#439 - Sam Cooke - Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 (1985)

MUSIC HISTORY WRITTEN BY HEAD WRITER DJ MORTY COYLE:

Although this live album by the American singer/songwriter and legendary “King of Soul” Sam Cooke was recorded at Miami’s Harlem Square Club on January 12th, 1963 it wasn’t released until over twenty years later in June of 1985.

I’ll get into why in a minute.

Born in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1931 Sam Cook (who then spelled his last name without the ending “E”) was the fifth of eight children of the Reverend Charles Cook, a minister in the Church of Christ, and his wife Annie Mae.

The family moved to Chicago when Sam was a few years old and by the time he was six he was already singing with his siblings in a group called the Singing Children.

By 1945 the fourteen year old Cook formed and sang lead in the gospel group the Highway QC’s, with a group of his fellow Highway Baptist Church friends.

He left them in 1950 and joined The Soul Stirrers, the famed gospel group whose career started in 1926 and continued for over eighty years by replacing members... like Menudo.

The Soul Stirrers were highly influential on the development of secular, African-American, musical styles like doo-wop, soul, r&b, and Motown.

A lot of that success was due to Cook’s voice, charm, and good looks which turned on many younger female fans to gospel music.

In 1956 after six years with the group Cook decided to pursue a solo career.

His first single was released under the name, “Dale Cook” so as not to alienate his gospel fan base.

However his unique voice was easily recognizable so by 1957 he was recording under his own name and that’s when he threw on that “E” to Cooke as a small attempt at reinvention.

His first single was a song he wrote called, “You Send Me”, a crossover hit which spent six weeks at number one on the R&B charts as well as three weeks at number one on the Pop charts.

Over the next five years Cooke released ten albums and many singles on two labels which included other hits he wrote like, “Wonderful World”, “Chain Gang”, “Cupid”, and “Twistin’ the Night Away.”

His label RCA Victor decided it was time for a live Sam Cooke album so on January 12th of 1962 in Miami’s historically African-American neighborhood of Overton he took the stage at the small Harlem Square Club to play to an audience packed with his devoted and adoring fans.

His band that night was Clifton White and Cornell Dupree on guitars, Jimmy Lewis on bass, Albert “June” Gardner on drums, George Stubbs on piano, and King Curtis and Tate Houston on saxophones.

The record was to be called “One Night Stand.”

But when RCA Victor heard the results they decided it didn’t represent the type of mainstream appeal they were cultivating for Cooke. It was too raw, too loud, and let’s be honest… too Black.

It was shelved and forgotten about while Sam’s popular career continued.

Between 1957 and 1964 he had thirty U.S. Top 40 hits.

Tragically by the end of ‘64, the following year after this recording, Sam Cooke would be shot and killed under mysterious circumstances in Los Angeles. He was only 33.

He then had three more posthumous Top 40 hits.

Cut to twenty-one years later when in 1985 a record executive named Gregg Geller discovered these live recordings and after adding a few instrumental overdubs quickly released this album.

Despite this showcase of Cooke’s raw power, versatility, and charisma Geller understood why the record company at the time decided to protect Cooke’s image as a pop, crossover, artist.

Geller said, "The fact is, when he was out on the road, he was playing to a predominantly, almost exclusively black audience. And he was doing a different kind of show — a much more down-home, down-to-earth, gut-bucket kind of show than what he would do for his pop audience."

To this day this album is considered one of the greatest live albums of all time.