Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Guralnick Peter

Author:Guralnick, Peter [Guralnick, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: BIO004000
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Published: 2008-12-13T16:00:00+00:00

TWO WEEKS LATER, after a brief series of engagements in Nassau and the Bahamas, he started on another Henry Wynn Supersonic tour, accompanied once again by such familiar performers as Clyde McPhatter and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters but with the addition this time of nineteen-year-old Aretha Franklin as well. Aretha, who had ended up signing with Columbia Records the previous summer, had already had two Top 10 r&b hits but was experiencing some of the same difficulties in making the transition from gospel to pop that Sam initially had. After a number of polite supper-club bookings, two consecutive one-week engagements with Sam at Baltimore’s Royal and Washington’s Howard Theater in March had provided her with her first extended exposure to the chitlin circuit. She was awkward and self-conscious onstage, and Sam did his best to help her, offering useful tips on where to stand, how to phrase, how to get across, while, on her own, she studied his show with unswerving dedication every night. It was plain to anyone who observed this gawky, almost coltish young mother of two, with her spectacular three-octave range and deep-set sorrowful eyes, that she was hopelessly in love with Sam—and had been ever since they first met at a Soul Stirrers’ program at her father’s church in Detroit. She gave up Kools for Kents, she liked to say, because Sam smoked Kents; she kept a scrapbook of clippings about him, going back to his earliest pop days, and even saved a crumpled cigarette package of his from the first time he had played the Flame. She knew that if Sam had twenty girls in a room, each one would leave feeling that she was the only one—“he just made you feel like it was all about you.” But she knew, deep down, it wasn’t all about her. And so she asked L.C. to accompany her on the road.

She told him her father wouldn’t allow her to take his ’61 Lincoln out on the tour if L.C. didn’t drive it for her. L.C. wouldn’t have hesitated to accept, “but Sam didn’t want me to. He said, ‘Man, you’re a star. I don’t want you driving nobody.’ He said, ‘You got a career to think of. That’s why I got Charles to drive me instead of you.’ He fussed at me for a while, but then [after] I calmed him down, he said, ‘Well, if that’s what you want to do, go ahead and do it with your crazy self. You’re going to do what you want anyway.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I am, Sam.’ And he laughed. And I had fun on that tour, I had a good time with both my brothers and Aretha, too.”

It was heavy competition onstage. Hank Ballard never failed to get the crowd going. And Clyde, who had started drinking more and more and was sometimes preoccupied with matters he shared with no one else, could still bring the audience to its feet with his delicate falsetto. But for Aretha “it was Sam’s tour as far as I was concerned.

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