Episode 60: “You Send Me” by Sam Cooke

A History of Folk Music in 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 60: You Send Me by Sam Cook.

We've talked before about how the music that became known as Soul had its roots in gospel music.

But today, we're going to have a look at the first big star of that music to get his start as a professional gospel singer, rather than as a rhythm and blues singer who included a little bit of gospel feeling.

Sam Cook was, in many ways, the most important black musician of the late fifties and early sixties, and without him it's doubtful whether we would have the genre of soul as we know it to day.

But when he started out, he was someone who worked exclusively in the gospel field, and within that field field he was something of a superstar.

He was also someone who, as admirable as he was as a singer, was far less admirable in his behaviour towards other people, especially the women in his life.

And while that's something that will come up more in future episodes, it's worth noting here.

Cook started out as a teenager in the 1940s, performing in gospel groups around Chicago, which, as we've talked about before, was the city where a whole new form of gospel music was being created at that point, spearheaded by Thomas Dorsey.

Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, and Sister Rosetta Tharp were all living and performing in the city during young Sam's formative years, but the biggest influence on him was a group called the Soul Stirrers.

The Soul Stirrers had started out in twenty six as a group in what was called the Jubilee style, the style that black singers of spiritual music sang in the period before Thomas Dorsey revolutionized gospel music.

There are no recordings of the soul stirrers in that style, but this is probably the most famous Jubilee recording.

coming for the carry me

up and I'm some time

coming for the carry me

But as Thomas Dorsey and the musicians around him started to create the music we now think of as gospel, the soul stirvers switched styles and became one of the first and best gospel quartets in the new style.

In the late forties, the soul stirvers signed to specialty records, one of the first acts to sign to the label, and recorded a series of classic singles led by R.

H.

Harris, who was regarded by many as the greatest gospel singer of the age.

You need a friend,

you need a friend.

Sam Cook was was one of seven children, the son of Reverend Charles Cook and his wife Annie May, and from a very early age the Reverend Cook had been training them as singers.

Five of them would perform regularly around churches in the area under the name the Singing Children.

Young Sam was taught religion by his father, but he was also taught that there was no prohibition in the Bible against worldly success.

Indeed, the Reverend Cook taught him two things that would matter in his life even more than his religion would.

The first was that whatever it is you do in life, you try to do it the best you can.

You never do anything by halves, and if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing properly.

And the second was that you do whatever is necessary to give yourself the best possible life, and don't worry about who you step on to do it.

After spending some time with his family group, Cook joined a newly formed gospel group, who had heard him singing the Inkspots song, If I Didn't Care, to a girl.

That group was called the Highway QCs, and a version of the group still exists to this day.

Sam Cook only stayed with them a couple of years.

and never recorded with them, but they replaced him with a sound-alike singer, Johnny Taylor, And listening to Taylor's recordings with the group, you can get some idea of what they sounded like when Sam was a member.

Bright

The rest of the group were decent singers, but Sam Cook was absolutely, unquestionably, the star of the Highway QCs.

Creedell Copeland, one of the group's members, later said, all we had to do was stand behind Sam.

Our claim to fame was that Sam's voice was so captivating, we didn't have to do anything else.

The group didn't make a huge amount of money, and they kept talking about going in a pop direction, rather than just singing gospel songs, and Sam was certainly singing a lot of secular music in his own time.

He loved gospel music as much as anyone, but he was also learning from people like Gene Autry or Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, and he was slowly developing into a singer who could do absolutely anything with his voice.

But his biggest influence was still R.

H.

Harris of the Soul Stirvers, who was the most important person in the Gospel Quartet field.

This wasn't just because he was the most talented of all the quartet singers, though he was, and that was certainly part of it, but because he was the joint leader of a movement to professionalize the gospel quartet movement.

Just as a quick explanation, in both black Gospel and in the white gospel music euphemistically called Southern Gospel, the term quartet is used for groups which might have five, six, or even more people in them.

I'll generally refer to all of these as groups because I'm not from the gospel world, but I'll use the term quartet when talking about things like the National Quartet Convention, and I may slip between the two interchangeably at times.

Just know that if I mention quartets, I'm not just talking about groups with exactly four people in them.

Harris worked with a less well-known singer called Abraham Battle, and with Charlie Bridges of another popular group, the famous Blue Jays.

Together they founded the National Quartet Convention, which existed to try to take all the young gospel quartets who were springing up all over the place, and most of whom had casual attitudes to their music music and their on-stage appearance, and teach them how to comport themselves in a manner that the organisation's leaders considered appropriate for a gospel singer.

The Highway QCs joined the convention, of course, and they considered themselves to be disciples, in a sense, of the soul-stirrers, who they simultaneously considered to be their mentors and thought were jealous of the QC's.

It was normal at the time for gospel groups to turn up at each other's shows, and if they were popular enough, they would be invited up to sing, and sometimes even take over the show.

When the Highway QCs turned up at Soul Stirvers' shows, though, the Soul Stirvers would act as if they didn't know them, and would only invite them onto the stage if the audience absolutely insisted, and would then limit their performance to a single song.

From the Highway QC's point of view, the only only possible explanation was that the soul stirrers were terrified of the competition.

A more likely explanation is probably that they were just more interested in putting on their own show than in giving space to some kids who thought they were the next big thing.

On the other hand, to all the younger kids around Chicago, the Highway QC's were clearly the group to beat, and people like a young singer named Lou Rawls looked up to them as something to aspire to.

And soon the QC's found themselves being mentored by R.B.

Robinson, one of the Soul Stirrers.

Robinson would train them and help them get better gigs, and the QC's became convinced they were headed for the big time.

But it turned out that behind the scenes there had been trouble in the Soul Stirrers.

Harris had, more and more, come to think of himself as the real star of the group, and quit to go solo.

It had looked likely for a while that he would do so, and when Robinson had appeared to be mentoring the QC's, what he was actually doing was training their lead singer, so that when R.

H.

Harris eventually quit, they would have someone to take his place.

The other Highway QC's were heartbroken, but Sam took the advice of his father, the Reverend Cook, who told him, Any time you can make a step higher, you go higher.

Don't worry about the other fellow.

You hold up for other folks, and they'll take advantage of you.

And so, in March 1951, Sam Cook went into the studio with the Soul Stirrers for his first ever recording session, three months after joining the group.

Art Roop, the head of Specialty Records, was not at all impressed that the group had got a new singer without telling him.

Rup had to admit that Cook could sing, but his performance on the first few songs, while impressive, was no R.

H.

Harris.

Go back to God.

But towards the end of the session, the soul stirvers insisted that they should record Jesus Gave Me Water, a song that had always been a highlight of the Highway QC's set.

Rube thought that this was ridiculous.

The Pilgrim Travellers had just had a hit with the song on Specialty not six months earlier.

What could Specialty possibly do with another version of the song so soon afterwards?

But the group insisted, and the result was absolutely majestic.

Crying glory, hallelujah, and it is wonders tale.

She left my Saviour singing.

She came back to him bringing the time she had a waterlogging.

Roop lost his misgivings both about the song and about the singer.

That was clearly going to be the group's next single.

The group themselves were still not completely sure about Cook as their singer.

He was younger than the rest of them, them, and he didn't have Harris's assurance and professionalism yet.

But they knew they had something with that song, which was released with Peace in the Valley on the B-side.

That song had been written by Thomas Dorsey 14 years earlier, but this was the first time it had been released on a record, at least by anyone of any prominence.

Jesus Gave Me Water was a hit, but the follow-ups were less successful.

And meanwhile, Art Rupe was starting to see the commercial potential in black styles of music other than gospel.

Even though Rupe loved gospel music, he realized when Laudy Miss Claudie became the biggest hit specialty had ever had to that point, that maybe he should refocus the label away from gospel and towards more secular styles of music.

Jesus Gave Me Water had consolidated Sam as the lead singer of the Soul Stirrers.

But while he was singing gospel, he wasn't living a very godly life.

He got married in 1953, but he'd already had at least one child with another woman, who he left with the baby, and he was sleeping around constantly while on the road, and more than once the women involved became pregnant.

But Cook treated women the same way he treated the groups he was in.

Use them for as long as they've got something you want, and then immediately cast them aside once it became inconvenient.

For the next few years, the Soul Stirvers would have one recording session every year, and the group continued touring.

But they didn't have any breakout success, even as other specialty acts like Lloyd Price, Jesse Belvin, and Guitar Slim were all selling hand over fist.

The Soul Stirvers were more popular as a live act than as a recording act, and hearing the live recording of them that Bumps Blackwell produced in 1955, it's easy to see why.

I crept out one morning, I found mother with folded arms,

and mother had her rise up.

She was looking up toward the sky, and I,

saw the tears and they fell down my mother's eyes.

But I can still hear the song mother was saying,

Mirama, there am I going

Bumps Blackwell was convinced that Cook needed to go solo and become a pop singer, and he was more convinced than ever when he produced the soul stirrers in the studio for the first time.

The reason, actually, was to do with Cook's laziness.

They'd gone into the studio, and it turned out that Cook hadn't written a song, and they needed one.

The rest of the group were upset with him, and he just told them to hand him a Bible.

He started flipping through, skimming to find something, and then he said, I got one.

He told the guitarist to play a couple of chords, and he started singing, and the song that came out, improvised off the top of his head, touched the hem of his garment, was perfect just as it was, and the group quickly cut it.

But their medicine would do no good.

When she touched him, the savior didn't see.

But still, he turned around and cried, somebody touch me.

She said it was I who just wanna touch the Him or Yogama.

I go I'll be very Blackwell knew then that Cook was a very, very special talent, and he and the rest of the people at Specialty became more and more insistent as 1956 went on that Sam Cook should become a secular solo performer, rather than performing in a gospel group.

The soul stirvers stirvers were only selling in the low tens of thousands.

A reasonable amount for a gospel group, but hardly the kinds of numbers that would make anyone rich.

Meanwhile, gospel-inspired performers were having massive hits with gospel songs with a couple of words changed.

There's an episode of South Park where they make fun of contemporary Christian music, saying you just have to take a normal song and change the word baby to Jesus.

In the mid-50s, things seemed to be the other way.

People were having a hit by taking gospel songs and changing the word Jesus to baby, or nearer as damn it.

Most famously and blatantly, there was Ray Charles, who did things like take this little light of mine.

I'm a gone lighter skin every day, every day we every day

every day every day every day I'll let my little lot shine

Well Jesus James gave me the mind I'm a gon I shine

Jesus James

I'm a goner

Jesus James gave me the mind I'm a gon'

shine every day every day every day

and turn it into this little girl of mine

do you love this little girl of mine

I want you people to know

this little girl of mine I take her everywhere and we'll go home.

One day I looked at my suit, my suit was new.

I looked at my shoes and they were too.

And that's why I

oh,

love the little girl of mine.

I do you love that this little girl of mine makes me happy when I'm sad.

This little girl of mine

But there were a number of other acts doing things that weren't that much less blatant.

And so Sam Cook travelled to New Orleans to record in Cosimo Matas' studio with the same musicians who had been responsible for so many rock and roll hits.

Or rather, Dale Cook did.

Sam was still a member of the Soul Stirrers at the time, and while he wanted to make himself into a star, he was also concerned that if he recorded secular music under his own name, he would damage his career as a gospel singer without necessarily getting a better career to replace it.

So the decision was made to put the single out under the name Dale Cook and maintain a small amount of plausible deniability.

If necessary, they could say that Dale was Sam's brother, because it was fairly well known that Sam came from a singing family, and indeed Sam's brother L.

C.,

whose name was just the initials L.

C.,

later went on to have some minor success as a singer himself, in a style very like Sam's.

As his first secular recording, they decided to record a new version of a gospel song that Cook had recorded with the Soul Stirrers, Wonderful.

I I know

the Lord is so wonderful.

Oh, Lord, oh, oh,

he's been my mother,

been my father too.

There's no one quick view out later, and that song became instead lovable.

Yes, she is.

I know, I know, I know, I know, I know she's lovable.

lovable, oh yes she is.

I

know she's lovable, lovable, lovable, lovable

And I know she's lovable, lovable, oh yes she is

just an angel,

a sweet little angel to me.

Around the time of the Dale Cook recording session, Sam's brother L.

C.

went to Memphis with his own group, where they appeared at the bottom of the bill for a charity Christmas show in aid of impoverished black youth.

The line-up of the show was almost entirely black, people like Ray Charles, B.B.

King, Rufus Thomas, and so on.

But Elvis Presley turned up briefly to come out on stage and wave to the crowd and say a few words.

The colonel wouldn't allow him to perform without getting paid, but did allow him to make an appearance, and he wanted to support the black community in Memphis.

Backstage, Elvis was happy to meet all the acts, but when he found out that L C was Sam's brother, he spent a full twenty minutes talking to L C about how great Sam was and how much he admired his singing with the Soul Stirrers.

Sam was such a distinctive voice that while the single came out as by Dale Cook, the DJs playing it would often introduce it as being by Dale Sam

and the Soul Stirrs started to be asked if they were going to sing Lovable in their shows.

Sam started to have doubts as to whether this move towards a pop style was really a good idea, and remained with the Soul Stirrs for the moment, though it's noticeable that songs like Mean Old World could easily be refigured into being secular songs, and have only a minimal amount of religious content.

This is a mean

This is a mean old world to live in all,

all by yourself.

Oh, this it is.

This is a mean world in which to be alone

without a friend, kindred, or even a home.

This is a mean old world to live in

But barely a week after the session that produced Mean Old World, Sam was sending Bumps Blackwell demos of new pop songs he'd written, which he thought Blackwell would be interested in producing.

Sam Cook was going to treat the Soul Stirrers the same way he'd treated the Highway QCs.

Cook flew to LA to meet with Blackwell and with Clifton White, a musician who had been for a long time the guitarist for the Mills Brothers, but who had recently left the band and started working with Blackwell as a session player.

White was very unimpressed with Cook.

He thought that the new song Cook sang to them, You Send Me, was just him repeating the same thing over and over again.

Art Rube helped them whittle the song choices down to four.

Rube had very particular ideas about what made for a commercial record.

For example, example, that a record had to be exactly two minutes and twenty seconds long, and the final choices for the session were made with Roop's criteria in mind.

The songs chosen were Summertime, You Send Me, another song Sam had written called You Were Made for Me, and Things You Do to Me.

which was written by a young man Bumps Blackwell had just taken on as his assistant, named Sonny Bono.

The recording session should have been completely straightforward.

Blackwell supervised it, and while the session was in LA, almost everyone there was a veteran New Orleans player.

Along with Cliff White on guitar, there was Renee Hall, a guitarist from New Orleans who had recently quit Billy Ward and the Dominoes and acted as instrumental arranger.

Harold Batiste, a New Orleans saxophone player who Bumps had taken under his wing and who wasn't playing on the session but ended up writing the vocal arrangements for the backing singers Earl Palmer, who had just moved to LA from New Orleans, and was starting to make a name for himself as a session player there, after his years of playing with Little Richard, Lloyd Price, and Fats Domino in Cosumo Matas's studio and Ted Vinson, the only LA native, on bass.

Vinson was a regular player on specialty sessions, and also had connections with almost every LA RB act, to the extent that it was his garage that Earth Angel by the Penguins had been recorded in.

And on backing vocals were the Lee Gotch singers, a white vocal group who are among the most in-demand vocalists in LA.

So this should have been a straightforward session, and it was until Art Roop turned up just after they'd recorded You Send Me.

You

thrill me.

I know you, you, you thrill me.

Darling, you, you, you, you

Rupe was horrified that Bumps and Batiste had put white backing vocalists behind Cook's vocals.

They were, in Rupe's view, trying to make Sam Cook sound like Billy Ward and his dominoes at best, and like a symphony orchestra at worst.

The Billy Ward reference was because Renee Hall had recently arranged a version of Stardust for the dominoes.

I

wonder

why I spend

the lonely night

dreaming of a sword.

The melody

haunts my reverie,

and I am worshipping with you

when our love was

And the new version of Summertime had something of the same feel.

So hush, little baby,

don't

you cry.

If Sam Cook was going to record for specialty, he wasn't going to have white vocalists backing him.

Rupe wanted black music, not something trying to be white, and the fact that he, a white man, was telling a room full of black musicians what counted as black music was not lost on Bumps Blackwell.

around a particular drum pattern.

I won't be late.

Hit her

Rupe had nearly fired Blackwell over that, and only relented when the record became a massive hit.

Now that instead of putting a male black gospel group behind Cook, as agreed, Blackwell had disobeyed him a second time and put white vocalists, including women, behind him.

Rupe decided it was the last straw.

Blackwell had to go.

He was also convinced that Sam Cook was only after money, because once Cook discovered that his solo contract only paid him a third of the royalties that the soul stirrers had been getting as a group, he started pushing for a greater share of the money.

Rupe didn't like that kind of greed from his artists.

Why should he pay the artist more than one cent per record sold?

But he still owed Blackwell a great deal of money.

They eventually came to an agreement.

Blackwell would leave specialty and take Sam Cooke and Cook's existing recordings with him, since he was so convinced they were going to be a hit.

Roop would keep the publishing rights to any songs Sam wrote, and would have an option on eight further Sam Cook recordings in the future.

But Cook and Blackwell were free to take You Send Me, Summer Time, and the rest, to a new label that wanted them for its first release, Keen.

And while they waited around for Keene to get itself set up, Sam made himself firmly a part of the Central Avenue music scene, hanging around with Gaynell Hodge, Jesse Belvin, Dootsy Williams, Gougie Renee, John Dolphin, and every one else who was part of the LA R and B community.

Meanwhile, the Soul Stirvers got Johnny Taylor, the man who had replaced Sam in the Highway QC's, to replace him in the Stirvers.

While Sam was out of the group, for the next few years he would be regularly involved with them, helping them out in recording sessions, producing them, and more.

When the single came out, everyone thought that summertime would be the hit, but You Send Me quickly found itself all over the airwaves and became massive.

me,

I know you

send me, whoa,

you, you, you, you,

send me

honesty.

You do, do, you

Several cover versions came out almost immediately.

Salmon Bumps didn't mind the versions by Jesse Belvin.

You

send me

I know you

send me

Darling you

send me

I know you do I know

I know

you

thrill me

I know you you you you thrill me Oh Cornell Gunter

Send me

I know you

Cindy,

darling you

Cindy,

honest

honesty.

They were friends and colleagues, and good luck to them if they had a hit with the song.

And anyway, they knew that Sam's version was better.

What they did object to was the white cover version by Theresa Vrewer.

Darling, you

send me,

I know

you

send me.

Darling, you

send me

honest, you

Even though her version was less of a sound-alike than the other LA RB versions, it was more offensive to them.

She was even copying Sam's woes.

She was nothing more than a thief, Blackwell argued.

And her version was charting and made the top ten.

Fortunately for them, Sam's version went to number one on both the RB and the pop charts, despite a catastrophic appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, which accidentally cut him off halfway through a song.

But there was still trouble with Art Roop.

Sam was still signed to Roop's company as a songwriter, and so he'd put You Send Me in the name of his brother, LC, so Roop wouldn't get any royalties.

Roop started legal action against him, and meanwhile he took took a demo Sam had recorded, I'll Come Running Back to You, and got Renee Hall and the Lee Gotch singers, the very people whose work on You Send Me and Summertime he'd despised so much, to record overdubs to make it sound as much like You Send Me as possible.

Folks say that you

found someone new

to do the things I used to

for you.

Just call my name,

I'm not ashamed.

I'll come running back to you.

Can't sleep at night,

I can't eat a bite

when you were mine.

And in retaliation for that being released, Bumps Blackwell took a song that he'd recorded months earlier with Little Richard, but which still hadn't been released, and got the specialty duo Don and Dewey to provide instrumental backing for a vocal group called The Valiant and put it out on Keen.

You got it far later,

it's all like the ball.

I went to rockin' and rollin', they hit you all the morning.

Well, and from the early early

Specialty had to rush release Little Richard's version to make sure it became the hit.

A blow for them, given that they were trying to drip feed the public what few Little Richard recordings they had left.

As 1957 drew to a close, Sam Cook was on top of the world.

But the seeds of his downfall were already in place.

He was upsetting all the right people with his desire to have control of his own career, but he was also hurting a lot of other people along the way people who had helped him, like the Highway QC's and the Soul Stirrs, and especially women.

He was about to divorce his first wife, and he had fathered a string of children with different women, all of whom he refused to acknowledge or support.

He was taking his father's maxims about only looking after yourself, and applying applying them to every aspect of life, with no regard to who it hurt.

But such was his talent and charm that even the people he hurt ended up defending him.

Over the next couple of times we see Sam Cook, we'll see him rising to ever greater artistic heights, but we'll also see the damage he caused to himself and to others, because the story of Sam Cook gets very, very unpleasant.

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