Recommendations of the Editorial team
Let’s say you want to sing “I love you for sentimental reasons.” How do you get started, the I? Do you just slide in there? Are you sneaking in a little hidden percussive H? The way a singer takes this vowel says a lot about his fundamental courage. When you say that from the back of your throat, the listener knows within a thousandth of a second that you’re not a wimp. That this singer has self-confidence, hits the right note and has the right sound.
Sam Cooke was great at that: he had grit as a singer.
Plus, Sam bombarded you with a lot of notes. Nowadays you hear all the coloratura stuff that Mariah Carey made popular. Sam was the first person I heard singing like that. When he sings “I love you for sentimental reasons/ I hope you believe me,” the next line should really be, “I’ve given you my heart.” But he sings: “I’ve given you my-my-mah-muh-my heart/ Given you my heart because I need you.”
Sam Cooke: “I Love You For Sentimental Reasons”:
It’s as if he wanted to say: Now that I’ve sung the word, I’m going to sing it again because this feeling absolutely has to come out. He gave us so much with his music that he could have left us far less and it would still be enough.
Sam incorporated all those extra notes into songs like “You Send Me,” in which he casually sprinkles between the lines: “I know, I know, I know, when you hold me.” This man had a wonderful approach, but also pretty good taste. I never had the feeling that he overdid his singing, as is often the case today. Sam always remained rhythmic, light and floating. He always demonstrated brilliant vocal control.
I must have sung “You Send Me” a thousand times while going up and down stairs. It came out when I was having my first small successes with Paul Simon. Our “Hey, Schoolgir!” was on the charts along with “You Send Me” and “Jail-house Rock*. I was just a kid, calling radio stations for advertising purposes. And all I heard was “You Send Me.”
Sam Cooke: “You Send Me”:
Sam was a good person, you could tell. His father had been a priest, and he himself had of course spent a lot of time in church. At first he only sang gospel, then R&B and pop were added. It seemed like he always made the right decisions in his life. Until the day he was shot by a motel night clerk. One wonders which people he was involved with.
Paul Simon, James Taylor and I covered “Wonderful World,” which was also his. A teenage short story like Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” or “School Days”, songs that speak from the hearts of young people.
Sam was a master of this style. “Wonderful World” is a naive song in the best sense of the word. Sam was famous before the album was discovered as an art form. You think of him in individual songs.
My favorites are “Sad Mood,” “Wonderful World,” “Summertime,” “For Sentimental Reasons,” and “You Send Me.” And “A Change Is Gonna Come” shows where he could have developed. He would certainly have written Marvin Gaye-like lyrics about the society in which we live.
His death was a tremendous loss. I know I couldn’t believe it at the time. He was still on the way up. A wonderful, intelligent singer. And he had this radiant smile.