Q&A with Peter Guralnick: Cooking with Sam
Sam also believed, as he told his brother LC, present yourself as the all-American boy because it's the white father who isn't going to allow you inside the home. You want to get your records inside; you want to get your foot in the door.
Cooke wrote many of his hits, from "Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha" to "A Change Is Gonna Come."
A song like "A Change Is Gonna Come," despite the fact that it is linked specifically to the movement, has never lost its currency because of Sam's theory of songwriting: Start with a phrase or a saying that's almost timeless, and retain a kind of simplicity of approach, and make it open-ended enough so it isn't limited to a certain time period. "A Change Is Gonna Come" has turned up in every age. In the wake of Katrina, it has been sung over and over again. In our own age, we don't think a change is gonna come, we think a change has got to come.
Cooke was a womanizer, and that was his undoing. Was he self-destructive?
If he was self-destructive, so was everybody else. I don't think this was uncharacteristic behavior in terms of virtually everyone I've ever met who lived their life on the road, black or white, singing sacred or secular music.
There are many conspiracy theories about his death.
They all revolve around the idea that a strong black man was brought down by the white establishment, which didn't want to see him get any higher. I don't think anyone has ever advanced any evidence to support that, but that belief can certainly be understood in terms of the prejudice so prevalent at the time and that continues to this day.
Why did he rush the motel clerk whom he thought was harboring the prostitute, who had stolen his wallet and pants? Why didn't he just walk away?
More than anything [his reaction] showed a cast of character that had been ingrained in him from childhood on: Never let yourself be disrespected, never let yourself be played. Sam felt himself being played. That [anger] was uncharacteristic of the great majority of his behavior — Sam was the smoothest, most sophisticated of people, a true intellectual.
He also flashed that side when a Holiday Inn in Shreveport refused to let him stay there even though he had a reservation. The prudent thing to do would have been to leave, yet he stayed and demanded to see the manager.
His wife is saying, "They're going to kill you," and he said, "They ain't gonna kill me, because I'm Sam Cooke." And she said, "Honey, down here they'd just as soon lynch you as look at you."
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