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Sam cooke wonderful world5/17/2023 ![]() ![]() “If you promise to give me five years,” Ms. Cooke’s proposal to a scene out of “The Graduate,” the 1967 film in which a dazed and disillusioned young man is seduced by a friend of his parents. In his own memoir, “Bobby Womack: My Story” (2006), Mr. At her urging, they married in early 1965. Womack into the house as a kind of protector. She said she had welcomed the 19-year-old Mr. Cooke was still numb from grief over her son’s death and humiliated by the tawdry circumstances of her husband’s, she told Mr. In 1963, their third child, Vincent, drowned in their pool when he was 18 months old. And she had her own affairs, as she explained to Mr. ![]() Cooke, whom he had interviewed at length, had tried to keep her end up, attempting to read James Baldwin at her husband’s prompting and joining a group of philanthropic African American women known as the Regalettes. In his exhaustive biography “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke” (2005), Peter Guralnick noted how Ms. Cooke, steely in his ambition and chronically unfaithful, went about his life while Ms. Cooke had added an “e” to his name at the start of his career.) The couple settled down in Los Angeles in a vine-covered Cape in the Hollywood area. ![]() Cooke.īarbara and Sam had married and divorced other people before marrying each other in Chicago in 1959, with Mr. She had their daughter, Linda, when she was 17 three other women would also have daughters by Mr. Conspiracy theories still surround the death.īarbara was his teenage sweetheart but only one of many girlfriends. Cooke was 33 when he was shot by the manager of a $3-a-night motel in Los Angeles in December 1964 while chasing a prostitute who had stolen his clothes and money. Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” (Aretha Franklin, who as a young singer was often on tour with him, remembered buying the book just because he had it.) He was a voracious reader, of everything from James Baldwin to William L. He was a canny businessman who retained the rights to his work and built a publishing and recording company to promote the work of others. The son of a preacher, he took a firm stand in playing the American South, refusing to perform for segregated audiences. Cooke, once a teenage gospel singer, was music royalty, a movie-star-handsome crooner of hits like “You Send Me” and “Wonderful World,” as well as the wrenching “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which would become a civil rights anthem. The Cookes’ life together and its aftermath were the stuff of Greek tragedy. ![]() The death was recently confirmed by David Washington, a Detroit radio host who is close to the Cooke and Womack families. Cooke lived in relative obscurity, and when she died in April at 85, no public announcement was made, at her and her family’s wish. Widely publicized, their union made them pariahs in their families, to much of the music community and to Mr. And only three months after his death, Barbara Campbell Cooke, his widow, would marry her husband’s protégé Bobby Womack, the gravelly-voiced soul singer and guitarist. Cooke, by then a pop superstar, was dead, killed in a motel tryst gone awry. Sam Cooke was 18 and Barbara Campbell was only 13 when they met on the South Side of Chicago.įifteen years later, Mr. IF YOU WERE THE ONLY GIRL IN THE WORLDġ.Their story started out as if lifted from one of his love songs. ALMOST IN YOUR ARMS (Theme From Houseboat)Ģ3. This is an enormously influential body of work which effectively laid down the roots for '60s Soul. This compilation features the very best of his recordings between 19, seventeen of which were US hits, including four million sellers, 'You Send Me', 'I'll Come Running Back To You', 'Wonderful World' and 'Chain Gang'.Īlongside his hits are a number of collector's rarities, including various B sides and tracks from his 1960 LPs 'Cooke's Tour' and 'Hits of the '50s', which have not previously appeared on CD. Sam Cooke - aka 'The Man Who Invented Soul' - is the most important R&B singer of all time. ![]()
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