Free Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick

well have been that the Soul Stirrers simply didn’t choose to interrupt their program—they were on top of the gospel field, after all, and Harris was a supremely self-confident, some might say an almost arrogant individual—but the QCs to a man were convinced that the Stirrers were scared of them, that they could begin to see the handwriting on the wall.
    Fifteen-year-old Lou Rawls, a regular at the “singing battles” at 3838 South State, would almost certainly have agreed. He sang with the West Singers out of his grandmother’s Greater Mount Olive Baptist Church, along with any number of pickup quartets of his own, but he saw the QCs as representing the kind of unassailable professionalism to which all the young quartets aspired. And he saw Sam Cook as possessing the kind of suave assurance, easygoing manner, natural good looks, and irresistible charm that any one of the quartet singers would have given his eyeteeth for. “We figured if we could all dress alike, that would give us an edge, but Sam just stood out. He didn’t have to call attention to himself. It was just there.”
    Rawls ran into L.C. first at 3838, with his new group, the Nobleaires (Sam had given them the name; the Nobles were L.C.’s gang). He met Sam and the QCs not long afterward, and soon he got to know the whole family. A grave, somewhat taciturn youth whose life had been marked by the absence of both parents (his father’s mother had raised him over by the Ida B. Wells Project on Thirty-eighth after his father had left and his mother had gone out to the Coast for war work), he envied the Cooks their relative affluence and stability. “They had a big flat, not one of them little kitchenette apartments, and we’d just go up there and hang. They were just a normal family, you know, children of a preacher, with the usual restrictions, but Sam’s mother, if you came around with Sam or L.C. or any of the others, then you were just part of the family. She would feed you, if she saw you doing something wrong, she would chastise you—but you knew she was doing it out of love.” He was crazy about Mrs. Cook, he was crazy about the whole family, really, but most of all he was taken with Sam. L.C. he recognized as a player, someone with his eye out for success just for the sake of success—it didn’t really matter how it was achieved. But Sam was single-minded in his vision: whatever else was going on in his life, he was going to express himself through his music. There was lots of talent at 3838, but Sam, in his mind, overshadowed everybody, not just for his talent but for his determination. He had no doubt that one day Sam and the QCs would make records and be known throughout the world. Just like the Soul Stirrers.
    T HE QC S’ FIRST REAL EXPOSURE to the Soul Stirrers’ world came about in a curious fashion. R.B. Robinson was one of the Soul Stirrers’ three baritone singers, a “utility” voice who could sing a number of different parts. Two years earlier, at the age of thirty-two, he had married nineteen-year-old Dora Walder in Los Angeles, her hometown, and they had subsequently made their home in Chicago, where the rest of the Soul Stirrers all lived. He had known Creadell’s father for some time, and through him he began to hear all about this quartet that Cope was training and in particular about the group’s new lead singer. He also met Cope’s daughter, Georgia (“Babe”), who was about to graduate from Wendell Phillips with Sam, and before long, he was coming around to the house both to see Babe and to hear the quartet.
    From that point on, whenever R.B. came back into town, Cope would call a rehearsal, and R.B. soon was actively coaching them, teaching them the songs that the Soul Stirrers sang and giving them the Stirrers’ own arrangements and voicings. It seemed odd to them at first that R.B. should be “training” them, and odder still when R.B. told them not to say anything to anyone because he would get in