SAM COOKE - 50 YEARS GONE

A sobering fifty years after Sam Cooke's untimely death, I mark this anniversary - December 11 - by re-publishing the entry on Sam in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Cooke, Sam [1931 - 1964]

Sam Cook was born 22 January 1931 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, but grew up in Chicago, one of eight children of a Baptist preacher; they formed the Singing Children when he was nine. Later he moved over to the Highway QCs and then replaced R.K. Harris as lead tenor of the Soul Stirrers. With this innovative and contemporary gospel group he began recording in 1951 (though his singing at this point is often overrated: his version of Thomas Dorsey’s great song ‘Peace In The Valley’, pallid and unmemorable, cannot compare with those by ELVIS PRESLEY and LITTLE RICHARD).

            He ‘went secular’ in 1957, becoming Sam Cooke and starting a long and splendid run of hits, almost all his own compositions, many of which have been covered time and again by artists of the stature of VAN MORRISON. He was a consummate vocalist and a bright, lithe, sexy young man, whose TV appearances helped make black sexuality visible to young white America. He may have learnt his trade in gospel but church-going modesty was not his style.

Sam Cooke was very popular but never popular enough. Most of his work is of undimmed excellence: great records by a terrific songwriter and a masterful soul singer of panache, integrity and expressive generosity. In 1960-63 he was in his prime, not least in live performance (try One Night Stand: Sam Cooke Live At The Harlem Square Club, 1963).

            By the end of 1963, Cooke had notched up eighteen Top Thirty hits since 1957; but pop success was not enough. Earlier that year he had heard Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and is reported to have felt shaken that it had been ‘a white boy’ who had written so potent a song  -  a song that eloquently, if implicitly, addressed the urgent issues of political struggle that so deeply involved his own race. He began performing the Dylan song himself (a version is captured on the album Live At The Copacobana, 1964), but his more profound response was to write the moving, thoughtful and dignified ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ (originally called ‘My Brother’) which he recorded on January 30, 1964.

            Despite the quality of the song and Cooke’s recording of it, it was slipped out as an album track (on Ain’t That Good News) and its release as a single was long delayed. On December 11, 1964, Cooke died after being shot in unclear circumstances in an LA motel. He was 33 years old. Two weeks later, and with one verse edited out, ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ was released… as the B-side of ‘Shake’.

Dylan mentions the song in Chronicles Volume One; the context is complex but this is what he writes: ‘Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it  -  like in that song of Sam Cooke’s, “Change Is Gonna Come”…’ And in an interview in 2001, he reveals an awareness of Cooke’s early gospel group the Highway QCs, recalling that when he was ‘12 years old, listening to the radio… at midnight the gospel stuff would start, and so I got… to be acquainted with the Swan Silvertones and the Dixie Hummingbirds and, you know, Highway QCs…’

Dylan cut a version of Cooke’s ‘Cupid’ with GEORGE HARRISON in a New York City studio in May 1970 (which would have been effective had Dylan remembered more than a handful of the words) and attempted Cooke’s hit ‘Chain Gang’ at March and April 1987 studio sessions for the Down In The Groove album. (These remain uncirculated.)

‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ was revisited by THE BAND on their Moondog Matinee album of oldies in the 1970s, and on Dylan’s 1978 world tour, on which various of his back-up singers were given solo spots (with Dylan and the band playing behind them), CAROLYN DENNIS sang ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ in Hitler’s old Zeppelinfeld stadium at Nuremberg that July 1 and again at Blackbushe Aerodrome in England two weeks later.

Matching song to venue with his usual quiet shrewdness, Dylan finally performed a respectful version of ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ himself live at the home of early-60s R&B and black aspiration, the Apollo Theater in Harlem, NYC, on March 28, 2004, forty years after the creation of the song for which his own work had been a catalyst.

            In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine asked 172 prominent music-industry figures, including artists such as JONI MITCHELL, to vote for the all-time 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Sam Cooke’s ‘Change Is Gonna Come’ came in at no.12  -  two places higher than ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’.

            Dylan, however, was at no.1 with ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.

[The Soul Stirrers: ‘Peace In The Valley’, nia, CD-reissued on Sam Cooke: My Gospel Roots, Xtra 26471, UK, 2005. Sam Cooke: One Night Stand: Sam Cooke Live At The Harlem Square Club, 1963, NYC, 12-13 Jan 1963, RCA PL85181, Rome, 1985; ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, NYC, 7-8 Jul 1964, Live At The Copacobana, Victor LPM /LSP-2970, NYC, 1964; ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, 30 Jan 1964, RCA 8486, NYC, 1964. Bob Dylan: ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, NYC, 28 Mar 2004, broadcast on NBC TV’s program ‘Apollo at 70: A Hot Night In Harlem’, NY, 19 Jun 2004; Chronicles Volume One, 2004, p.61; interview for WTTW-TV, Chicago, 27 Oct 2001. The Band: ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, Bearsville NY, Mar-Jun 1973, Moondog Matinee, Capitol SW-11214, 1973. Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone poll seen online 7 Aug 2005 at www.rollingstone.com/rs500moretext.]

REGINA McCRARY: HAPPY 55th

Gospel singer Regina McCrary, an old friend of Bob Dylan's, is 55 today (May 22, 2013). Here's her entry in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (but updated for this blogpost):

McCrary, Regina [1958 - ]

Regina McCrary (sometimes billed under her previous married names Regina Havis and Regina McCrary Brown) was born May 22, 1958 in Nashville, the daughter of the late Rev. Samuel Brown, who as Sam McCrary was lead singer of the Fairfield Four gospel group in the 1940s. The group had been formed in the 1920s; re-formed in the 1980s, the Fairfield Four performs ‘Lonesome Valley’ on the soundtrack of the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?. The younger sister of gospel-singer Ann McCrary, she was encouraged to audition for a place in Dylan’s back-up singers’ group by her friend Carolyn Dennis, whom she had known since they were small children.

            She auditioned when the 1978 World Tour hit Nashville on December 2, almost at the end of its long run  -  and she was brought in for the sessions for Slow Train Coming in spring 1979, beginning with vocal overdubs in the Muscle Shoals studio in Sheffield, Alabama that May 5 and continuing on May 7, 10 and 11. Next, the very beautiful Ms McCrary Brown formed part of the back-up singing outfit on Dylan’s ‘Saturday Night Live’ appearance on October 20, 1979 and then embarked on the first Dylan gospel tour, starting with the long run of sold-out dates at the Fox Warfield in San Francisco that November 1 and finishing on December 9 in Tucson, Arizona. She had no idea how ‘big’ Bob Dylan was when she signed up with him: it was only when confronted with these audiences that she registered how important a figure he was to so many people.

            Her friend Carolyn Dennis was not in the group on this tour: Regina’s vocal colleagues were Mona Lisa Young and Helena Springs. The group sang some opening numbers each night before Dylan himself came on, but he plunged Regina in at the deep end by making her deliver as a monologue a particular ‘Christian homily’ story she’d known all her life and had been heard retailing backstage.

            In 1980 McCrary stayed on the Dylan payroll, remaining all through the year’s touring  -  from snowy Portland, Oregon on January 11 through to Charleston, West Virginia on February 9, and from Toronto on April 17 through to Dayton, Ohio on May 21. She was there too for the recording of the Saved album in between the two tours, beginning in the studio on February 13, along with Mona Lisa Young and Clydie King, and she sang behind Dylan on ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ at the Grammy awards show on CBS-TV in LA that February 27. (In March, when Dylan played harmonica on Keith Green’s track ‘Pledge My Head To Heaven’, two other McCrary sisters, Charity and Linda, were the back-up singers.)

            On the second 1980 tour, she duetted with Dylan on his little-known song ‘Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One’ at Hartford, Connecticut on May 7, and two weeks later sang it solo on the tour’s last night. Again, this tour did not include Carolyn Dennis.

            In 1981 Regina McCrary was still with Dylan when he went into the studios in Santa Monica on March 11 to start work on the Shot of Love sessions, and towards the end of that month during one day’s session she not only sang back-up vocals but was recorded singing solo lead vocals on ‘Please Be Patient With Me’ and (as she had done live the year before) ‘‘Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One’. She and Dylan even co-wrote a song at these sessions, ‘Got To Give Him My All’ (though it has never circulated, by either singer). She remained at the sessions until May, though she seems to have left before the last session, at which were Carolyn Dennis and Madelyn Quebec but no Regina.

            On the June-July 1981 tour, Regina was there again, and sang solo lead vocal on ‘Till I Get It Right’ in an early slot at each concert, and duetted with Dylan on ‘Mary From the Wild Moor’ at the third London performance on June 28.

            In all, she had been with Bob Dylan on three albums and over 150 concerts. By 1999, when interviewed for the US Dylan fanzine On The Tracks, McCrary Brown was working ‘as a drug counselor in a Christian ministry’ and singing on ‘The Bobby Jones Gospel Show’, then the largest gospel TV show in the country, which went out twice each Sunday via cable TV channel BET from Nashville, her home base.

            McCrary’s 21-year-old son Tony was murdered in c2000, but she reportedly found peace by inwardly forgiving his killer. By 2004 she had become the Rev. Regina McCrary and was billed as a guest speaker at the Surviving Heartbreak Hotel Women’s Retreat, again in Nashville.

            In 2003, a circle of sorts was completed with the release of the various-artists compilation album Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan, which features two relevant items (alongside Dylan’s own duet with Mavis Staples): here we find an a cappella ‘Are You Ready?’ by the newest incarnation of the all-male Fairfield Four  -  and a version of ‘Pressing On’ billed as by the Chicago Mass Choir on which the lead vocalist is . . . Regina McCrary.

            Since then, as part of gospel group the McCrary Sisters, she has continued to perform and record gospel albums. Our Journey, from 2010, includes a re-working of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’.