Sam Cooke With The Soul Stirrers – The Complete Specialty Recordings
Sam Cooke’s legacy has been well-served in recent years. First came RCA’s 2000 release The Man Who Invented Soul, a four-disc set that made a compelling case for its title (despite lacking Cooke’s greatest song, “A Change Is Gonna Come”). ABKCO followed in 2002 with the 23-track Keep On Movin’, which featured not only “Change” but also a slew of material from the last year of Cooke’s life that was previously unavailable on CD.
Yet Cooke’s 1950s gospel recordings with the Soul Stirrers, the very music that many would argue remains his best, remained scattered across a half-dozen or so discs. The Complete Specialty Recordings finally brings it all together, along with plenty of alternate takes and hard-to-find live recordings. The result is a three-disc, 84-song set that’s essential for anyone interested in either the development of Cooke as an artist or the “golden age of gospel.” Even more than the RCA box, this set shows clearly how Cooke pushed the gospel quartet format’s boundaries and helped build the foundation for both soul and rock ‘n’ roll.
Cooke came into the Soul Stirrers as the replacement for R.H. Harris, a great singer in his own right who had helped the group become one of the best-selling gospel quartets. Cooke didn’t fill those shoes right away; the thirteen cuts from his 1951 audition reveal that he had the chops but not the emotional power to work the congregation. Over the next two years, as the tracks here show, Cooke developed as a performer (witness his thrilling shouts on all three 1953 takes of “All Right Now”), while the group pushed into more beat-heavy (read: commercial) territory.
By 1956, Cooke was already experimenting with secular music, but the seven tracks without the Soul Stirrers included here demonstrate why it would still be a while before he found his way in that world. The set ends with the group’s legendary July 1955 performance at Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium, a three-song lesson in how the great gospel quartets wrecked the house. The group starts slowly, with “I Have a Friend Above All Others”, then builds energy on “Be With Me Jesus” (with Paul Foster, no slouch but no Sam Cooke, taking the lead). On the eight-minute “Nearer To Thee,” Foster and Cooke engage in a tenacious call-and-response battle that brings the crowd to its feet and to its knees. Cooke’s step in to rock ‘n’ soul was just around the corner, but you’d be hard-pressed to find music that rocks harder than this.