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

trouble. But they took him for a friend and listened entranced as he told them tales of the road, of making as much as $700 or $800 for a single program. The Soul Stirrers’ booking policy was scientifically worked out, he explained: if they played Chicago on a Sunday afternoon, they played Gary that night, if they played St. Pete on Sunday, it was Tampa on Monday—and everywhere they went, they went first-class. If there had been any question previously, there certainly was room for none now. With R.B. in their corner, there was no doubt in any of the QCs’ minds of where they were heading. It was only a matter of how long it would take to get there.
    I N THE MONTHS before Sam’s high school graduation, the fortunes of the group rapidly improved. They were booked on a big Mother’s Day musicale presented by the Gay Sisters at Holiness Community Temple that ran directly up against the Stirrers’ annual presentation at DuSable with the Pilgrim Travelers as their special guests. They were traveling more frequently to Detroit, Gary, even Indianapolis. And they were gaining more and more public recognition as the up-and-coming young group.
    Sam was going with a girl named Izetta who was in L.C.’s class at school and who was responsible for what turned out to be L.C.’s last whipping. At fifteen L.C. was no more enthusiastic about formal education than he had been as a child. “So this one time I ditched school, and Izetta was over the house. She said, ‘L.C., we had so much fun at school today, you should have been there.’
    “I mean, we’re all at the table eating, and I’m saying, ‘Shh, girl,’ but Papa heard. He said, ‘Annie Mae, did L.C. go to school?’ She said, ‘He left out of here going to school, Brother Cook.’ So he asks me, ‘L.C., did you go to school?’ I said, ‘No, sir, Papa’—’cause whatever you did, Papa taught us, don’t lie. I said, ‘Mama sent me out of here, but I didn’t make it.’ He said, ‘What you mean you didn’t make it?’ And he started whupping me. And everything he would whup me for, I was supposed to say, ‘Yes, sir’ to. So he asked me, ‘Are you gonna be good?’ and ‘Are you going to do everything your mother tell you to?’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir, Papa. Yes, sir, Papa.’ But then he tricked me.
    “He said, ‘You think you a man, don’t you?’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir, Papa.’ And then he really whupped me. Afterwards, I sat down with my father, and I said, ‘Papa, I can’t stand no more whuppings.’ He said, ‘What you mean?’ I said, ‘Papa, if you whup me any more, I’m just gonna have to leave your house.’ He said, ‘You are going to leave the house?’ I said, ‘Papa, I’ll do whatever you tell me to, but I can’t stand no more whuppings.’ And he never whupped me no more again.”
    Sam had girls everywhere he went—in his friends’ and family’s observation, he had more trouble fighting them off than he did attracting them—but there was one girl in particular, Barbara Campbell, not quite thirteen and just finishing up eighth grade at Doolittle, to whom, to everyone’s astonishment, he seemed inextricably drawn. According to L.C.: “She was my girl first—when we were in grammar school—we wasn’t nothing but kids. But then she moved away.” She moved back because her mother had just gotten divorced and was about to marry her fourth husband, and her Grandmother Paige, her father’s mother, said enough was enough, she was going to keep these poor children together for a while. So they all moved into Grandmother Paige’s comfortable, two-story home at 3618 Ellis Park, Barbara and her twin sister, Beverly, and their older sister, Ella, and before long, she began meeting up with all her old friends from the neighborhood.
    She ran into the Richards’ sister Mildred, whom she had originally met through QCs “announcer” Raymond Hoy when she was living with her other grandmother over on Rhodes. Mildred, whom everyone