Popular RCA Artist Found Shot Dead Inside L.A. Motel
LOSANGELES — Sam Cooke, one of RCA Victor’s top pop artists, was shot and killed at a motel here Thursday night (December 10). It was reported that Cooke was mistaken for a prowler. He was 29 years old.
Cookehasbeenasteady seller since he joined the Victor label in1960. This past year he had three single clicks and two best selling albums. Victor has a new Cooke single in the works which was being planned for release within the next few weeks.
In addition to his Victor activities, Cooke operated his own label,SARRecords,onthe Coast. Surviving are his widow and two daughters.
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Credit, information and news source: Billboard, December 19, 1964
His Biggest Hurdle Now Behind Him, Sam Cooke Looks Toward the Adult Market
MUSIC BUSINESS — (7/11/1964) — The young and talented in our time face a depressing reality. The very mass media which serve to promote and parade them before the public (press, radio, television, recordings) play a double role: they are also the harbingers of obsolescence. The “too much, too soon” machinery has a will of its own, and few understand the mechanics of escaping it. Hopefully, Sam Cooke does.
At 29, Cooke can already look back on seven exceptionally successful years in show business. A graduate of one of the finest gospel singing groups, the Soul Stirrers, Cooke’s first single hit as a soloist was his self-penned “You Send Me,” which appeared on the Keene label. Shortly thereafter he was signed by RCA Victor Records and his career slowly took shape. And it is a solid shape. His last ten singles have all made Top 20 in the country.
SAM COOKE 1964
Long term success is rarely an accident. For Cooke, it has been a case of meticulous planning, and a constant need on the part of the artist for reappraisal of his abilities – particularly as a live performer. “I remember my first stab at the Copa. I had just two hit singles and was booked as a second string act. I wasn’t prepared. I had no conception of an act, lacked stage presence and made little identity with lyrics. It was a painful lesson.”
Others who recall that particular date are easier on Cooke than he is on himself. But he vowed then he’d be a pro before he returned.
When he opened there, June 24, as head-liner, there was something of a vengeance in the first half of the opening set. He was tight and visibly nervous. But then, the real Sam came through and he had his audience with him from there on in – even to singing and clapping while he fed them the lyrics to “If I Had A Hammer.” A pretty risky trick for the staid Copa crowd — but it worked. Cooke has finally broken into the adult market, and he intends to stay there.
Yet there is something enigmatic about Cooke’s past five years as a performer. He has been virtually protected from the adult market, which is hard to reconcile in this day and age. All the while, he has had a tremendous teen following, and the Negro community know him as a “star.” At New York’s Town Hill, for instance, he earns $12,500 per week as a headliner.
When he plays the Apollo in Harlem he breaks attendance records (52,000 his last week there). Yet, his manager of nine months, Allen Klein, when asked why he’d waited so long for the Copa booking, he explained, “Frankly, they didn’t want him. ‘Who’s Cooke,’ they asked. His current booking there wasn’t even set until May.”
Klein has ambitious plans for Cooke’s future, with murmurs of a Carnegie Hall concert and the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, as well as the European scene. Cooke recently left the William Morris Agency and signed with G.A.C., where Buddy Howe is in charge of him. “Howe’s one of the best talent builders in the business,” offers Klein.
Klein explained, “We’re ready to go all the way with Sam. This past year has been a brief hiatus for Sam — he’s not given any personal appearances, save one, so that he could orient himself to the change in his career. Now we’re set to run with it.”
If Cooke’s business acumen is any indication of his talent for carrying things out, there’s little doubt that he’ll make his presence felt. He owns his own publishing firm (Kags) and two record labels, Derby and Sar. As a composer, he’s been responsible for most of his hit record tunes, including “You Send Me,” “Every-body Likes to Cha Cha Cha,” “Only Sixteen,” “Chain Gang,” “Having A Party,”“Cupid,” “Twistin’ The Night Away,” “Another Saturday Night,” “Ain’t That Good News,” and “Good Times,” is just a partial list. And it is intimated that his recent new pact with RCA Victor has some pretty interesting clauses in it. One is that as he develops new talent on his own labels, Victor gets first refusal on signing the acts.
If Cooke has any idol it is talent. He is ecstatic about great performers, arrangers, writers. He spoke recently at length about Bob Dylan. “Now there’s a guy with a real soul. And such a talent for putting beautiful thoughts in a simple framework. If you’ve got something to say, I think that’s the way to say it. If you haven’t you’d better cool it.
“You know,” he confessed, “I was so impressed with one of his songs (‘The Times They Are a-Changin’), I wrote one around it, called ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ “. END
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Information, credit and news source: Music Business; July 11, 1964
It was the second most successful in a series of themed albums enjoying a #5 peak on the Billboard R&B chart. It showcased the versatility of the group with a Brit-pop album under their belt, as well as, a country and western-themed album. According to Motown data, this album managed to sell over 325,000 copies.(Source: WiKipedia)
THE SUPREMES 1965
THE SUPREMES
WE REMEMBER SAM COOKE
*****
“OCCASIONALLY in any field of endeavor there arises upon the scene so unique and unusual that critics as well and disciples alike immediately take notice. Sometimes it takes that talent years to grow and mature to its full height. On other occasions the rise to the zenith is like a shooting star. Always, however, that rise is an absolute predictable and foreseeable event. Such a man was Sam Cooke, his very existence exploding with the pent up creativity that was his natural gift, striving ever in the allied fields.
A composer and lyricist of unusual talent, he seemed to have a finger on the pulse of the times . . . being that fortunate artist who usually did not have to look for material because he created his own.
With his eye to the future with a well planned approach, Sam Cooke breached the beach the beachheads from his early R&B oriented approaches to the mature and additional vistas available; witness his outstanding success at the Copacabana and class clubs of like nature.
His untimely passing, if on this basis alone, shocked the entire music world. To his contemporaries not only was a creator of originality but likewise he was a real person. To have this young, successful and ‘great’ removed from the scene was a fact of total incongruity that was first reaction who knew, respected and loved him was one of disbelief.
Rising somewhat in a parallel spiral, but dominated by their artistic creativity, the Supremes in their own way have reached unbelievable heights of acceptance and success. Nothing they or any of us can do will bring back Sam Cooke, the man, the artist, the creator. But more than just paying respect to Sam Cooke they are, in their way, doing what Sam Cooke would have wanted them to do . . . bring music into this world. Sam Cook’s creativity in the form of his renown compositions . . . the Supremes with their unsurpassed artistry . . . a Tribute to Sam Cooke.
In a way he will live forever. He saw to it, he made it that way.” — Scott St. James (Source of notes: LP B-side; ‘We Remember Sam Cooke’)
BILLBOARD HOT 100 AS COMPILED BY NATIONAL RETAIL SALES AND RADIO AIRPLAY
BILLBOARD SONG NUMBER 33 IN U.S.A.* Sam Cooke *WEEK OF 2/20/65
M O T O R C I T Y R A D I O F L A S H B A C K S
50 YEARS AGO: SEVEN WEEKS on the singles chart, “A Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke peaked at No. 33 on the Billboard Hot 100, week of March 6, 1965.
A huge crowd gather outside Tabernacle Baptist Church during Sam Cooke’s rites in Chicago, December 17, 1964.(Click image for larger view)
CHICAGO — A crowd estimated at 15,000 flocked to the Tabernacle Baptist Church on the South Side Thursday night, December 17, to pay last respects to the late Sam Cooke, who was shot and killed in Los Angeles on December 11 (last year).
Only a third of the crowd could be accommodated in the church and 50 policemen were called to shepherd the overflow which milled about in near zero weather for several hours until permitted to file past Cooke’s casket after the church emptied.
Earlier in the day heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay viewed Cooke’s body at the A. R. Leak Funeral Home, where he laid in an open coffin in three-quarter view, shielded under a protective glass cover.
The RCA recording artist was fatally shot in Los Angeles by a woman hotel manager who said Cooke had burst in her office threateningly and a scuffle ensued between the two. After the police conducted their investigation the shooting was ruled as justifiable homicide. The report concluded the hotel proprietor had acted accordingly in self-defense during an attack allegedly perpetrated by Cooke.
A newspaper account on the death of Sam Cooke, December 12, 1964. (Click image for larger view)
Tearful and poetic eulogies were intoned by several Negro ministers who knew Cooke from the days he and his seven brothers and sisters formed a gospel singing group called the Child Singers. This was shortly after the family moved to Chicago from Mississippi.
Cooke graduated to the Highway’s QC’s, winning a wide and divided and devoted gospel-mode following in the great Chicago ghetto. In 1949, he joine the Soul Stirrers, and led the troupe from the church circuit to the Copa.
“The world is better because Sam Cooke lived,” eulogized the Reverend Lewis Rawls. “He inspired many youths of all races and creeds.”
E. Rodney Jones, representing WVON radio station owner Leonard Chess, said: “As long as music exists, Sam Cooke will live.” WVON broadcast the entire memorial service.
Cooke was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. He was 33. END.
A January 1965 Jet magazine account detailing Sam Cooke’s death.(Click image for larger view. For a LARGER read, click here)
MCRFB Addendum: There has been several variations and accounts on what actually took place on December 11, 1964, the morning Sam Cooke died at the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles.
For more on the career, untimely death of Sam Cooke, go here. For a detailed, comprehensive account of Cooke’s shooting, begin here. Here also, a Los Angeles police crime scene photo showing Sam Cooke as he was found at the motel. Below: Dick Clark interviews Sam Cooke on AB in 1964. And, the official Sam Cooke Facebook page today, here.
SAM COOKE 1931 – 1964
(Information and news source: Billboard; January 2, 1965).
Popular RCA Artist Found Shot Dead Inside L.A. Motel
LOS ANGELES — Sam Cooke, one of RCA Victor’s top pop artists, was shot and killed at a motel here Thursday night (December 10). It was reported that Cooke was mistaken for a prowler. He was 29 years old.
