The layers of significance of One Night Stand! Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club
What a 1963 album has to tell us about American culture then, in the intervening decades, and now
Dignity and nobility are in short supply in the tone of our national discourse , as you may have noticed. Respect, compassion and goodwill are perhaps even less present.
If one can’t claim some kind of beleaguered-demographic status, walking on eggshells is becoming the only available option of maneuvering through life. One best not confer a theme on a party one hosts, or start a restaurant offering the cuisine of a nationality to which one doesn’t belong, for fear of being convicted of some sort of cultural appropriation. The merciless corrections of the cancel culture await any employee of an organization who dares to question the need for affinity groups, implicit-bias workshops or diversity circles.
Scroll your Twitter feed and take note of how long it takes for a video of boneheads of any particular demographic group inflicting verbal, or perhaps physical, violence on individuals or groups from another demographic to appear.
It’s going to be interesting to see how ethnic festivals in our nation’s communities are affected by the new degree of societal brittleness once the pandemic recedes enough for them to resume. Will people of all possible categories be welcome to line up at the Korean, Latvian, or Peruvian food booths, or crowd around the stage for an Indian, Irish or Trinidadian music performance?
What’s been made plain so far in the summer of 2020 is that these questions most acutely loom for one particular demographic: black Americans.
As I stated in a Precipice piece entitled “Color,” there are solid reasons why this is so:
. . . why hasn’t that culture-within-a-culture come to be regarded in the same way as, say, the ongoing viability of a Korean, or Arab, or Hungarian subset of the American fabric?
The obvious and most important answer is that no nationality, ethnic group or other race has been subjected to the dual oppressions of racism and bigotry that black Americans experienced for centuries. That factor figures prominently into the shaping of black culture.
We’re now sorting through the questions about how close - or impossibly far away - we are from putting other considerations besides race far above race in our perceptions of each other. Is blackness and whiteness destined to remain front and center when inhabitants of this country interact?
As I said at the outset of this essay, dignity and nobility are hard to come by these days. That’s true across the board in post-American society. The artistic output of any and every demographic is degraded to the point of really not qualifying as artistic expression. Journalism and opinion writing produced by anyone and everyone permits an employment of vulgarity that would not have found approval ten years ago.
How does this pertain to the matter of race? Is it still permissible for someone who happens to be white to point out that the pronouncements of Black Lives Matter leaders are a far cry from the ennobling rhetoric of a Martin Luther King or Bayard Rustin?
To return to the matter of art, is it still permissible for someone who happens to be white to point out that the nihilistic, solipsistic and pornographic output of the likes of August Alsina seems hard to put on a continuum with the body of work of the Motown empire, or Duke Ellington?
A certain figure came to mind the other day as I was reflecting on matters such as
the role of decorum and its relationship to “authenticity”
the tension between sexuality and spirituality in black American music
the ongoing impact of that eventful year of 1963 , and
whether commonly accepting certain norms - in speech, dress and conduct - makes for some kind of default whiteness
The figure I’m speaking of is Sam Cooke.
Sam Cooke was the king of smooth. He was impossibly handsome, always impeccably dressed, and had a stage presence that looked effortless to achieve. During the period of his peak fame, from 1957 to 1964, he produced pop music that featured a crooning style of singing that gave him the crossover appeal of a Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine or Johnny Mathis. He had an understanding of show business down pat. Watch him explain to television show host Mike Douglas how he views working a room.
But there was much more to Sam Cooke than the image a cursory acquaintance provides.
He was born in 1931 in Clarksdale, Mississippi - in the same town and year as Ike Turner, interestingly - and grew up in Chicago. His voice and looks allowed him to rise in black gospel circles to the point of being chosen to be the new lead singer of the nationally revered Soul Stirrers. The group became the cash cow of Art Rupe’s Specialty Records’ gospel roster. Cooke kept after Rupe (a white man) to let him sing secular pop. Rupe relented in 1956, but after one record, Rupe shut down the cutting of the next one in mid-session when he walked in and saw white background singers.
The session was for “You Send Me,” which became the record that launched Cooke’s secular stardom.
Cooke and producer Bumps Blackwell took the players and singers down the street to a small studio to finish the record, which was released on the Keen label. Its success brought Cooke to the attention of RCA Victor, which signed him.
That record was the prototype for the formula Cooke employed on his hits for the rest of his career: smooth crooning, simple chord progressions, generally heavy on a I-VI-IV-V sequence, arrangements more in keeping with a pop, rather than an R&B, designation, and lyrical content geared toward an adolescent audience.
Along the way, going back to his gospel days, Cooke’s appeal to the ladies brought complications into his life. He had at least three out-of-wedlock children in addition to the children he had with his second wife, Barbara. It’s pretty well established that there was a sexual component to his friendship with the very young Aretha Franklin, whom he knew through her father, the legendary Baptist minister C.L. Franklin.
None of this affected his image throughout his life, and was still overshadowed in the aftermath of his sordid death in late 1964 by the outpouring of grief, particularly among black Americans, who saw him as an untouchable icon.
Until 1985, the public’s understanding was that Sam Cooke’s only live album was Live at the Copa, recorded in July 1964 and released in October of that year. It’s a dazzling showcase of what Cooke could do. The material ranges from standards (“The Best Things In Life Are Free,” “When I Fall In Love”) to old sing-along favorites (“Bill Bailey,” “Tennessee Waltz”) to topical material (“Blowin’ in the Wind,” “If I Had A Hammer”) to blues "(“Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”) to his own hits (“Twistin’ the Night Away,” “You Send Me”). The introduction is given by Sammy Davis, Jr. and Cooke’s own band is supplemented by the Copacabana house band. The result is mightily swinging, but polished, in keeping with what the public was familiar with.
One Night Stand! Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club is a much different kind of record. It was recorded in early 1963 at a small venue in Overtown, the historically black neighborhood in Miami. The introduction is done by a raucous emcee looking to stoke audience fervor.
RCA Victor shelved the album at the time, and its grit was precisely the reason. Cooke was on the cusp of a level of stardom that the company didn’t want to jeopardize. It was only released when a producer came across it in 1985.
The first tune, “Don’t Fight It,” sets the tone. It’s an uptempo number that alternates between a I-VI back-and-forth and a twelve-bar blues form. Cooke is serving notice that it’s going to be a night for cutting loose. (“Baby when you’re dancing near me / with your cheek close to mine / and you begin to feel a funny thrill / movie’ up your spine / don’t fight it.”) The set list is heavier on his own hits than Copa. But even the standard, “I Love You (For Sentimental Reasons),” written by the black songwriter Deek Watson of the Ink Spots, is preceded by a streetwise introductory soliloquy that makes some dark assumptions about relationship dynamics (“Fellas, I want you to remember one thing. When somebody tells you about something your girlfriend has done, or your wife has done, don’t go home a hittin’ on her and all that stuff.”) that is repeated nearly verbatim eight years later by B.B. King on his album Live at Cook County Jail in the lead-in to “How Blue Can You Get.”
But it’s Cooke’s vocal delivery that is the big difference. Songs that are delivered with pop silkiness on the original studio recordings, or on Copa, are rendered with an uninhibited gospel-rooted rasp. It’s the way he sang to such audiences when he’d tour the south. There’s a strong sense that he knew it was the thing to do to give a different kind of show when he was among his own people.
1963 was a racially charged year in America, of course. August saw the march on Washington at which Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have A Dream” speech. About a month later, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, by Klan members, occurred.
But it was a year of black crossover success in music. Non-black America went in for the Motown sound, the Sam Cooke sound, girl groups such as The Ronettes and The Chiffons, and jazz greats such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Oscar Peterson and Wes Montgomery, in a big way.
It seems pretty clear that these artists, as well as the producers and arrangers they worked with, had some sense of fine-tuning the balance between “sounding black” and being marketable to a wide audience.
What happened in American society in the intervening decades to make the shift to an in-your-face declaration that “this music is for blacks and whether whitey likes it is not of concern to me”? To return to the question I posed in the post entitled “Color,” why did black music not find a place among the threads in the American cultural fabric that seemed like such a promising possibility 50-plus years ago?
The fervor of the audience participation on the Harlem Square Club record may provide us some insight. That audience wasn't just there for the uplift of sanctification. The material, and Cooke’s delivery, made that clear. Cooke exuded the sexuality that was the source of so much tumult in his personal life. The album makes clear that in an atmosphere that felt comfortable to those who liked their black music unvarnished, unbridled sensuality was the point.
I don’t know that any kind of hard and fast conclusion is possible here. It’s enough to say that this record, which languished unheard for twenty years after the performance it captures, raises questions that merit examining in a time when much is different, but maybe not everything.