I want to go off piste for a moment to talk about my second love. About the same time I became interested in discovering neglected books, I also started to read and listen to ever-expanding circles of music. I think it was Peter Guralnick’s Feel Like Going Home that hooked me, but it could just as well have been Tony Heilbut’s The Gospel Sound. Pretty soon I was spending almost as many hours in used record stores as in used book stores — maybe more, thanks to a classmate who tipped me off to the hack of taping albums and reselling them.
One of the earliest revelations to come from these explorations was Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers. Guralnick, Heilbut, Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Charlie Gillett, and others of the first generation of great pop music writers all performed a great service to their readers by opening up our ears and knocking down so many self-imposed barriers. Guralnick got me past my abhorrence of “Behind Closed Doors” and forced me to take a serious listen to Charlie Rich and recognize the unique fusion of country, gospel, and cool jazz represented in his work, which never really sat comfortably inside the walls of any particular genre. And Heilbut got me to listen to gospel without the visceral desire to escape I still carried from having been forced to sit through a Billy Graham revival.
By now, Sam Cooke’s stature as one of the greatest voices in American music is well established, but in the late 1970s, he was just some dead singer who had a tune or two in regular rotation on oldies stations. So when I first bought the Specialty Records collection of the Soul Stirrers’ greatest hits, I was stunned to hear how Cooke’s voice float in, over, and around the melody in songs such as “Touch the Hem of His Garment” and “Mean Old World.” To then compare these tracks to Cooke’s RCA greatest hits album was a shock: where did the soul go? I had to take Charlie Gillett’s word and really go scouring to find an old 45 copy of “A Change is Gonna Come” to accept that Cooke hadn’t completely sold out when he went pop. It’s hard now to believe that such a seminal recording wasn’t something you could find wherever you went: RCA didn’t even consider it worth putting on their own Cooke greatest hits album.
Fast forward to the early 1980s, when I had bought and listened to most of what Guralnick and others had written about was getting into less well-known artists and the less well-known work of well-known artists — things like Roy Orbison’s MGM albums or Little Junior Parker’s Mercury albums. One of my finds from this time was Jesus Be a Fence Around Me, the one album the Soul Stirrers released on Sam Cooke’s SAR records label, but without Cooke as lead. I gave it one listen, shrugged it off as a half-filled glass, and moved on.
I rarely buy music these days, having collected too many lifetimes’ worth already, but I recently sprung for Joy In My Soul: The Complete SAR Recordings, a compilation of the Soul Stirrer’s SAR album and singles released a few years ago by ABKCO. Coming back to the tracks that appeared on Jesus Be a Fence with a fresh set of ears, I found myself appreciating the music on its own merits. While it’s true that no one could ever replace Sam Cooke, there was a dynamic in the group with Johnnie Taylor as the new lead tenor. It’s more of a group of equals, which lets you appreciate the ensemble work, particularly the deft accompaniment of guitarists LeRoy Crume and Clifton “Clif” White. White has cited Count Basie’s legendary guitarist Freddie Green as an influence, and his playing provides the same subtle, solid, swinging foundation to this music.
At the same time, though, Johnnie Taylor’s singing on several of the tracks is as magical as Cooke’s on the Specialty classics, if in his own way. What I noticed, particularly on “Stand By Me Father,” was how Taylor played with pacing almost as a contrast to Cooke’s use of melisma. This is really a stand-out tune, the type of performance and recording that rises above its category and time and deserves to be heard as simply a great piece of music.
In his biography of Cooke, Dream Boogie, Peter Guralnick writes that Cooke and his partner and fellow producer J. W. Alexander seriously considered turning it into a pop single:
It was a lover’s cry for help, an almost heartbroken admission of vulnerability, but, of course, it was not a lover, it was the Lord who was there to provide inspiration and support. None of the other three songs carried the weight, ambiguity, or emotional complexity of “Stand By Me Father”: two further collaborations between Sam and J.W. (“Wade in the Water” and “He’s Been a Shelter”) were vehicles for Paul Foster; the last (“I’m Thankful”) was a kind of sentimental recitation for Johnnie of all the things for which to be grateful, written by new Stirrers baritone Richard Gibbs. But, Sam and Alex were agreed, “Stand By Me Father,” if done right, had the potential to break both pop and gospel.
Guralnick writes that these aspirations were undermined by Taylor’s calls out to Jesus in the recording, but I find it hard to believe that pop fans could have overlooked the Biblical references to Samson, Philistines, Daniel in the lion’s den, etc.. It’s still significant, however, that “Stand By Me Father” was the very first single released under the SAR label.
The whole ABKCO set is well worth a listen, with plenty of tracks that show black gospel in a transition, moving from the very successful vocal group style that brought the Soul Stirrers, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, and others to the top of their charts and even occasionally broke into the R&B charts and presaging the sound of soul music. The lead track puts a fine strolling rhythm on the standard, “I Am a Pilgrim,” simply by introducing a contraction (“I’m a Pilgrim”). “I Love the Lord” gives Paul Foster a chance to show of his strong pipes over a backing arrangement that could have come straight out of Cooke’s pop catalogue. And though I refuse to take the Staple Singers’ version of “Wade in the Water” from its permanent place in my personal pop Pantheon, I have to admit that the Soul Stirrers’ version is a contender.
Joy In My Soul: The Complete SAR Recordings includes an excellent set of liner notes by R&B expert Bill Dahl.