http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/ ... xml&coll=2
MUSIC
Aretha on list for Rock Hall's Cooke salute
Sunday, September 11, 2005
John Soeder
Plain Dealer Pop Music Critic
Aretha Franklin, Elvis Costello, the Dixie Hummingbirds and the Blind Boys of Alabama are among the artists set to sing the praises of Sam Cooke during the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum's American Music Masters salute to the quintessential soul man.
They'll celebrate Cooke's pop music in concert at 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 5, at Playhouse Square's State Theatre. Also on the bill are former J. Geils Band frontman Peter Wolf, Taj Mahal, Cissy Houston, Otis Clay and William Bell.
Most of those performers -- including Franklin -- will be joined by Lou Rawls for a second show at 6 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 6, at the State Theatre, with the focus on the gospel side of Cooke's career.
"It's fairly courageous to do two concerts," says Warren Zanes, the Rock Hall's vice president of education.
"But with Sam Cooke, you can't not give his gospel music as much attention as his pop music gets. It's appropriate for him."
Cooke, the son of a Baptist minister, was among the first performers inducted into the Rock Hall in 1986. Three years later, the hall also enshrined the Soul Stirrers, the gospel group in which Cooke got his start before he became a solo superstar on the pop charts.
He scored his first No. 1 single in 1957 with "You Send Me." More than two dozen other Top 40 hits followed for the native of Clarksdale, Miss., including "Chain Gang," "Twistin' the Night Away" and "Another Saturday Night."
The Rock Hall expects to line up additional artists for both concerts in Cooke's honor.
The performances are part of "A Change Is Gonna Come: The Life and Music of Sam Cooke," the 10th annual installment of the Rock Hall's American Music Masters series, presented in conjunction with Case Western Reserve University.
The weeklong event commences Monday, Oct. 31.
Also on the agenda is an academic symposium Saturday, Nov. 5, at Case's Ford Auditorium, with appearances by Cooke's brother L.C. Cooke, Leroy Crume of the Soul Stirrers and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chairman Julian Bond, among others. Peter Guralnick, author of "Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke" (to be published next month), will deliver the conference's keynote address.
Cooke was shot dead in 1964 at the age of 33. A motel manager in Los Angeles said she killed Cooke in self-defense after he tried to attack her. It was ruled a justifiable homicide.
Tickets for both Cooke tribute concerts go on sale Friday through Tickets.com outlets, or charge by phone, 1-800-766-6048 or 216-241-6000. Rock Hall members can buy tickets starting Monday by calling 216-515-8427.
http://purchase.tickets.com/buy/TicketP ... _val=COOKE
Tickets for the Saturday show are $20, $30 and $40. Tickets for the Sunday show are $15, $25 and $35.
If you purchase a ticket for the Saturday concert, you can buy a ticket to the Sunday concert for half-price.
Group discounts for parties of 20 or more are available for the Sunday show. Call 216-515-1228.
Tickets for the symposium, $30, go on sale Friday at Ticketmaster outlets, or charge by phone, 216-241-5555 (Cleveland) or 330-945-9400 (Akron).
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
jsoeder@plaind.com, 216-999-4562
© 2005 The Plain Dealer
© 2005 cleveland.com All Rights Reserved.
EC in Sam Cooke tribute , Nov. 5/6 '05
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Elvis seems to be only confirmed for Nov. 5th
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http://www.rockhall.com/programs/public.asp?id=607
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Case Western Reserve University will celebrate the legacy of Sam Cooke during the Tenth Annual American Music Masters Series this November. Sam Cooke, considered by many to be the definitive soul singer and crossover artist, a model for African-American entrepreneurship and one of the first performers to use music as a tool for social change, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the inaugural class of 1986.
The tribute will extend from October 31 – November 6 and will feature panels, films, educational programs, a day-long conference at Case and two tribute concerts. The main tribute concert will feature Cooke’s pop and R&B material and the gospel show will focus on his spiritual music.
Tribute Concerts:
MAIN TRIBUTE
The main tribute concert will take place Saturday, November 5 at 8:00 p.m. at the State Theatre, Playhouse Square.
Scheduled to perform:
·Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee Aretha Franklin
·Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee Elvis Costello
·Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee Solomon Burke
·Gavin DeGraw
·The Dixie Hummingbirds
·The Blind Boys of Alabama
·The Manhattans
·Cissy Houston
·Peter Wolf
·Taj Mahal
·Otis Clay
·William Bell
Tickets for this concert are $20, $30 and $40 and are on sale through Tickets.com.
Note: With the purchase of a full price Saturday tribute ticket, buyers will receive 50% off the price of a Sunday tribute concert ticket.
GOSPEL TRIBUTE:
The Gospel tribute will take place the following night, Sunday, November 6, at 6:00 p.m., also at the State Theatre, Playhouse Square.
Scheduled to perform:
·Aretha Franklin
·Solomon Burke
·Lou Rawls
·The Blind Boys of Alabama
·The Dixie Hummingbirds
·The Manhattans
·Michelle Williams of Destiny’s Child
·Cissy Houston
·Taj Mahal
·Otis Clay
Tickets for this concert are $15, $25 and $35 and are available through Tickets.com.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.rockhall.com/programs/public.asp?id=607
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Case Western Reserve University will celebrate the legacy of Sam Cooke during the Tenth Annual American Music Masters Series this November. Sam Cooke, considered by many to be the definitive soul singer and crossover artist, a model for African-American entrepreneurship and one of the first performers to use music as a tool for social change, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the inaugural class of 1986.
The tribute will extend from October 31 – November 6 and will feature panels, films, educational programs, a day-long conference at Case and two tribute concerts. The main tribute concert will feature Cooke’s pop and R&B material and the gospel show will focus on his spiritual music.
Tribute Concerts:
MAIN TRIBUTE
The main tribute concert will take place Saturday, November 5 at 8:00 p.m. at the State Theatre, Playhouse Square.
Scheduled to perform:
·Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee Aretha Franklin
·Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee Elvis Costello
·Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee Solomon Burke
·Gavin DeGraw
·The Dixie Hummingbirds
·The Blind Boys of Alabama
·The Manhattans
·Cissy Houston
·Peter Wolf
·Taj Mahal
·Otis Clay
·William Bell
Tickets for this concert are $20, $30 and $40 and are on sale through Tickets.com.
Note: With the purchase of a full price Saturday tribute ticket, buyers will receive 50% off the price of a Sunday tribute concert ticket.
GOSPEL TRIBUTE:
The Gospel tribute will take place the following night, Sunday, November 6, at 6:00 p.m., also at the State Theatre, Playhouse Square.
Scheduled to perform:
·Aretha Franklin
·Solomon Burke
·Lou Rawls
·The Blind Boys of Alabama
·The Dixie Hummingbirds
·The Manhattans
·Michelle Williams of Destiny’s Child
·Cissy Houston
·Taj Mahal
·Otis Clay
Tickets for this concert are $15, $25 and $35 and are available through Tickets.com.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/entertai ... oke30.html
Sam Cooke casts a giant shadow
October 30, 2005
BY DAVE HOEKSTRA Staff Reporter
The Rev. Charles Cook was an itinerant country preacher based on the South Side. His favorite song was the spiritual "This Little Light of Mine," which cast a promised shadow on his family of 10. The preacher did not live by modest means. He had two limousines, and as early as 1942, the family had one of the few windup phonographs in the 3500 block of South Cottage Grove.
None of this was lost on his son Sam.
With one foot in gospel, Sam Cooke (he added the "e" when his career took off) crossed over into the bright lights of popular music in 1962, with hits such as "Wonderful World," "You Send Me," the timeless "A Change Is Gonna Come" and many others. But then Cooke was murdered on Dec. 11, 1964, in the $3-a-night Motel Hacienda in Los Angeles. A night manager shot the singer after he fled a motel room in an aborted tryst with a woman he met in a bar.
Cooke was 33 -- "the Jesus Year."
Four decades later, his life is being celebrated once again. Acclaimed author Peter Guralnick has written Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke (Little, Brown $27.95), in stores this week. On Nov. 10, the book will serve as the template for a panel discussion with Guralnick, Sam's brother L.C. Cooke and disc jockey Herb Kent at the Du Sable Museum of African American History. That event will be followed by "A Sam Cooke Celebration," Nov. 11 at FitzGerald's in Berwyn.
That's a lot of ground to cover.
"Sam never wanted to accept any limits," Guralnick said last week during a book tour stop in San Francisco. "He truly believed he could appeal to all people at all times across all barriers of race, class or anything else."
Otis Clay, 63, met Cooke several months before he died, even though their lives had been on parallel paths. In 1960, Clay was a member of the Famous Blue Jays, a gospel group Cooke admired. The Blue Jays' traditional melodic sound influenced Cooke when he joined the Soul Stirrers in 1950, replacing the searing falsetto of original member R.H. Harris. The Soul Stirrers, which also included the late Johnnie Taylor and Julius Cheeks and later Willie Rogers, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989.
"Of course, the Soul Stirrers pioneered things that are going on in gospel to this day," Clay said during a conversation at his Liberty Baptist Church in Bronzeville. "One lead singer starts low, the other starts modulating."
Lead singer Harris often sang in delayed time, which gave ample space for harmonies. Harris died in September 2000, but in a 1992 interview he told me how he schooled Cooke on clarity. "I taught him diction, which is what you said, and pronunciation, which is how you say it," Harris explained. "I also taught him stage [deportment] and expression of personality, as in what you sing. If you have a bad personality, it doesn't matter how good you sing."
Clay's honey-soaked vocals embrace Cooke's command of gopsel, soul, pop, even country. (When Cooke was with the Highway Q.C.'s in the late 1940s, he sang Gene Autry's "South of the Border" on the side.)
In July 1964, Clay was on tour with the Chicago-based Sensational Nightingales. While the Nightingales were appearing at the Apollo Theater, Cooke was recording his style-bending album "Sam Cooke at the Copa" at the Copacabana nightclub. The album included his hits, a bleached version of Pete Seeger's "If I Had a Hammer" and, of course, "This Little Light of Mine."
"Sam came up to the Apollo," Clay recalled. "Everybody was hanging out at the Apollo. Little Richard was there. Allen Klein [Cooke's manager, soon to become the Beatles' manager] had just bought Sam this Rolls-Royce. Charles [Sam's brother] and [Clarence] Watley [Sam's valet-chauffeur] went and got Sam. Sam was one of the nicest guys you would ever meet."
Cooke's civil rights anthem "A Change Is Gonna Come" has been a longtime staple of Clay's set. "A Change Is Gonna Come" opened the doors for other self-affirming soul classics, such as James Brown's "It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World," released in 1965, and Curtis Mayfield's songbook, including "Keep on Pushing," a companion piece to Cooke's obscure "Keep Movin' On" (recorded Dec. 21, 1963).
"I was singing 'A Change Is Gonna Come' with the Nightingales and left them in March 1965," Clay said. "To tell you the truth, gospel just got into 'A Change Is Gonna Come' two or three years ago. You wouldn't dare stand up in a church and sing 'A Change Is Gonna' Come' because it was played on secular radio. Everybody had a choice. Some folks said, 'See what happened to him when he started singing blues and rock 'n' roll.' But that song was always somewhere down the middle of the road, pulling people together. Civil rights was in high gear."
Soul legend Solomon Burke, 69, met Cooke when he was in the Soul Stirrers from 1950-57. They maintained a friendship that lasted until his death. Burke had hoped to include Cooke in his 1966 dream team project of fellow Atlantic Records singers Otis Redding, Joe Tex and Don Covay called "The Soul Clan."
"The impact an artist like Sam Cooke had on the audience doesn't happen in shows anymore," Burke said. "People just stood still with tears coming down. The artist was there in living color. It was something you could feel from your head to your feet. It left a tingling sensation. He would sing, 'My baby's coming home tomorrow -- ain't that good news?' Whew! 'A Change Is Gonna Come' -- well, it came in so many different ways -- the changing of the guards mentally, spiritually, financially."
A pathfinder, Cooke in 1959 became only the second black artist (after Harry Belafonte) to be signed by RCA Records. By 1962, Cooke and his late personal manager J.W. Alexander (a major source for Guralnick's book) invested the money from the hits to create their own publishing company and management firm. This made Cooke the first black vocalist in 40 years to have such control over his career.
One of the unsung fruits of this period was Cooke's SAR Records, which was formed in 1959 and closed after Cooke's death in 1964. SAR stood for founders Sam Cooke, Alex (as in J.W. Alexander) and Roy Crain, Cooke's road manager and the founder of the Soul Stirrers. Cooke signed artists like Bobby Womack and the Womacks to the label, as well as deep-blues artist Johnnie Morisette a k a "The Singing Pimp." Morisette covered Cooke's "Meet Me at the Twisting Place" for SAR. Two months after Cooke was murdered, Womack married Cooke's widow, Barbara. (Guralnick dishes the dirt on how Womack wore Cooke's blue suit, black shoes and sunglasses when he showed up at the courthouse to obtain his wedding license.)
Dream Boogie is a lot about hope and the pursuit of goals, but the subtext is man's searching nature. In addressing Morisette and latter-day Soul Stirrer vocalist Jimmie Outler (who was arrested for kidnapping, robbery and rape), Guralnick writes, "There was something about the rough life they led that he [Cooke] was clearly drawn to; denying them would have been like denying an ineluctable part of himself."
In our interview, he expanded on this theme: "You could speak of a bifurcated personality, except in Sam's case, it's a multiple-bifurcated personality. He had goals that went off in every direction. Part of him wanted to play the Copa, Vegas, be in the movies. Another part of him never wanted to forget where he was from. He was very explicit about that. Sam truly believed he could keep all these things straight. And then, J.W. -- who in many ways filled a mentor's role with Sam -- saw in Sam what he would have liked to been."
Had Cooke lived, Burke suggested he would have become a smooth, Nat "King" Cole type of vocalist before shifting into the political arena.
"Today? I think he would be Sen. Sam Cooke. He had charisma and intelligence. Look at [Chicago-born soul man and now Cook County commissioner] Jerry Butler. He's done well in politics. Sam Cooke was always a powerhouse and always a headliner."
Elvis biographer views Cooke as a more difficult subject than The King
Peter Guralnick's exhaustive Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke (Little, Brown $27.95) looks at the Chicago-born singer though windows that link American soul music with the vision of black America. But it was harder to come to terms with an iconic figure like Cooke -- harder than Guralnick's previous subject, anyway.
Guralnick is best known for his two-volume biographies Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley. But Presley and Cooke were as different as "Shake" and "All Shook Up."
"Sam was a deeply analytical person," Guralnick said in a recent interview. "In his interior life, trying to trace out even the books he read offered much more of a window to who he was than Elvis. Elvis was a great reader, too, but he read all over the place. Sam's reading encompassed James Baldwin, James Weldon Johnson and tended to have a direction. It was an attempt to grasp this restless, exploratory mind."
Presley is the most documented musician of the 20th century. Cooke, however, got most of his press exposure after he died, such as the five-page Ebony spread in February 1965, "The Tragic Death of Sam Cooke."
"With any African-American singer or entertainer, the record is more sparse," Guralnick said. "I combed through black newspapers in city after city, but my most common finds were listings for a show that Sam did. There were only a handful of interviews. There was a two-part interview with Sam in the [Chicago] Defender in 1958, but you really had to search to find these things."
Guralnick did interview between 200 and 300 people for Dream Boogie and had unprecedented access to Cooke's widow, Barbara.
Dream Boogie weighs in at 747 pages with a four-page bibliography and a valuable discographical note (Guralnick volunteers a disclaimer that he did liner notes for three Cooke albums and boxed set). So one wonders what Guralnick edited out of the book.
"About 2,000 pages," he answered. "The editing process is rigorous. I want a book with a narrative logic and every piece is intended to advance the story that takes it beyond where it was before.
"In many ways, I thought of it as a novelistic canvas with characters of great ambition. I didn't want to write an endless parade of anecdotes. I wanted to write a book that was from the inside out. Some of these people I interviewed dozens of times, and I don't think I've ever done that before. It is totally about keeping an open mind and going in without any pre-conceptions. People said this about Elvis, too: 'What was the most surprising thing you learned?' It was everything. I had to blank out anything I knew before."
Dave Hoekstra
*Sam Cooke's nephew, Erik Greene, wrote the new 239-page paperback Our Uncle Sam, (http://www.ourunclesam.com), which focuses on the singer's formative years. Cooke died 18 months before Greene was born, but Greene makes modern-day connections between his uncle and Rod Stewart (Cooke was a major influence on his raspy vocals) and rocker Southside Johnny that do not appear in Guralnick's tome.
*Cooke is also the subject of the 10th annual American Music Masters Series at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. A tribute concert with Aretha Franklin, Elvis Costello, Solomon Burke, Cissy Houston, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Otis Clay and others will take place at 8 p.m. Saturday at the State Theatre, Playhouse Square in Cleveland (tickets, $20-$40, are available through Tickets.com). Burke, Clay, Franklin and Lou Rawls headline a Cooke gospel tribute at 6 p.m. Nov. 6 at the State Theatre.
Copyright © The Sun-Times Company
All rights reserved.
Sam Cooke casts a giant shadow
October 30, 2005
BY DAVE HOEKSTRA Staff Reporter
The Rev. Charles Cook was an itinerant country preacher based on the South Side. His favorite song was the spiritual "This Little Light of Mine," which cast a promised shadow on his family of 10. The preacher did not live by modest means. He had two limousines, and as early as 1942, the family had one of the few windup phonographs in the 3500 block of South Cottage Grove.
None of this was lost on his son Sam.
With one foot in gospel, Sam Cooke (he added the "e" when his career took off) crossed over into the bright lights of popular music in 1962, with hits such as "Wonderful World," "You Send Me," the timeless "A Change Is Gonna Come" and many others. But then Cooke was murdered on Dec. 11, 1964, in the $3-a-night Motel Hacienda in Los Angeles. A night manager shot the singer after he fled a motel room in an aborted tryst with a woman he met in a bar.
Cooke was 33 -- "the Jesus Year."
Four decades later, his life is being celebrated once again. Acclaimed author Peter Guralnick has written Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke (Little, Brown $27.95), in stores this week. On Nov. 10, the book will serve as the template for a panel discussion with Guralnick, Sam's brother L.C. Cooke and disc jockey Herb Kent at the Du Sable Museum of African American History. That event will be followed by "A Sam Cooke Celebration," Nov. 11 at FitzGerald's in Berwyn.
That's a lot of ground to cover.
"Sam never wanted to accept any limits," Guralnick said last week during a book tour stop in San Francisco. "He truly believed he could appeal to all people at all times across all barriers of race, class or anything else."
Otis Clay, 63, met Cooke several months before he died, even though their lives had been on parallel paths. In 1960, Clay was a member of the Famous Blue Jays, a gospel group Cooke admired. The Blue Jays' traditional melodic sound influenced Cooke when he joined the Soul Stirrers in 1950, replacing the searing falsetto of original member R.H. Harris. The Soul Stirrers, which also included the late Johnnie Taylor and Julius Cheeks and later Willie Rogers, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989.
"Of course, the Soul Stirrers pioneered things that are going on in gospel to this day," Clay said during a conversation at his Liberty Baptist Church in Bronzeville. "One lead singer starts low, the other starts modulating."
Lead singer Harris often sang in delayed time, which gave ample space for harmonies. Harris died in September 2000, but in a 1992 interview he told me how he schooled Cooke on clarity. "I taught him diction, which is what you said, and pronunciation, which is how you say it," Harris explained. "I also taught him stage [deportment] and expression of personality, as in what you sing. If you have a bad personality, it doesn't matter how good you sing."
Clay's honey-soaked vocals embrace Cooke's command of gopsel, soul, pop, even country. (When Cooke was with the Highway Q.C.'s in the late 1940s, he sang Gene Autry's "South of the Border" on the side.)
In July 1964, Clay was on tour with the Chicago-based Sensational Nightingales. While the Nightingales were appearing at the Apollo Theater, Cooke was recording his style-bending album "Sam Cooke at the Copa" at the Copacabana nightclub. The album included his hits, a bleached version of Pete Seeger's "If I Had a Hammer" and, of course, "This Little Light of Mine."
"Sam came up to the Apollo," Clay recalled. "Everybody was hanging out at the Apollo. Little Richard was there. Allen Klein [Cooke's manager, soon to become the Beatles' manager] had just bought Sam this Rolls-Royce. Charles [Sam's brother] and [Clarence] Watley [Sam's valet-chauffeur] went and got Sam. Sam was one of the nicest guys you would ever meet."
Cooke's civil rights anthem "A Change Is Gonna Come" has been a longtime staple of Clay's set. "A Change Is Gonna Come" opened the doors for other self-affirming soul classics, such as James Brown's "It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World," released in 1965, and Curtis Mayfield's songbook, including "Keep on Pushing," a companion piece to Cooke's obscure "Keep Movin' On" (recorded Dec. 21, 1963).
"I was singing 'A Change Is Gonna Come' with the Nightingales and left them in March 1965," Clay said. "To tell you the truth, gospel just got into 'A Change Is Gonna Come' two or three years ago. You wouldn't dare stand up in a church and sing 'A Change Is Gonna' Come' because it was played on secular radio. Everybody had a choice. Some folks said, 'See what happened to him when he started singing blues and rock 'n' roll.' But that song was always somewhere down the middle of the road, pulling people together. Civil rights was in high gear."
Soul legend Solomon Burke, 69, met Cooke when he was in the Soul Stirrers from 1950-57. They maintained a friendship that lasted until his death. Burke had hoped to include Cooke in his 1966 dream team project of fellow Atlantic Records singers Otis Redding, Joe Tex and Don Covay called "The Soul Clan."
"The impact an artist like Sam Cooke had on the audience doesn't happen in shows anymore," Burke said. "People just stood still with tears coming down. The artist was there in living color. It was something you could feel from your head to your feet. It left a tingling sensation. He would sing, 'My baby's coming home tomorrow -- ain't that good news?' Whew! 'A Change Is Gonna Come' -- well, it came in so many different ways -- the changing of the guards mentally, spiritually, financially."
A pathfinder, Cooke in 1959 became only the second black artist (after Harry Belafonte) to be signed by RCA Records. By 1962, Cooke and his late personal manager J.W. Alexander (a major source for Guralnick's book) invested the money from the hits to create their own publishing company and management firm. This made Cooke the first black vocalist in 40 years to have such control over his career.
One of the unsung fruits of this period was Cooke's SAR Records, which was formed in 1959 and closed after Cooke's death in 1964. SAR stood for founders Sam Cooke, Alex (as in J.W. Alexander) and Roy Crain, Cooke's road manager and the founder of the Soul Stirrers. Cooke signed artists like Bobby Womack and the Womacks to the label, as well as deep-blues artist Johnnie Morisette a k a "The Singing Pimp." Morisette covered Cooke's "Meet Me at the Twisting Place" for SAR. Two months after Cooke was murdered, Womack married Cooke's widow, Barbara. (Guralnick dishes the dirt on how Womack wore Cooke's blue suit, black shoes and sunglasses when he showed up at the courthouse to obtain his wedding license.)
Dream Boogie is a lot about hope and the pursuit of goals, but the subtext is man's searching nature. In addressing Morisette and latter-day Soul Stirrer vocalist Jimmie Outler (who was arrested for kidnapping, robbery and rape), Guralnick writes, "There was something about the rough life they led that he [Cooke] was clearly drawn to; denying them would have been like denying an ineluctable part of himself."
In our interview, he expanded on this theme: "You could speak of a bifurcated personality, except in Sam's case, it's a multiple-bifurcated personality. He had goals that went off in every direction. Part of him wanted to play the Copa, Vegas, be in the movies. Another part of him never wanted to forget where he was from. He was very explicit about that. Sam truly believed he could keep all these things straight. And then, J.W. -- who in many ways filled a mentor's role with Sam -- saw in Sam what he would have liked to been."
Had Cooke lived, Burke suggested he would have become a smooth, Nat "King" Cole type of vocalist before shifting into the political arena.
"Today? I think he would be Sen. Sam Cooke. He had charisma and intelligence. Look at [Chicago-born soul man and now Cook County commissioner] Jerry Butler. He's done well in politics. Sam Cooke was always a powerhouse and always a headliner."
Elvis biographer views Cooke as a more difficult subject than The King
Peter Guralnick's exhaustive Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke (Little, Brown $27.95) looks at the Chicago-born singer though windows that link American soul music with the vision of black America. But it was harder to come to terms with an iconic figure like Cooke -- harder than Guralnick's previous subject, anyway.
Guralnick is best known for his two-volume biographies Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley. But Presley and Cooke were as different as "Shake" and "All Shook Up."
"Sam was a deeply analytical person," Guralnick said in a recent interview. "In his interior life, trying to trace out even the books he read offered much more of a window to who he was than Elvis. Elvis was a great reader, too, but he read all over the place. Sam's reading encompassed James Baldwin, James Weldon Johnson and tended to have a direction. It was an attempt to grasp this restless, exploratory mind."
Presley is the most documented musician of the 20th century. Cooke, however, got most of his press exposure after he died, such as the five-page Ebony spread in February 1965, "The Tragic Death of Sam Cooke."
"With any African-American singer or entertainer, the record is more sparse," Guralnick said. "I combed through black newspapers in city after city, but my most common finds were listings for a show that Sam did. There were only a handful of interviews. There was a two-part interview with Sam in the [Chicago] Defender in 1958, but you really had to search to find these things."
Guralnick did interview between 200 and 300 people for Dream Boogie and had unprecedented access to Cooke's widow, Barbara.
Dream Boogie weighs in at 747 pages with a four-page bibliography and a valuable discographical note (Guralnick volunteers a disclaimer that he did liner notes for three Cooke albums and boxed set). So one wonders what Guralnick edited out of the book.
"About 2,000 pages," he answered. "The editing process is rigorous. I want a book with a narrative logic and every piece is intended to advance the story that takes it beyond where it was before.
"In many ways, I thought of it as a novelistic canvas with characters of great ambition. I didn't want to write an endless parade of anecdotes. I wanted to write a book that was from the inside out. Some of these people I interviewed dozens of times, and I don't think I've ever done that before. It is totally about keeping an open mind and going in without any pre-conceptions. People said this about Elvis, too: 'What was the most surprising thing you learned?' It was everything. I had to blank out anything I knew before."
Dave Hoekstra
*Sam Cooke's nephew, Erik Greene, wrote the new 239-page paperback Our Uncle Sam, (http://www.ourunclesam.com), which focuses on the singer's formative years. Cooke died 18 months before Greene was born, but Greene makes modern-day connections between his uncle and Rod Stewart (Cooke was a major influence on his raspy vocals) and rocker Southside Johnny that do not appear in Guralnick's tome.
*Cooke is also the subject of the 10th annual American Music Masters Series at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. A tribute concert with Aretha Franklin, Elvis Costello, Solomon Burke, Cissy Houston, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Otis Clay and others will take place at 8 p.m. Saturday at the State Theatre, Playhouse Square in Cleveland (tickets, $20-$40, are available through Tickets.com). Burke, Clay, Franklin and Lou Rawls headline a Cooke gospel tribute at 6 p.m. Nov. 6 at the State Theatre.
Copyright © The Sun-Times Company
All rights reserved.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/skyco/60286908/
' Elvis Costello performing at the Sam Cooke tribute at the State Theater on Saturday night. He was slotted before Aretha Franklin and after Solomon Burke. Cropped to remove black space and the heads of people in front of me.'
' Elvis Costello performing at the Sam Cooke tribute at the State Theater on Saturday night. He was slotted before Aretha Franklin and after Solomon Burke. Cropped to remove black space and the heads of people in front of me.'
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sexysadie7
- Posts: 32
- Joined: Tue Apr 27, 2004 3:10 pm
- Location: Chicago, IL
what a great show!
ec performed three songs:
that's where it's at
get yourself another fool
bring it on home to me (with otis clay, who elvis said was his "insurance policy" for playing between solomon burke and aretha franklin.)
ec also came out during "a change is gonna come" at the end of the show.
elvis sat in a side box during the show before intermission and seemed to really be having a great fan experience like the rest of us. i have never seen him more comfortable on stage without a guitar in his hand. i am just so glad to have had the chance to see this amazing show!
ec performed three songs:
that's where it's at
get yourself another fool
bring it on home to me (with otis clay, who elvis said was his "insurance policy" for playing between solomon burke and aretha franklin.)
ec also came out during "a change is gonna come" at the end of the show.
elvis sat in a side box during the show before intermission and seemed to really be having a great fan experience like the rest of us. i have never seen him more comfortable on stage without a guitar in his hand. i am just so glad to have had the chance to see this amazing show!
you lack lust...
you're so lacklustre...
is that all the strength
you can muster?
you're so lacklustre...
is that all the strength
you can muster?
http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/ ... xml&coll=2
MUSIC
Unbelievable, all the way around with stellar talent, well, everywhere
Monday, November 07, 2005
John Soeder
Plain Dealer Pop Music Critic
Elvis Costello put it best. "I can't believe some of the things I've seen tonight," he declared Saturday evening during an all-star tribute concert to legendary soul singer Sam Cooke at Playhouse Square's State Theatre.
A near-capacity crowd surely would agree with Costello, who wowed 'em with passionate readings of "That's Where It's At" and "Get Yourself Another Fool." He also teamed up with Otis Clay for the fiery call-and-response workout "Bring It On Home to Me."
Then there was Aretha Franklin, who looked heavenward as she belted out "(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons." It was as if she were serenading Cooke himself, shot to death in 1964 at the age of 33. The Queen of Soul was in splendid form for "Sugar Dumpling" and "You're Always on My Mind," too. Her voice soared and dipped like a roller coaster, from dizzying high notes to breathtaking lows and back.
And let's not forget "Having a Party," which turned into a fun sing-along led by William Bell (who also crooned "You Send Me"), while Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP and one of the show's emcees, danced in the wings.
Like the man said: Unbelievable, all the way around.
The gig was the centerpiece of the 10th annual American Music Masters series, presented by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Case Western Reserve University.
Another concert was set for Sunday night, celebrating the gospel side of Cooke's career.
His pop catalog, a treasure trove of romantic ballads and feel-good hits, was the focus of the Saturday gig, although it also touched on Cooke's spiritual leanings. The Blind Boys of Alabama got things off to a heavenly start with "This Little Light of Mine."
With three Hall of Famers co-headlining - Franklin, Costello and Solomon Burke - the event did not want for stellar talent.
Several performers had close ties to Cooke, including Franklin, who said: "It truly was a divine pleasure and honor just to know him."
Leroy Crume, who had performed alongside Cooke in the Soul Stirrers, joined the Dixie Hummingbirds for "Wonderful."
Others on the bill did not disappoint, either.
Clay revisited "Another Saturday Night," Cissy Houston did right by "Only Sixteen," the Manhattans brought sweet harmonies to bear on "Wonderful World" and "Chain Gang," Taj Mahal turned in a hip-quaking rendition of "Twistin' the Night Away" and Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band enlisted Rock Hall staffer Lisa Vinciquerra as his dancing partner for "Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha."
The most pleasant surprise was newcomer Gavin DeGraw, who revealed a soulfulness beyond his 26 years when he sang "Cupid" and "Nothing Can Change This Love."
Cooke's younger brother, L.C.; members of Cooke's old Highway QCs group; R&B personalities Odell "Gorgeous" George and James "Early" Byrd; actor Morgan Freeman; and Rock Hall President and Chief Executive Terry Stewart made appearances throughout the show. There even was a videotaped cameo by former President Clinton, who praised Cooke as "an emblem of hope."
For the finale, Burke (ensconced on a throne) led a rousing rendition of Cooke's civil rights anthem, "A Change Is Gonna Come," joined by Franklin, Costello and most of the other performers.
As for the concert itself, organizers needn't have changed a thing.
Just another Saturday night? Hardly. Rather, this was a once-in-a-lifetime salute to the kind of artist who comes along only once in a lifetime.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
jsoeder@plaind.com, 216-999-4562
© 2005 The Plain Dealer
© 2005 cleveland.com All Rights Reserved.
MUSIC
Unbelievable, all the way around with stellar talent, well, everywhere
Monday, November 07, 2005
John Soeder
Plain Dealer Pop Music Critic
Elvis Costello put it best. "I can't believe some of the things I've seen tonight," he declared Saturday evening during an all-star tribute concert to legendary soul singer Sam Cooke at Playhouse Square's State Theatre.
A near-capacity crowd surely would agree with Costello, who wowed 'em with passionate readings of "That's Where It's At" and "Get Yourself Another Fool." He also teamed up with Otis Clay for the fiery call-and-response workout "Bring It On Home to Me."
Then there was Aretha Franklin, who looked heavenward as she belted out "(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons." It was as if she were serenading Cooke himself, shot to death in 1964 at the age of 33. The Queen of Soul was in splendid form for "Sugar Dumpling" and "You're Always on My Mind," too. Her voice soared and dipped like a roller coaster, from dizzying high notes to breathtaking lows and back.
And let's not forget "Having a Party," which turned into a fun sing-along led by William Bell (who also crooned "You Send Me"), while Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP and one of the show's emcees, danced in the wings.
Like the man said: Unbelievable, all the way around.
The gig was the centerpiece of the 10th annual American Music Masters series, presented by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Case Western Reserve University.
Another concert was set for Sunday night, celebrating the gospel side of Cooke's career.
His pop catalog, a treasure trove of romantic ballads and feel-good hits, was the focus of the Saturday gig, although it also touched on Cooke's spiritual leanings. The Blind Boys of Alabama got things off to a heavenly start with "This Little Light of Mine."
With three Hall of Famers co-headlining - Franklin, Costello and Solomon Burke - the event did not want for stellar talent.
Several performers had close ties to Cooke, including Franklin, who said: "It truly was a divine pleasure and honor just to know him."
Leroy Crume, who had performed alongside Cooke in the Soul Stirrers, joined the Dixie Hummingbirds for "Wonderful."
Others on the bill did not disappoint, either.
Clay revisited "Another Saturday Night," Cissy Houston did right by "Only Sixteen," the Manhattans brought sweet harmonies to bear on "Wonderful World" and "Chain Gang," Taj Mahal turned in a hip-quaking rendition of "Twistin' the Night Away" and Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band enlisted Rock Hall staffer Lisa Vinciquerra as his dancing partner for "Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha."
The most pleasant surprise was newcomer Gavin DeGraw, who revealed a soulfulness beyond his 26 years when he sang "Cupid" and "Nothing Can Change This Love."
Cooke's younger brother, L.C.; members of Cooke's old Highway QCs group; R&B personalities Odell "Gorgeous" George and James "Early" Byrd; actor Morgan Freeman; and Rock Hall President and Chief Executive Terry Stewart made appearances throughout the show. There even was a videotaped cameo by former President Clinton, who praised Cooke as "an emblem of hope."
For the finale, Burke (ensconced on a throne) led a rousing rendition of Cooke's civil rights anthem, "A Change Is Gonna Come," joined by Franklin, Costello and most of the other performers.
As for the concert itself, organizers needn't have changed a thing.
Just another Saturday night? Hardly. Rather, this was a once-in-a-lifetime salute to the kind of artist who comes along only once in a lifetime.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
jsoeder@plaind.com, 216-999-4562
© 2005 The Plain Dealer
© 2005 cleveland.com All Rights Reserved.
Re: EC in Sam Cooke tribute , Nov. 5/6 '05
Bob seems to be putting together stuff for his radio shows ; has this tribute show ever turned up in recordings ?
http://www.allalongthewatchtower.dk/pho ... msg-369769
(extract)
June 23, 2008
Bob Dylan's Radio Show
Peter Wolf recently dropped in for Bob Dylan's Radio show, which should be coming up in the near future. They talked about the Sam Cooke tribute Peter did with Aretha and Elvis Costello in Cleveland.
http://www.allalongthewatchtower.dk/pho ... msg-369769
(extract)
June 23, 2008
Bob Dylan's Radio Show
Peter Wolf recently dropped in for Bob Dylan's Radio show, which should be coming up in the near future. They talked about the Sam Cooke tribute Peter did with Aretha and Elvis Costello in Cleveland.
Re: EC in Sam Cooke tribute , Nov. 5/6 '05
https://twitter.com/otisclay/status/411 ... 97/photo/1
Otis Clay @otisclay tweets -
Elvis Costello and I at The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame tribute to Sam Cooke. Bring It On Home To Me.
Otis Clay @otisclay tweets -
Elvis Costello and I at The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame tribute to Sam Cooke. Bring It On Home To Me.
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And No Coffee Table
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