Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick

for recognition and remuneration than 3838 South State. Other groups their age were just beginning to make their mark. The Gospel Writer Junior Girls, who had made their Chicago debut in June on a Women’s Day program sponsored by R.H. Harris’ wife Jeanette’s group, the Golden Harps, had recently begun broadcasting on WDIA as the Songbirds of the South, and Sam was taken with the singing of Cassietta Baker (later to become famous as Cassietta George in the Caravans), one of the group’s distinctive leads. He was greatly impressed by the Reverend Brewster, too, an extraordinary preacher and polymath whose
Camp Meeting of the Air
was regularly broadcast live from East Trigg Baptist Church and who presented the QCs at a number of programs at his church. Brewster had not only written many classic songs in the new gospel vein (“Surely God Is Able” was his latest), but he wrote and produced “sacred pageants” every year, often with uplifting racial themes. With his scholarly dignity, wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, and emphasis on elocution (“Anybody could be on the pulpit and beat on the Bible [but I was] taught . . . to stand up there and say my thing just like I was reading Caesar on Gaul, orations of the crown, and the Shakespearean plays that I loved so much”), he proved a natural model for Sam, to whom he taught another of his recent compositions, “How Far Am I From Canaan?,” expounding upon it both musically and textually to his eager young pupil. Tate even got them what Marvin took to be a real record audition at a recording studio in town. “The Soul Stirrers had just put out a number, and we were asked to sing that song in the studio. They said, ‘If you do it as good as the Soul Stirrers, we’ll record you.’ Well, as fate would have it, that day we was off track. You know you have [those kind of] days. We didn’t make it, and they would not record us.”
    As disappointing as that failure was, however, it was not their darkest moment in Memphis. Their cocky self-assurance, their prideful attitude, almost guaranteed a succession of falls. The next came when Sam and Lee and Jake took the car one night, leaving Marvin and Gus behind. “They had some girls,” said Marvin, “and they took them to the park, and when they got there, the girls were telling them, ‘This is a white park. We got no business in here. We’re going to get in trouble.’ Well, naturally, the guys are from Chicago, and they’re not used to this sort of thing, and they thought these girls were just trying to get out of doing what they was going in there to do. Anyway, after they got in the park and settled down, they discovered these lights on them—the police had driven up behind them and put the spotlights on them and told them to get out of the car. Well, everybody got out, and they lined them all up, but Sam was the only one who had his hands in his pockets. And as they went down the line to each person and asked them where they were from, when they got to Sam, the officer got angry because he had his hands in his pockets, and he slapped him and called him a nigger and said, ‘You are not in Chicago. We will hang you down here, and they’ll never find your body.’
    “I’ll never forget that. Because when they came home that night, they told us. That was a sad part in our lives. But I told them, ‘You didn’t have no business leaving me and Gus behind.
That’s
why you got messed up!’”
    It was another kind of misunderstanding, this one, as Marvin recalled it, over a song, along with a sudden, sharp break with the Spirit of Memphis Quartet, their original sponsor, that ultimately led to their departure from town. “I don’t remember the essentials of what occurred, but they literally ran us out.” One of the local groups, evidently, had an old syncopated “jubilee”-type number, “Pray,” that they had arranged along the lines of the Golden Gate Quartet, “and we heard it one time, and that was