Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick

noisy altercation. “We was all up there having fun, and [heard] this commotion on the floor below, so Sam goes out and leans over the bannister and calls out, ‘What’s all this noise out here?’ The guy shot upstairs—I mean, he was serious—but we all went back inside, and Sam said, ‘Well, that’s all right, he won’t make any more noise.’”
    With the war over, Willie went back to work at the chicken market, Mary settled into married life, and Charles enlisted in the air force at the age of nineteen. He was stationed in Columbus, Ohio, and despite his unwavering determination to quit singing altogether the moment he turned twenty-one, he joined a chorus that traveled widely with a service show called Operation Happiness.
    But that was the end of the Singing Children, and the extension of another phase of Sam’s singing career. Just as he and L.C. had gone from apartment to apartment in the Lenox Building, serenading the various tenants with one of the Ink Spots’ recent hits, they had begun in the last year or so to greet passengers alighting from the streetcar at Thirty-fifth and Cottage Grove, the end of the line, in similar fashion. Sam’s specialties continued for the most part to derive from the sweet-voiced falsetto crooning of Bill Kenny, the breathy lead tenor for the group that had dominated black secular quartet singing (and in the process enjoyed a remarkable string of number-one pop hits) for the last seven years. Among Sam’s favorites were Kenny’s original 1939 signature tune, “If I Didn’t Care,” the group’s almost equally influential “I Don’t Want to Set the World On Fire,” and their latest, one of 1946’s biggest hits, “To Each His Own.” As in the apartment building, Sam would sing, and L.C. would pass the hat. “People would stop because Sam had this voice. It seemed like he just drew people to him—he sang the
hell
out of ‘South of the Border.’ The girls would stop, and they would give me dimes, quarters, and dollars. Man, we was cleaning up.”
    Sam and L.C. harmonized with other kids from the neighborhood, too (“You know, everybody in the neighborhood could sing”). They sang at every available opportunity—Johnny Carter (later lead singer with the Flamingos and Dells), James “Dimples” Cochran of the future Spaniels, Herman Mitchell, Johnny Keyes, every one of them doing their best in any number of interchangeable combinations to mimic Ink Spots harmonies, “singing around [different] places,” as Sam would later recall, just to have fun.
    His mind was never far from music; one day, he told L.C., he would rival Nat “King” Cole, another Chicago minister’s son, whose first number-one pop hit, “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons,” was one of Sam’s recent favorites. But somehow he never seemed to contemplate the idea that he might have to leave the gospel field to do it. Nor did he allow the music to distract him from his main task of the moment, which was to finish high school. Reverend and Mrs. Cook were determined that each of their children would graduate from Wendell Phillips—and it seemed as if L.C. was the only one likely to provide them with a real challenge (“Everybody else liked school; I didn’t”). Sam saw education as a way to expand what he understood to be an otherwise narrow and parochial worldview. Reading took him places he couldn’t go—but places he expected one day to discover for himself. He was constantly drawing, caught up in his studies of architectural drafting at school but just as quick to sketch anything that caught his interest—he did portraits of his family and friends, sketches to entertain his little brother David. In the absence of inherited wealth, he placed his faith in his talent and his powers of observation, and despite an almost willful blindness to his own eccentricities, he was a keen student of human nature. Which was perhaps the key to his success with girls, as his brother L.C. saw it,