Following in Ray Charles’ footsteps by fusing gospel music with secular lyrics, Sam Cooke packed more soul into a 3-minute single than most singers can muster over an entire lifetime. In fact, many critics contend that he “invented” Soul music (although for me that is too simplistic an interpretation of the pioneers and sources of the genre). Blessed with suave charisma and a magical voice, Cooke’s all-too-brief career was filled with terrific highlights and smash hits, including 30 Top 40s between 1957 and 1963, as well as several posthumous successes like the glorious, Civil Rights-infused “A Change is Gonna Come”.
That epic song points to the direction Cooke would undoubtedly have headed had he lived: politically aware music committed to the cause of Civil Rights and social justice, just as he was in life. “A Change is Gonna Come” also prefigures the social awakening that such artists as Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye would undergo as the 1960s wore on by showing that protest music was a natural fit for R&B and soul and not merely the sole province of white folk singers.
Though there are a ton of songs to choose from among the less political, from “Wonderful World”, “Chain Gang”, “Cupid” and “You Send Me” to name just a few, the more classically blues-structured “Somebody Have Mercy” has always seemed to me one of the best Cooke recorded during his breakout crossover period onto the pop charts: soulful but not too sweet, lyrically very clever and featuring top notch musical backing.
Obviously, we can say that at 33 Sam Cooke died far, far too young, robbing us of a full lifetime of his rapidly evolving greatness. But with his enormous influence on the artists that followed him such as Otis Redding, James Brown, Al Green, Gaye, Ben E. King, Bobby Womack and on up to today’s soulful R&B singers, as well as popular music as a whole, we can also say that Sam Cooke never really died at all. The true immortals never do.
