Years before he became a soul music icon, Cooke was a member of the Soul Stirrers, a renowned gospel group based in Chicago in the early to mid-1950s. In the 80s, I was a teenager when I first heard Last Mile of the Way, one of the group’s best-known songs. Rev. Milton Brunson played it during his Saturday afternoon show on WXFM (105.9 FM). Devoted Chicago gospel fans will also remember Brunson as founder of the Thompson Community Singers as well as pastor of the Christ Tabernacle Baptist Church on the city’s West Side. I was stunned by the song’s beauty as well as Cooke’s vocals. I knew some of his R&B tunes, but was thrilled to hear him sing gospel.

Born in Clarksdale, Mississippi on January 22, 1931, Cooke was almost two years old when his family migrated to Chicago’s South Side, eventually settling at 3527 So. Cottage Grove. As a child, he sang with his siblings at a church pastored by his father in Chicago Heights, about 30 miles outside the city. Cooke was 19 when he joined the Soul Stirrers in 1950.

Sharing lead vocals with Paul Foster, Cooke and the group recorded a string of gospel gems on Specialty Records, including Just Another Day, Touch the Hem of His Garment and Be With Me, Jesus—many of them written or arranged by the handsome lead singer. If you listen to those recordings, you can hear the distinctive phrasing, the trademark yodel and other vocal acrobatics that would one day earn him the title, ‘The Man Who Invented Soul.’

Cooke’s ability to whip crowds into a spiritual frenzy only intensified as the Soul Stirrers toured the country. A July 1955 appearance at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles would place him on the path to becoming a secular artist. The group sang extended versions of their most popular recordings, including another Cooke composition, Nearer to Thee. During this performance, he added new verses that ensured an emotional response from the audience. Listen to how he, trading ad-libs with Foster, steadily builds the crowd’s excitement, singing about how “bad company will make a good child go astray” and finding his mother “with folded arms…looking up toward the sky” with tears streaming down her face.

It was the Shrine appearance that made Specialty’s A&R man Bumps Blackwell urge Cooke to consider pursuing a pop career. By December 1956, he had recorded Lovable, a secularized version of the group’s hit, Wonderful. Concerned about the possible backlash from the religious community, he used the pseudonym Dale Cook. Of course, no one was fooled. According to Peter Guralnick, in the book Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, several gospel singers and fans tried to persuade the charismatic performer not to switch to popular music. Gospel deejays and concert promoters said he was making a huge mistake.

However, in April 1957, Cooke recorded his final session with the Soul Stirrers. Ironically, those songs which included, That’s Heaven to Me, Were You There and Lord, Remember Me could have easily been pop or doo-wop records. The next month, Cooke left Chicago and the group, and moved to Los Angeles. He signed a deal with Keen Records and four months later, You Send Me was on its way to the top of the pop and rhythm and blues charts.

Thanks for reading this; please join me in Sounding Off by sharing your favorite gospel song by Sam Cooke. I look forward to your response.

Kimberly Vann

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Today in 1955,Little Richard goes to  Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studios in New Orleans for the first time. Over the next year he’ll record some of the greatest sides in rock and roll history with producer Bumps Blackwell and the cream of bandleader Dave Bartholomew’s musicians.

Every summer, I like to have a project, and this summer, it was supposed to be acquainting myself with film. Towards the end of the summer, however, it ended up acquainting myself with rock music. Part of the reason I read so voraciously is that I lack a lot of context, and one of those contexts is popular music. Hence The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll. But while I was poking around the 800s in the nonfiction section at the library, I stumbled across this anthology and thought it sounded very interesting, so I determined to read it once I had an overview. And I ended up reading a six hundred page anthology while I desperately needed to boost my posting buffer. Of course.

Rock and Roll is Here to Stay is an anthology of rock writing by those who wrote the music, witnessed the music, and analyzed the music, curated by William McKeen, who teaches a course in rock and roll history at Boston University. The anthology is separated into eight sections—definition of terms, ancestors, superstardom, weirdness, present at the creation, soul, critics, and tributes—and pays slight attention to chronology. The larger focus is on rock as a movement and as a whole.

Anthologies are always hard to review, aren’t they? Especially when they’re more academic—I have a sneaking suspicion McKeen curated Rock and Roll is Here to Stay for his class. But this one doesn’t feel too academic; even the novel excerpts feel pointed. There is that unevenness of quality I find in every anthology—I’m starting to think it’s just the nature of the beast—but everything feels relevant. Even my least favorite piece, Lester Bangs’ “Psychotic Reactions and Carberator Dungs”, has a beautiful paragraph about how one’s truest autobiography is that of the music one adores. (Which makes my autobiography, at the moment, Electric Light Orchestra’s Discovery.) It’s extremely well-edited, with a focus on the music over the lifestyle.

Even though the Superstardom and Weirdness sections claim to focus on excess, even the pieces supposedly about something else don’t stray too far from the point, except for perhaps a handful of pieces about relationships, such as Pamela Des Barres’ “Every Inch of my Love”, about her relationship with Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. Patti Smith’s “Rise of the Sacred Monsters”, a slightly incoherent (I’m woefully unpoetical) piece that starts with her crush on Mick Jagger at a young age and just goes, is more about how a musician and their music can frustrate even the true believers. “Woodstock Nation”, an oral history piece about the famous music festival, focuses on the business end of it, which brought the west and east coast scenes together, as well as the contrast between the musicians and their audience. Pete Townshend, in particular, notes his shock and dismay at realizing that the American scene the Who are trying to break into appears to be melting before his eyes. And, in perhaps one of my favorite anecdotes, Terry Southern, in “Riding the Lapping Tongue” (“The Lapping Tongue” the unofficial name for the Rolling Stones’ plane, which bore their Andy Warhol designed symbol), is handed a pamphlet at a Stones concert about the sexism in the Stones’ music.

So the anthology’s lows aren’t very low, and its heights—goodness. John Lennon’s “The Ballad of John and Yoko” is just stunning—the line “Escape, at last! Someone to leave home for!” is so astonishingly romantic and personal I could have swooned. Rickey Vincent’s “The Mothership Connection” analyzes the message of Parliament Funkadelic in the context of the aftermath of the civil rights movement. Nik Cohn’s “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night”, on which the film Saturday Night Fever was based, is a fascinating look into how the music of the club becomes secondary to dance, which the subculture finds superior to speech. Despite the sexism of a lot of this history (there’s one anecdote about the Beatles summoning the Supremes, having utterly misread each other’s public personas), we see women expressing desire (in “Riding the Lapping Tongue”, a young woman tells Bill Wyman that “Oh my God, you are so stone beautiful I can’t believe it!” [193]), seeking salvation through music, and expressing themselves, perhaps none so succinctly and powerfully as Yoko Ono’s brief press release about the murder of her husband, which ends with “Our thoughts are with you” (628). Chilling.

I wouldn’t recommend it as an introduction to rock history if you’re as dead new to the stuff as I was—I think I made the right choice in reading The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll first—but if you already know a bit or any of the pieces sound interesting, I would definitely give it a go, if only for “The Ballad of John and Yoko” and the sheer variety in perspectives. And I haven’t even mentioned the excerpt from High Fidelity!

Bottom line: Perhaps not an introduction to rock history if you’re as totally new to the stuff as I was, but a fascinating collection of wonderful writing about rock music, even given the unevenness inherent in anthologies, which isn’t so bad here. Definitely worth a look.

I rented this book from the public library.

Little Richard was an electrifying talent — that we can all agree upon. But where exactly does he stand among contemporaries like Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry? Richard, like the other performers mentioned, was an early inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But his legacy has not aged as well as many of his fellow rock giants. Richard did not always have access to the best material. His career quickly stalled out when he announced he would no longer sing “the devil’s music.” Yet, at the top of his game, the man born Richard Penniman could really stir up a room.

Top notch songs like Tutti Frutti, Ready Teddy, Long Tall Sally, Slippin and Slidin, and Rip It Up have surely stood the test of time. Penniman’s producer Art Rupe deserves a great deal of credit — as does the marvelous crew of backing musicians that can be heard on Richard’s New Orleans and Los Angeles recording sessions. These often overlooked studio cats included names like Lee Allen on tenor sax, Huey Smith on piano, Alvin “Red” Tyler on baritone sax, and the legendary Earl Palmer on drums.

Most of the highlights of Little Richard’s early rock n’ roll career can be found on “Here’s Little Richard.” Of special note is the bonus audio interview  with Rupe, Richard’s two original demo recordings, and included videos of Penniman’s 1956 Hollywood screen tests. The videos show Little Richard powering his way thru Tutti Frutti and Long Tall Sally. These songs heavily influenced acts like The Beatles and still maintain their energy and excitement more than 50 years after first being transferred to vinyl. The packaging also comes with a tastefully done booklet, some very cool B&W photography, and a fold-out poster of the original album cover. How’s that for extras???

Collectors and longtime fans will really dig the extra features and enhanced sound quality. If you don’t have any Little Richard in your collection, this is a wonderful place to start. Pop it into your CD player and you’ll be “ripping it up” in no time flat. Little Richard had that effect on people — and he still does today.

Rock ’n’ roll may date back to Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” in 1951 and perhaps further to blues/swing hybrids of the 1940s. But many would contend that Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans in September 1955, was the first great rock ’n’ roll record. “Tutti Frutti” kicks off Here’s Little Richard, Concord Music Group’s expanded reissue of the original Specialty Records album from 1957. Street date is April 17, 2012.
In addition to the original recordings of Little Richard’s best known hits — “Long Tall Sally,” “Ready Teddy,” “Jenny Jenny,” “Rip It Up,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’” and more — the Concord remastered reissue features two bonus tracks (Specialty demo recordings of “Baby” and “All Night Long”) and two videos (screen tests of “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally”).

The set contains liner notes by R&B musicologist Lee Hildebrand, as well as the notes from the original LP. Although Little Richard recorded for RCA Victor in 1951 and Peacock Records in 1953, his Specialty years — the 25-month period between September 1955 and October 1957 — proved monumental. As annotator Hildebrand writes, “They are quite possibly the most exciting and incendiary recordings in the annals of popular music and constitute a body of work upon which Richard’s reputation as one of the primary architects of rock ’n’ roll is measured.” Richard approached Specialty Records at the suggestion of R&B legend Lloyd Price, best known for the 1952 R&B hit “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.”

Richard and his band, the Upsetters, recorded a demo of two blues songs at Macon radio station WMBL-AM. The first, “Baby,” was a blues shuffle, the second a slow blues titled “All Night Long” that featured B.B. King-style guitar by Thomas Hartwell. In fact Specialty owner Art Rupe happened to be looking for a singer like B.B. King, although staff producer Bumps Blackwell recalls Rupe as seeking the next Ray Charles. The demos didn’t overwhelm Rupe, but he signed Little Richard anyway.

Blackwell was assigned to record Richard in New Orleans, and the resulting session featuring pianist Huey Smith and saxophonist Lee Diamond begat eight standard-issue blues/R&B songs. Then, during a break on the second day while Smith was out, the producer heard Richard sing “Tutti Frutti,” accompanying himself on the piano. With only 15 minutes of studio time remaining, and the original lyrics cleaned up by songwriter and studio habitué Dorothy LaBostrie, there was no time for Smith to learn the piano part, so Richard played it himself.

According to Hildebrand, “Richard attacked the piano with incessant even-eight-note patters which was decidedly different from the shuffle rhythm drummer Earl Palmer was laying down behind him. Swing and shuffle beats had been the primary pulse of rhythm & blues until Richard introduced even eights that would come to drive most R&B and rock music and still do today.”

 
The song shot to #2 on Billboard’s R&B charts and a creditable #17 pop. Rolling Stone rated it at #43 on its list of Greatest 500 Songs of All Time. Subsequent Little Richard Specialty hits dented Top 10 R&B and Top 20 pop. All the songs on Here’s Little Richard were recorded in New Orleans with the exception of “True, Fine Mama” and “She’s Got It,” both made in Los Angeles, Specialty’s home.

Since abruptly giving up show business for God in October 1957, Richard’s life has vacillated between religion and rock ’n’ roll. Today at age 78, he lives in Nashville. Despite being wheelchair-bound, on July 3, 2011, he performed “Tutti Frutti” and other hits on the nationally televised all-star “A Capitol Fourth” on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Collector’s Choice has recently released 3 vintage Little Richard recordings. Set to wax in the late ’60s and early ’70s, these LPs were a real hodge podge of musicians and musical styles. Sure, Richard’s trademark falsetto is evident throughout. But Mr. Penniman bounces around wildly from blues to country to rhythm and blues and the results are somewhat mixed.

All three CDs have their moments, but the clear cut winner in my book is the collection entitled “The Rill Thing.” Ably accompanied by the fabulous Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, Little Richard finds his groove with cuts like “Freedom Blues,” “Greenwood, Mississippi,” and the 10-minute instrumental blowout called “The Rill Thing.” The playing is as tasteful as a platter of fried green tomatoes and Richard’s over the top personality never overpowers his talented band mates.   

The same cannot be said for the other two releases. I will admit that the cover art on “The Second Coming” is very cool, but the LP suffers from spotty production and a sameness that grows weary after the first few cuts. The highlights are the tracks where Penniman is joined by LA session legends like saxman Lee Allen and drummer Earl Palmer.

I would have to say the “King of Rock and Roll” collection is the worst of the lot. Richard fails to live up to the album’s title and his between track ramblings don’t hold up to repeated listening. The song choices are bold (CCR’s “Born on the Bayou” and Motown’s “Dancing in the Street” to name a pair) and I give him some credit for that. And the cover art again scores points with Penniman sitting high atop a majestic throne with sceptor in hand and his trademark hair piled high on a sesame seed bun.

Forget the latter two, but please don’t miss ”The Rill Thing.” You will surely love it if you are a fan of the greasy, down home Southern R&B sound that made stars out of names like Clarence Carter, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, and Aretha Franklin.