The Best of Sam Cooke by Sam Cooke Album Info
The Best of Sam Cooke is a 1962 compilation which contains most of Sam Cooke's most well-known hits from 1957 to 1962. Sam Cooke was a great artist and major hit maker in the late 1950s and early 1960s. For a while he was RCA Records' second best-selling singles artist, after Elvis Presley. But for all his talent, Sam Cooke was not a superstar during his lifetime. His fame did not rival of Ray Charles or Frank Sinatra. Sam Cooke was a successful rock and roll singer (when the term still encompassed R&B) who was interested in crossing over into the mainstream, to the sort of adult respect accorded to Sinatra and Nat "King" Cole. Cooke had lots of big hits, but he saw himself at the start of a long journey. At the time he was killed, in December of 1964, he thought his major work, the work for which he should be remembered, was still in front of him. Cooke's early death froze him in time, with all his possibilities unplayed. It is possible had he lived that he would have moved into the mainstream, had middle-of-the-road hits like Johnny Mathis. Or he might have gone to film and TV stardom. After all, he was an exceptionally handsome and charming young man at the moment when television and movies were about to become racially integrated. Had Cooke lived to follow that road, he might have been Sidney Poitier or Bill Cosby. But there's another way to look at it. The year before Cooke's death saw him and the country challenged by new ways of thinking. Martin Luther King led the march on Washington. JFK was assassinated. The Beatles arrived in America. Cooke stood at ringside as his friend Cassius Clay who pulled Cooke into the ring and embraced him and shouted to the TV cameras, "Sam Cooke - the greatest rock and roll singer in the world!" Along with Clay, Cooke became acquainted with the radical leader Malcolm X and began studying the philosophy of Black Power. He had a library of black history had a name. When his protégé Bobby Womack complained that some of the new rock singers could not really sing, Sam told him that from now on it was not going to be about who had the prettiest voice, it was going to be about who was the most believable. From now on, people who wrote the songs would be singing them. When Cooke heard Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," he said it should not have been left to a white boy to write that song, and composed his own great anthem of integration, "A Change Is Gonna Come." Cooke donated the song to an album Martin Luther King assembled for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Had Sam Cooke followed this path, he might have become a powerful voice for the struggle for equality. He might have gotten there ahead of Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, who were all influenced by Cooke and all achieved great success in the years after his death. And none of that considers what Cooke had begun as a businessman. He had started his own label, SAR Records, and was signing, producing and recording other artists - while giving them a fairer deal than other labels did. Sam Cooke the entrepreneur might have given Berry Gordy a run for his money. He might have pulled off the dream of an artist-controlled label that the Beatles later attempted with Apple. Cooke retains a great hold on the popular imagination in part because of what we dream he would have become if he had lived, but Cooke died young and tragically. In 1964, he was shot to death by a motel clerk after he was robbed by a prostitute with whom the clerk may (or may not) have been in cahoots. It was a sad way to go, and the circumstances of his death, for a while, diminished Cooke's reputation. In the months after he died, the world Cooke knew was turned upside down. Malcolm X was assassinated, Lyndon Johnson sent combat troops into Vietnam, Motown became "The Sound Of Young America," Dylan released "Like A Rolling Stone" and the Stones put out "Satisfaction." Sam Cooke's influence was alive in the Temptations and Smokey Robinson, but for a few years he was pushed into the oldies section. Times were changing too fast to look back. Here is where Sam Cooke began to defy convention. While most popular music becomes less vital as it gets older, the sheer quality of the songs Cooke wrote, produced and sang made them endure and grow in stature. By the early seventies, Cooke's acolytes were singing his songs and his praises. Rod Stewart appropriated much of Cooke's swaggering, cackling vocal style and often covered Cooke's songs, including "Having A Party" and "Twisting The Night Away". The Band covered "A Change Is Gonna Come", Tony Orlando had a huge hit with "Cupid" (which Tom Waits reclaimed in concert), Cat Stevens topped the charts with "Another Saturday Night", Van Morrison covered "Bring It On Home To Me", Simon and Garfunkel and James Taylor recorded "Wonderful World" and on and on. It's been that way ever since. Van Morrison wrote a song about listening to Sam Cooke and used Cooke's "Send Me Some Lovin" as a template for his own "Vanlose Stairway." Bruce Springsteen named a song about the solace found in old records "Meet Me At Mary's Place," after a Sam Cooke song. The Pretenders' "Back On The Chain Gang" evoked Cooke's old hit for a new song about music allowing departed heroes to live on after death. Sam Cooke had achieved an almost impossible feat: after he died, his music earned him the superstardom he had worked toward his whole life. The Best Of Sam Cooke album was the beacon that kept Cooke's most popular songs in the public eye during the long years when most of his catalog was out of print. For a couple of generations this was the first - and often only - Sam Cooke album they owned. Although there are more ambitious collections that show Cooke's remarkable range and diversity, this is still the best starting place. These are Sam Cooke's biggest commercial hits. This is the message in a bottle that brought his gifts to millions of people. One can't help thinking that, if it's lasted this long, it will probably last forever. - Bill Flanagan, New York, 2005
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