Where Gospel Met R&B: Sam Cooke’s SAR Records at the Birth of Soul
When Sam Cooke formed the label SAR Records in 1959, along with creative partner J.W. Alexander and mentor/road manager Roy Crain, pop stars rarely involved themselves in the business side of the music industry. Cooke was even more of an anomaly, being both African-American and a newly-minted pop star. But while only two years had passed since Cooke scored his first hit with “You Send Me” in late 1957 (making him only the third black artist of the decade to top the Billboard pop charts, after Nat King Cole and the Platters), he was no newcomer to the music industry.
Cooke got his start in the gospel group the Highway QCs as a teenager in the mid-’40s. Within a few years, he had ascended into the role of lead singer for the venerable gospel group the Soul Stirrers. His striking good looks and sweet, enchanting voice reinvigorated the decades-old group and won them a host of new fans (often young and/or female). He left the group for the secular world in the late ’50s, pioneering a new blend of gospel, R&B, and pop music, and achieving a level of stardom and respect rarely awarded to black singers of the era.
Cooke wasn’t just interested in singing and songwriting, however. As he declared in a 1963 press release, “My future lies more in creating music and records than in being a nightclub performer.” SAR Records was intended to be just such an outlet, where Cooke could recruit acts he saw as special and exercise his producing arm. There was also an idealistic streak behind SAR. In Peter Guralnick’s book Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, SAR co-founder J.W. Alexander explains: “We wanted to give young black artists the benefit of as good a production as they could get with a major company. We used the top studios. We didn’t short-cut. We never thought of it as a training ground. We thought of it as an opportunity to contribute something back to the community.”
While Cooke never released any of his recordings through SAR, the artists he chose to record and produce provide just as much insight into his musical history and point of view. Two of the label’s key acts in particular parallel his own career. One, the Soul Stirrers, had given Cooke his first taste of stardom, and were carrying on with a new lead singer who clearly emulated Cooke’s sweetly melodic style. The other, a family R&B act called the Valentinos, had also started out singing sacred music before Cooke persuaded them to go pop, and featured a creative figure whom Cooke perceived as a clear successor. ABKCO’s recent reissue of both artists’ complete recordings for SAR (including previously unreleased material) illustrates Cooke’s willful blurring of the boundaries between sacred and secular, and the resulting new style of music that emerged.
The two-disc Joy in My Heart: The Complete SAR Recordings finds the Soul Stirrers reeling from a pair of major blows: the still-raw departure of Cooke, their charismatic, infinitely talented lead singer, and the loss of their label, Specialty Records. Founding member Roy Crain (who also helped start SAR) had begun occupying his time more as Cooke’s road manager than as an active gospel musician. Yet the Stirrers had endured for decades before Cooke even joined the group; surely they could still carry on. The Soul Stirrers became the first act recruited to SAR, perhaps as some sort of penance on Cooke’s part for having abandoned the Lord’s music. Or perhaps he was just intrigued by the idea of taking a gospel group and recording them like an R&B band, with a pop-level production budget and a groove-heavy, rocking sound.
A common assertion about SAR is that Cooke’s production style ensured that all the label’s singers sounded an awful lot like him. The most blatant example of that can be found in Johnnie Taylor, the Stirrers’ replacement for Cooke. (Taylor, who had previously replaced Cooke in the Highway QCs, would also eventually go pop, racking up hits like “Who’s Making Love” for Stax in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and scoring a #1 record with “Disco Lady” in 1976.) He only fronted two sides with the Stirrers, both recorded in 1959, but his reading of “Stand by Me Father” is one of the set’s high watermarks. His vocals recall Cooke not only in their smoothness and phrasing, but in his intimate delivery, which manages to scale down great religious pronouncements into something personal to each listener.
Taylor’s replacement Jimmie Outler may not have emulated Cooke as strongly as his predecessor, although his sweetly aching tenor on “Jesus Be a Fence Around Me” gets close. The production on their recordings, however, shows that Cooke was still interested in revitalizing gospel with youthful pop sounds. The musical styles on the two LPs the group recorded for SAR, 1961’s Jesus Be a Fence Around Me and 1963’s Encore!! With the Soul Stirrers, range from the light, rolling cha-cha of “Listen to the Angels Sing” and “I Love the Lord” (which, with secular lyrics, could make convincing Cooke pop hits), to heavier blues like “Toiling On” and “Praying Ground.” Even traditional spirituals “Amazing Grace,” “Wade in the Water” and “Free at Last” are so reworked as to be nearly unrecognizable, allowing the familiar sentiments to be heard as with new ears. The Soul Stirrers’ SAR recordings may not have crossed over into the mainstream, as some of their earlier recordings with Cooke had done (most famously “Jesus Gave Me Water” and “Touch the Hem of His Garment”), but it wasn’t for lack of possibilities.
But if Cooke fitted the Soul Stirrers with R&B trappings, he went even further with another gospel group on his label. Most of the five Womack Brothers were still teenagers at their first recording session in 1961, which perhaps explains the rambunctious energy and contemporary sound of their first two gospel singles, “Somebody’s Wrong” and “Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray.” Cooke saw hit-making potential in the group — particularly in Bobby Womack, the guitar player and co-lead singer, who fronted the group with his older brother Curtis — and persuaded them to leave sacred music entirely. The brothers, newly christened the Valentinos, released their first pop single in 1962: “Lookin’ for a Love,” a remake of “Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray” with secular lyrics. (Its B-side, “Somewhere There’s a Girl,” pulled the same trick with the Womack Brothers’ “Somewhere There’s a God.”)
“Lookin’ for a Love” became a solid hit, peaking at #8 on the Billboard R&B chart and crossing over into the Hot 100. (It also lends its name to the new compilation, Lookin’ for a Love: The Complete SAR Recordings.) Yet most rock fans would better recognize a more modest hit the group would release two years later: the country-ish “It’s All Over Now,” which the Rolling Stones would cover for their first #1 hit, released just two months after the Valentinos’ version. While these two records are obvious highlights of the collection, Lookin’ for a Love is packed with solid R&B, from the gruff-voiced Bobby’s early compositions like “Don’t Go Away” and “I’ve Got Love for You,” to the relatively sleek (but still somewhat gruff) Curtis’ “Darling, Come Back Home” and “I’ll Make It Alright.” There’s an appealingly ramshackle quality to these records that contrasts sharply with Cooke’s own polished discography. Even when recording Cooke compositions like “Sugar Dumpling” and “Tired of Livin’ in the Country,” the Womacks bring a looseness to the material that belies the songs’ origins.
By 1964, though, the group seemed on the verge of disintegration. Bobby and Harry Womack (who played bass) were regularly touring as part of Cooke’s band, with the former developing an especially close relationship with his mentor. Additionally, in Lookin’ for a Love’s liner notes, eldest brother Friendly Womack Jr. suggests that the poor performance of the group’s final single, “Everybody Wants to Fall in Love” b/w “Bitter Dreams,” was due to SAR not having “much faith in the record, because they didn’t promote it like they did the earlier records.” Cooke’s death in December 1964 under mysterious circumstances proved to be the final straw, with the brothers ending the Valentinos and going their separate ways. (The Womacks would maintain a close familial bond with their former mentor’s family, however, Bobby would infamously marry Sam’s widow Barbara just three months after Cooke’s death, while youngest brother Cecil would later wed Cooke’s daughter Linda.)
Cooke’s death also dissolved SAR Records, which, despite J.W. Alexander’s crucial participation, was essentially a one-man outfit. The Soul Stirrers would continue recording for decades afterward, though never with the same degree of success that they had with Cooke as frontman. Bobby Womack would grow from sought-after sideman into one of the towering figures of ’70s soul, while Cecil and his wife Linda would score hits in the ’80s as the duo Womack & Womack.
The idea guiding SAR Records, however, was bigger than that of any individual artist signed to the label. On one level, it provided a model for other musicians, especially African-American ones, to take charge of the business side of their career and expand their creative pursuits beyond performing. On another level, it acted as sort of a laboratory where Cooke could experiment with replicating his trademark sound with other artists. Cooke’s blend of gospel, R&B, and pop wasn’t just a personal style, as it turned out, but something that could be adopted and reinterpreted by a wide range of artists as the basis of an entire new genre: soul.
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Jordi Toledo Gonzalez