Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick Page A

it. We took it.” Then, according to Marvin, the two Memphis groups entered into a concerted alliance, “they put out insinuations and innuendos about the police looking for the Highway QCs, which was not true.” It was all, Marvin said, on account of the way that “we were taking their programs from them.” But it created a climate in which it was no longer tenable for them to stay.
    It didn’t really matter. It was time to go. They had been away now for more than two months and accomplished all that they could. Everyone was a little bit homesick, and Tate, it seemed, was out of ideas.
    B ACK HOME, SAM GOT A JOB at the Sears warehouse and rekindled his romance with Barbara Campbell. She was fourteen years old, still, in her own words, “green as a cabbage”—her grandmother had never told her anything about sex other than that if she lifted up her dress, she could have a baby—but everyone knew she was Sam Cook’s girl. At night Mildred would help her sneak out of the house, and when it got cold, Sam would show up looking so handsome with his broad-brimmed felt hat and belted black trench coat and turned-up shirt collar—he was her “shining knight,” and they would walk and talk and smooch till her lips hurt. On Saturdays she would go to the show—he knew exactly where she would be sitting—and they would sit and kiss in the dark all afternoon long.
    Barbara never doubted that he loved her, but for all her innocence, she was shrewd enough to recognize that she was not the only one. One time she caught him out in an affair with a girl who hadn’t missed anybody in the neighborhood, and when she told him that she knew what he had done, he was so embarrassed that he actually said, “Oh, I wasn’t up to that.” She was not about to let him off the hook. “Oh, Sam, how could you?” she said with her best impression of wounded teenage innocence. But she could understand it. It would be easy for any woman to fall for Sam, she realized, with his “beauty” and his “gift of gab”—and, anyway, she had another boyfriend of her own.
    For the QCs it was a time of some frustration. They were local heroes upon their return, bigger certainly than when they had left, and back to doing all their regular church programs in Chicago, Gary, Indianapolis, and Detroit. But somehow after the unanticipated adventure of their Memphis sojourn, the free and easy life they had led, it all seemed stale, dull, and unprofitable, in every sense of the word, to go back to living at home. Tate clearly had run out of money and luck, and if he remained as dedicated to them as ever, having named his tenth child Sammie Lee for the two lead singers of his group, they were not necessarily as dedicated to him.
    Then Itson showed up, “another unsavory type,” as Creadell would later describe him, but with money, influence, and power at his disposal. “Itson impressed us,” Marvin Jones recalled, “with the way he dressed, the car that he drove, and the things he could do. Itson came along with his slick-talking ass —” “Yeah, but he really loved the QCs,” declared Creadell with a laugh.
    Marshall L. Itson had a real-estate company with offices at 5005 South Indiana in the heart of Bronzeville’s business and entertainment district. He had a brand-new black fish-tail Cadillac, and he bought the group one of their own so they could ride around town in style. Sam would come and pick Creadell up at school. “I was in my senior year, and the police used to stop us going up and down South Parkway. ‘What are you youngsters doing in this car? Get out.’ We’d say, ‘We’re spiritual singers.’” But the police would make them get out every time before they would let them go on their way.
    Their new manager bought them brand-new uniforms, too, a double-breasted black suit for each of them and a pair of double-breasted blue ones. They would rehearse behind a one-way mirror at the back of his office, and Marvin and the others