Sam Cooke

Samuel Cook was born on the twenty-second of January 1931 at Clarksdale, Mississippi, the fifth of eight children of the Reverend Charles Cook — a Baptist preacher — and Annie Mae Cook. The family migrated to Chicago in 1933 in the Second Great Migration. He was raised at the Chicago Bronzeville district and at the family's home congregation, the Christ Temple Baptist Church under his father's pastorate. He sang from his fifth year in the family quintet The Singing Children.

He joined at fourteen the Highway QC's — the gospel quartet that served as the principal Chicago training ground for the post-war touring gospel-quartet circuit — and at nineteen, on the twenty-second of January 1950, he succeeded R. H. Harris as lead singer of the Soul Stirrers, the most celebrated Black gospel quartet of the period. He sang with the Soul Stirrers for the following six years and conducted across that period the recordings — "Touch the Hem of His Garment," "Nearer to Thee," "Jesus Wash Away My Troubles" — that established him in the African American gospel-quartet tradition.

He crossed over into popular music in 1956 with the single "Loveable" — recorded under the name Dale Cook to avoid alienating his gospel audience — and definitively in December 1957 with the Keen Records release of "You Send Me," which reached number one on both the Billboard R&B and Hot 100 charts. The recording established him as the principal architect of the gospel-to-soul crossover.

He founded his own label SAR Records in 1959 with his manager J. W. Alexander — making him the first major Black popular-music artist to own his own record label, ten years before Stax Records and a decade before Berry Gordy would consolidate Motown's ownership structure. He signed with RCA Victor in 1960 under terms that retained his SAR ownership and rights.

He attended the third of February 1964 New York concert at which Bob Dylan performed "Blowin' in the Wind." He travelled the same evening to the studio to begin the composition of his response, which he completed across the following ten weeks. He recorded "A Change Is Gonna Come" at the RCA Studios in Hollywood on the thirtieth of January 1964; the song was released after his death as the B-side of the December 1964 single "Shake." It has subsequently been entered into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as one of the principal documents of American twentieth-century song.

He was shot and killed by Bertha Franklin at the Hacienda Motel at Los Angeles on the eleventh of December 1964, at thirty-three. The circumstances of his death remain widely disputed.

He is honored here as the architect of soul, founder of SAR Records, and composer of "A Change Is Gonna Come."