extraordinary skills of translation and negotiation, as well as some masking. The interracial rock and roll explosion ignited by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and Elvis a few years earlier had run up against serious resistance. Hypersensitive to the threat of international communism, mainstream politicians painted any challenge to American “normalcy” as part of an all-encompassing communist plot. Even when their methods attracted some timorous and belated criticism, J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy did not defy the mainstream in their ideology. John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in large part because his anti-communism was more extreme. In this political climate, any agitation on social issues, including any challenge to conventional racial or sexual roles, drew sustained fire. In the South, where most whites colored King’s movement dark red, that wasn’t a metaphor.
The new “mongrel music” provided an inviting target. In the mid-fifties, rock and roll rattled a staid McCarthy-era America with disconcerting images of unfettered sexual energy that frequently brought blacks and whites together on suddenly integrated dance floors. Pictures of Little Richard, eyes rolled back underneath a distinctly bizarre mountain of hair, confronted cold war–era America with images from one of its worst nightmares. It didn’t help that he seemed at least as interested in the white boys as the sisters they were supposed to be protecting. The hysterical tone of the attacks comes through clearly in a pamphlet distributed to white parents: “Help save the youth of America! Don’t let your children buy or listen to these Negro records. The screaming, idiotic words and savage music are undermining the morals of our white American youth.”
The authorities cracked down on the interracial music scene. Chuck Berry went to jail; Little Richard “retired” to the ambiguous safety of the church, throwing his diamond rings in the river—”they never would tell us what river,” laments Solomon Burke—and denouncing rock and roll as the devil’s music after he dreamed of his own damnation. Pioneer disc jockey Alan Freed, who made little distinction between rock and roll and rhythm and blues, was hounded into exile in a payola scandal that somehow let clean-cut pop impresario Dick Clark escape unscathed. Sanitized teen idols like Fabian and Frankie Avalon—many of them Italian Americans dark enough to remain exotic without presenting a threat to “racial purity”—channeled the uncontained sexual energy of the pioneers into chaperoned romance guaranteed not to move more than a few steps past first base.
Enter Sam Cooke with a “crossover” vision that helped redefine American popular music. By the time “You Send Me” reached number one in 1957, Cooke had almost a decade of mileage on the gospel highway, first with Chicago’s Highway QCs and then with the Soul Stirrers, where he replaced the legendary R. H. Harris as lead vocalist. Like blues guitarists, jazz instrumentalists, and hip-hop vocalists, gospel quartets often fought it out head-to-head for audience approval. A singer had to be on his game or he wasn’t going to hold the stage. Just that simple. Never able to stand toe-to-toe with the raw power of gospel veterans like Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones, Ira Tucker of the Dixie Hummingbirds, the incomparable Clarence Fountain of the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, or Archie Brownlee of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, Cooke finessed the issue. Moving away from Harris’s combination of raw power and down-home phrasing, Cooke developed the personal style described perfectly by Daniel Wolff in his definitive biography, You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke: “When Sam took hold of a note . . . it wasn’t the traditional nonverbal moan that Holiness congregations were used to. It wasn’t a cry of pain. Instead, he decorated the note, embellishing the melody till it hung, fragile as lace, in the air over the congregation.”
Cooke’s new approach resulted in the kind of competitive stalemate that might emerge in a one-on-one game between Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Michael Jordan. Each star kept his supporters, but each had to refine his style. Those who watched Cooke with the Soul Stirrers remembered that for the younger members of the audience, especially the women, he was the man. Cooke’s audience heard his voice as a response to the power of the moan and the redemptive vision. “Come Go with Me” revives the vision of the promised land while “Pilgrim of Sorrow” testifies to the reality of the burden. But the key to Cooke’s success, even within the gospel world, lay in his provocative blending of sex and spirituality in “Jesus Gave Me Water” and “Touch the Hem of His Garment.” Mostly Cooke pretended to stay just—and only just—this side of the line from Ray Charles’s frankly sexual “I Got a Woman” and “What’d I Say.” But, as Willie Dixon, Cooke’s contemporary on the blues side of Chicago’s musical tracks, put it: “The men don’t know but the little girls understand.”
The black girls in the gospel audience, the same teenagers who listened to Little Richard and Chuck Berry, understood Cooke’s star potential clearly. So did Sam. During his five years of gospel stardom, he developed an ideal crossover style: delicate, almost ethereal, but with enough of Harris’s and Fountain’s power to provide a clear alternative to pop crooning. He also had the advantage of seeing what had happened to the crossover rock and rollers when they let the mask slip too far. Cooke’s foray into the mainstream established the approach refined by Berry Gordy’s Motown. There were three basic principles: innocent (if sometimes masked) lyrics; arrangements (frequently built around strings) that emphasized hooks; and smooth background harmonies (often provided by white studio singers).
The call and response on the crossover dream connected singers from Memphis to Manhattan. Recording for New York’s Atlantic Records, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters transformed their gospel roots into a sweet soul style that anticipated Cooke’s on hits such as “Such a Night,” later covered by Elvis Presley, and “Honey Love.” At the same time Cooke was recording “Cupid” and “Only Sixteen,” the girl groups, often produced by studio genius Phil Spector, were exploring parallel approaches. The powerful bass line and softly strumming guitar in Jerry Butler and the Impressions’ “For Your Precious Love” anticipate the gospel soul of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” a secularized remake of the gospel standard “Stand By Me Father.” Against a deceptively beautiful orchestral backdrop, King’s lyrics ride the power of a soul-deep bass line. Looking out on a darkened landscape where “the moon is the only light we’ll see,” King searches for the strength to overcome his sense of isolation. “I won’t be afraid, no I won’t be afraid,” he repeats, “Just as long as you stand by me.” It’s a classic case of political masking. Listeners unaware of the violence facing the beloved community can hear the song as a plea for romantic connection. But if you visualize a lone SNCC organizer on a Southern back road, the song grows deeper.
Even while he was appealing to the integrated teen audience of Dick Clark’s Saturday Night Show, Cooke continued to play one-nighters for predominantly black audiences in the South. On New Year’s Eve 1962, as he was preparing a musical assault on Las Vegas, he more than held his own at a gospel concert in Newark, New Jersey, where he appeared alongside the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Caravan Singers, and the latest incarnation of the Soul Stirrers. Cooke explained his continuing connection with his roots: “When the whites are through with Sammy Davis, Jr., he won’t have anywhere to play. I’ll always be able to go back to my people ‘cause I’m never gonna stop singing to them. No matter how big I get, I’m still gonna do my dates down South. Still gonna do those kind of shows. I’m not gonna leave my base.” James Brown—and Ella Baker—would have understood.
If you listen to Cooke’s crossover hits with an awareness of masking, some wonderful moments, otherwise invisible, come into focus. One of Cooke’s biggest hits, “Wonderful World” (later covered by soul legends Herman’s Hermits and James Taylor) opens with what seems to be a high school cliché: “Don’t know much about history / don’t know much biology.” The cliché’s worth a second thought. Because, if there are two things that a black man in pop music needed to encourage the white audience to forget, they were history and biology, at least the parts involving skin color and sexuality. If you could do that, who knows? The world just might turn out to be as wonderful as Leave It to Beaver and Camelot promised.
7
Solid Gold Coffins:Phil Spector and the Girl Group Blues
Even when Cooke was creating his pop hits, he remembered his gospel roots. That wasn’t