in the gospel world, a door closed behind you, the bolt shot.

But for Cooke to have his desired commercial success, he’ll need more than what was thought of at the time as the record buying market primarily for African Americans. He’ll have to infiltrate white suburbia, infiltrate the homes of kids—often girls—whose parents thought Elvis Presley’s routine was tantamount to porn that Ed Sullivan let air on his show for some befuddling reason. It’s like Josh Gibson. Josh Gibson may have been the finest catcher of all-time, the most prodigious slugger as well—more so than Babe Ruth. But you wouldn’t have known it—and we still don’t know it now—because Josh Gibson never had his fair chance to play in the Majors, on account of the demonic scourge of segregation.

Black musical artists who didn’t crossover during the 1950s were in this Gibson-ish boat. Those that did make the jump can be artists that we now think of as shaded to the white cultural palette—Nat King Cole, as one example. If you know Cole’s work leading a piano trio, you know that he was a driving, funky player. But that’s not most people, and it wasn’t then—they knew the warblings , the pretty ballads, that safe a reminder that you were still on the right side of the tracks—that is, away from the juke joints, a venue like Miami’s Harlem Square Club. “The Christmas Song” sounds Black but in a pop Paul Robeson vein. It starts a drive. It doesn’t make the full trip.

Clark respected Cooke—who had just performed “Ain’t That Good News,” the title track of his just-released thirteenth and final studio album—and understood his gifts as a writer, which will be central to our story. Billie Holiday and Elvis Presley might have received the occasional songwriting credit or a suggested line or a flash of a lick, but Cooke didn’t garner his songwriting credits in this fashion. He sat down with a guitar and he wrote the songs. You can speak of him like a Bob Dylan that way. We don’t, but we need to start.

Clarke asks Cooke how many songs he has composed to date in the half-dozen years since his leap of faith in himself—or what we might call a leg of his journey—and Cooke ponders, as if there’s no quantifiable answer. The two men, though, come back to “You Send Me,” with its duty-bound verb. Clark goes so far as to get metaphysical and ask Cooke what the “answer” is, which sounds a bit like he’s hoping for a major helping of revelation.

“Well,” Cooke says, “if you observe what’s going on, try to figure out how people are thinking, and determine the times of your day, I think you can always write something that people will understand.”

The aphoristic answer is profound. Cooke saw the world—including its minutiae—with a profundity of understandi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Man Who Went
• 2 Soul Rest, Soul Launch
• 3 A Little Night Music
• 4 Under the Trees and Over in Overtown
• 5 Circle Sounds
• 6 Promissory Party
• Copyright