In 1983, he co-wrote the song "I Never Heard" with Michael Jackson. It was retitled and released in 2009 under the name "This Is It".[1]
An additional song that Jackson co-wrote with Anka from this 1983
session, "Love Never Felt So Good", has since been discovered, and will
be released in the future. The song was also released by Johnny Mathis in 1984.
Anka was born to Andy and Camelia Anka in Ottawa, Ontario, where they owned a restaurant called the Locanda. His parents are both of Greek OrthodoxLebanese descent.[2]
He sang with the St. Elias Antiochian Orthodox Church
choir under the direction of Frederick Karam, with whom he studied
music theory. He studied piano with Winnifred Rees. He attended Fisher Park High School, where he was part of a vocal trio called the Bobby Soxers.[3][4]
Early success
Paul Anka recorded his first single, "I Confess", when he was 14. In 1957 he went to New York City where he auditioned for Don Costa at ABC,
singing what was widely believed to be a lovestruck verse he had
written to a former babysitter.
In an interview with NPR's Terry Gross
in 2005, he stated that it was to a girl at his church whom he hardly
knew.[5]
The song "Diana" brought Anka stardom as it rocketed to #1 on the Canadian and U.S. music charts.[6] "Diana" is one of the best selling singles ever by a Canadian recording artist.[7]
He followed up with four songs that made it into the Top 20 in 1958,[8]
including "It's Time to Cry", which hit #4 and "(All Of a Sudden) My
Heart Sings", which reached #15, making him (at 17) one of the biggest teen idols of the time.
He toured Britain, then Australia with Buddy Holly. Anka also wrote "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" – a song written for Holly, which Holly recorded just before he died in 1959. Anka stated shortly afterward:
"It Doesn't Matter Anymore" has a tragic irony about it now, but at
least it will help look after Buddy Holly's family. I'm giving my
composer's royalty to his widow – it's the least I can do.[9]
Anka composed Tom Jones's biggest hit record, "She's a Lady", and wrote the English lyrics to "My Way", Frank Sinatra's
signature song. In the 1960s Anka began acting in motion pictures as
well as writing songs for them, most notably the theme for the hit film The Longest Day, in which he made a cameo appearance as a US Army Ranger.
For his film work he wrote and recorded one of his greatest hits, "Lonely Boy".
He also wrote and recorded "My Home Town", which was a #8 pop hit for
him the same year. He then went on to become one of the first pop
singers to perform at the Las Vegas casinos. In 1960 he appeared twice as himself in NBC's short-lived crime dramaDan Raven.
By the late 1960s, his career focused on adult contemporary and
big-band standards, played regularly in Las Vegas. In the early 1970s he
signed with Buddah Records.
After more than ten years without a top 25 hit record, he signed with United Artists and in 1974 teamed up with Odia Coates to record the #1 hit, "(You're) Having My Baby".
The two would record two more duets that made it into the Top 10, "One
Man Woman/One Woman Man" (#7) and "I Don't Like to Sleep Alone" (#8),
and the #15 duet "(I Believe) There's Nothing Stronger Than Our Love".
It became so popular Anka recorded it as a full song, which peaked at
#7 in the U.S. pop chart in 1976. The follow-up was another hit that
Anka wrote for Sinatra, "Anytime (I'll Be There)", peaking at #33.
Anka's last Top 40 hit in the U.S. was in the summer of 1983: "Hold Me
'Til The Mornin' Comes", which included backing vocals from then-Chicago frontman Peter Cetera; it hit #2 on the Hot Adult Contemporary chart.[10]
"Cupid" is a 1961 hit single recorded and written by Sam Cooke.[1] (U.S. Pop #17, U.S. R&B #20, U.K. #7.)
The song is ranked #452 on the Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
Cooke's producers had asked him to write a song for a girl they had
seen on a Perry Como TV show — but once they heard her sing, they kept
"Cupid" for Cooke to do himself.
It was Cooke's idea to drop in the
sound of an arrow being fired "straight to my lover's heart."[2]
In 1980, along with Michael Zager's "I've Loved You For a Long Time" the song was covered in a medley by The Spinners. This version went to number four on the Hot 100, thus becoming the highest charting version on the Hot 100, and number five on the R&B chart.[4]
In 2010, Grand Archives covered the song for the Starbucks compilation Sweethearts.
In 2012, the chorus was sampled in a Carly Rae Jepsen song called "Tiny Little Bows", which is featured as the album opener track on her second album Kiss.
Other
This song was also featured in the 1987 movie Inner-space starring Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid.
A reference to this song is found in the chorus of the song "Sleepwalker" by The Wallflowers: Cupid, don't draw back your bow / Sam Cooke didn't know what I know.
Samuel Cook (January 22, 1931 – December 11, 1964),[1] professionally known as Sam Cooke, was an American recording artist, singer-songwriter and entrepreneur generally considered among the greatest of all time.[3]
Influential as both a singer and composer,[4] he is commonly known as the King of Soul
for his distinctive vocals and importance within popular music.
AllMusic
biographer Bruce Eder wrote that Cooke was "the inventor of soul
music", and possessed "an incredible natural singing voice and a smooth,
effortless delivery that has never been surpassed."[8]
Sam Cooke began his career with his siblings in a group called The Singing Children when he was 9. He first became known as lead singer with the Highway QC's as a teenager joining at the age of 14.
During this time, Cooke befriended fellow gospel singer and neighbor Lou Rawls, who sang in a rival gospel group.
In 1950, Cooke replaced gospel tenor Reubert H. Harris as lead singer of the gospel group The Soul Stirrers, founded by Harris.
Under Cooke's leadership, the group signed with Specialty Records,
where their first recording was for the song "Jesus Gave Me Water" in
1951.
They also recorded other gospel tracks, such as "Peace in the
Valley", "How Far Am I From Canaan?", "Jesus Paid the Debt" and "One
More River", among many other gospel songs, some of which he wrote.[2]
Cooke was often credited for bringing gospel music to the attention of a
younger crowd of listeners, mainly girls who would rush to the stage
when the Soul Stirrers hit the stage just to get a glimpse of Cooke.[11]
Crossover pop success
Cooke in Billboard magazine
His first pop/soul single was "Lovable" (1956), which was a remake of the gospel song "Wonderful" and was released under the alias "Dale Cook"[12]
in order not to alienate his gospel fan base; there was a considerable
stigma against gospel singers performing secular music.
However, it
fooled no one[13]—Cooke's unique and distinctive vocals were easily recognized.
Art Rupe,
head of Specialty Records, the label of the Soul Stirrers, gave his
blessing for Cooke to record secular music under his real name, but he
was unhappy about the type of music Cooke and producer Bumps Blackwell were making.
Rupe expected Cooke's secular music to be similar to that of another Specialty Records artist, Little Richard.
When Rupe walked in on a recording session and heard Cooke covering Gershwin, he was quite upset. After an argument between Rupe and Blackwell, Cooke and Blackwell left the label.
The label soon included The Simms Twins, The Valentinos (who was Bobby Womack and his brothers), Bobby Womack and Johnnie Taylor.
Cooke then created a publishing imprint and management firm before leaving Keen to sign with RCA Victor. One of his first RCA singles was the hit "Chain Gang".
Like most R&B artists of his time, Cooke focused on singles; in
all, he had 29 top 40 hits on the pop charts, and more on the R&B
charts.
He was a prolific songwriter and wrote most of the songs he
recorded. He also had a hand in overseeing some of the song
arrangements.
In spite of releasing mostly singles, he released a
well-received blues-inflected LP in 1963, Night Beat, and his most critically acclaimed studio album, Ain't That Good News, which featured five singles, in 1964.[citation needed]
Answering separate reports of a shooting and of a kidnapping at the
motel, police found Cooke's body, clad only in a sports jacket and shoes
but no shirt, pants or underwear.
He had sustained a gunshot wound to
the chest, which was later determined to have pierced his heart.[17]
The motel's manager, Bertha Franklin, said she had shot Cooke in
self-defense after he broke into her office residence and attacked her.
Her account was immediately questioned and disputed by friends and
acquaintances.[18]
The official police record states that Franklin fatally shot Cooke, who had checked in earlier that evening.[19]
Franklin claimed that Cooke had broken into the manager's
office-apartment in a rage, wearing nothing but a shoe and a sports
coat, demanding to know the whereabouts of a woman who had accompanied
him to the hotel.
Franklin said the woman was not in the office and that
she told Cooke this, but the enraged Cooke did not believe her and
violently grabbed her, demanding again to know the woman's whereabouts.
According to Franklin, she grappled with Cooke, the two of them fell to
the floor, and she then got up and ran to retrieve her gun. She said she
then fired at Cooke in self-defense because she feared for her life.
Cooke was struck once in the torso
and, according to Franklin, he exclaimed, "Lady, you shot me", before
mounting a last charge at her.
She said she beat him over his head with a
broomstick before he finally fell, mortally wounded by the gunshot.
The motel's owner, Evelyn Carr,[note 2] claimed that she had been on the telephone with Franklin at the time of the incident.[10]
Carr claimed to have overheard Cooke's intrusion and the ensuing
conflict and gunshot. Carr called the police to request that officers go
to the motel, telling them she believed a shooting had occurred.
A coroner's inquest
was convened to investigate the incident. The woman who had accompanied
Cooke to the motel was identified as Elisa Boyer, who had also called
the police that night shortly before Carr had.
Boyer had called the
police from a telephone booth near the motel, telling them she had just
escaped being kidnapped.
Boyer told the police that she had first met Cooke earlier that night
and had spent the evening in his company.
She claimed that after they
left a local nightclub together, she had repeatedly requested that he
take her home, but he instead took her against her will to the Hacienda
Motel.
She claimed that once in one of the motel's rooms, Cooke
physically forced her onto the bed, and that she was certain he was
going to rape her.
According to Boyer, when Cooke stepped into the
bathroom for a moment, she quickly grabbed her clothes and ran from the
room.
She claimed that in her haste, she had also scooped up most of
Cooke's clothing by mistake.
She said she ran first to the manager's
office and knocked on the door seeking help. However, she said that the
manager took too long in responding, so, fearing Cooke would soon be
coming after her, she fled from the motel before the manager ever opened
the door.
She said she then put her clothing back on, hid Cooke's
clothing, went to a telephone booth, and called police.
Boyer's story is the only account of what happened between her and
Cooke that night; however, her story has long been called into question.
Inconsistencies between her version of events and details reported by
other witnesses, as well as circumstantial evidence,[note 3][20][21]
suggest that Boyer may have gone willingly to the motel with Cooke,
then slipped out of the room with Cooke's clothing in order to rob him,
rather than to escape an attempted rape.[10][19]
However, questions about Boyer's role were beyond the scope of the
inquest, the purpose of which was only to establish the circumstances of
Franklin's role in the shooting.[10]
Boyer's leaving the motel room with almost all of Cooke's clothing, and
the fact that tests showed Cooke was inebriated at the time, provided a
plausible explanation to the inquest jurors for Cooke's bizarre
behavior and state of dress.
With that verdict, authorities officially closed the case on Cooke's death.[10]
Some of Cooke's family and supporters, however, have rejected Boyer's
version of events, as well as those given by Franklin and Carr.
They
believe there was a conspiracy to murder Cooke, and that the murder took
place in some manner entirely different from the three official
accounts.[24][25][26][10][27][28][10][29]
Singer Etta James
viewed Cooke's body before his funeral, and questioned the accuracy of
the official version of events.
She wrote that the injuries she observed
were well beyond the official account of Cooke having fought Franklin
alone.
James wrote that Cooke was so badly beaten that his head was
nearly separated from his shoulders, his hands were broken and crushed,
and his nose mangled.[30]
No concrete evidence supporting a criminal conspiracy has been presented to date.[27][28]
Aftermath
Grave of Sam Cooke, in the Garden of Honor, Forest Lawn Glendale
The first funeral service for Cooke was held on December 18, 1964 in Chicago at A.R. Leak Funeral Home, where 200,000 fans had lined up for more than four city blocks to view his body.[31][32]
Afterward, his body was flown back to Los Angeles for a second service at the Mount Sinai Baptist Church on December 19,[33] which included a much-heralded performance of "The Angels Keep Watching Over Me" by Ray Charles, who stood in for grief-stricken Bessie Griffin.
The album, also titled Shake, reached the number one spot for R&B albums. After Cooke's death, his widow, Barbara, married Bobby Womack.
Cooke's daughter, Linda, later married Womack's brother, Cecil.[16]
Bertha Franklin said she received numerous death threats after
shooting Cooke.
She left her position at the Hacienda Motel and did not
publicly disclose where she had moved.[35]
After being cleared by the coroner's jury, she sued Cooke's estate,
citing physical injuries and mental anguish suffered as a result of
Cooke's attack. Her lawsuit sought US$200,000 in compensatory and
punitive damages.[35]
Barbara Womack countersued Franklin on behalf of the estate, seeking
$7,000 in damages to cover Cooke's funeral expenses.
Elisa Boyer
provided testimony in support of Franklin in the case.
In 1967, a jury
ruled in favor of Franklin on both counts, awarding her $30,000 in
damages.[36]
In 2008, Cooke was named the fourth "Greatest Singer of All Time" by Rolling Stone.[41]
In June 2011, the city of Chicago renamed a portion of East 36th
Street near Cottage Grove Avenue as the honorary "Sam Cooke Way" to
remember the singer near a corner where he hung out and sang as a
teenager.[42]
In 2013 Cooke was inducted into the Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of
Fame in Cleveland, Ohio at Cleveland State Univ. The founder of the
Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame Museum LaMont Robinson said he was
the greatest singer ever to sing. The Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of
Fame Museum will be built in Cooke's hometown of Clarksdale, MS.
Since I couldn't find this version
on youtube in the quality I wanted, I thought I'd do us Sam Cooke fans a favor. This is by far my favorite version of the song and I first
heard it on the radio on some nostalgia channel when I was with my first
girlfriend. Fond memories, this type of music will never die.
The Best of Sam Cooke is a 1962 compilation which contains most of Sam Cooke's most well-known hits from 1957 to 1962.
Cooke made a demo
recording of "You Send Me" featuring only his own guitar accompaniment
in the winter of 1955. The first recording of the track was made in New
Orleans in December 1956 in the same sessions which produced "Lovable",
the first release outside the gospel
field for Cooke (credited on that single as Dale Cook).
The classic
version of "You Send Me" was cut in Los Angeles in June 1957 and was
issued as a single with another track from the same session: a version
of "Summertime", as the debut release on the Keen label[1] founded by Bob Keane;
this release marked the first single credited to "Sam Cooke" (whose
true surname was Cook).
Although "Summertime" was the intended A-side,
disc jockeys favored "You Send Me" which broke nationally that October
to reach #1 for a two-week stay in December 1957, with sales estimated
at a 1.5 million units. "Overnight, with a single song, Sam Cooke" - who
had spent the summer of 1957 living in his producer's apartment -
"became a secular superstar, with audiences consisting of black and
white, men and women, young and old."[2]
As was common practice in the 1950s when it was unusual for hits in the black R&B market to crossover to the Pop charts, a cover version of "You Send Me" aimed at the Pop charts was cut by the white singer Teresa Brewer[1]
and released in October 1957.
Symptomatic of the changing music scene,
Cooke's original was able to repeat its #1 R&B chart performance in
the Pop field, eclipsing Brewer's version. However Brewer's version of
"You Send Me" reached as high as #8 representing a strong improvement
over her five prior single releases, although "You Send Me" would prove
to be Brewer's final Top 20 hit.[3]
Acclaim
Since its release, the song has become a landmark record of the soul genre, which Cooke helped create. It was named as one of the 500 most important rock and roll recordings by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Sam Cooke[1] (January 22, 1931 – December 11, 1964), born Samuel Cook, was an African-American recording artist, singer-songwriter and entrepreneur.[4]
Cooke had 30 U.S. top 40 hits between 1957 and 1964, and a further three after his death. Major hits like "You Send Me", "A Change Is Gonna Come", "Cupid", "Chain Gang", "Wonderful World", and "Twistin' the Night Away" are some of his most popular songs. Cooke was also among the first modern black
performers and composers to attend to the business side of his musical
career. He founded both a record label and a publishing company as an
extension of his careers as a singer and composer. He also took an
active part in the African-American Civil Rights Movement.[8]
On December 11, 1964, Cooke was fatally shot by the manager of the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles, California,
at the age of 33. At the time, the courts ruled that Cooke was drunk
and distressed, and that the manager had killed Cooke in what was later
ruled a justifiable homicide. Since that time, the circumstances of his death have been widely questioned.
Cooke was born "Cook" in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He later added an "e" onto the end of his name, though the reason for this is disputed.[9] He was one of eight children of the Rev. Charles Cook, a Baptist minister, and his wife, Annie Mae.
The family moved to Chicago in 1933. Cooke attended Wendell Phillips Academy High School in Chicago, the same school that Nat "King" Cole had attended a few years earlier.[9] Sam Cooke began his career with his siblings in a group called The Singing Children when he was nine.
He first became known as lead singer with the Highway QC's as a teenager joining at the age of 14. Soon after graduating high school, Cooke was offered the opportunity to join The Soul Stirrers and hone his musical abilities.[citation needed]
In 1950, Cooke replaced gospel tenor R.H. Harris as lead singer of the gospel group The Soul Stirrers, founded by Harris. Under Cooke's leadership, the group signed with Specialty Records
where their first recording was for the song "Jesus Gave Me Water" in
1951.
They also recorded other gospel tracks, such as "Peace in the
Valley", "How Far Am I From Canaan?", "Jesus Paid the Debt", and "One
More River", among many other gospel songs some of which he wrote
himself.[3]
Cooke was often credited for bringing gospel music to the attention of a
younger crowd of listeners, mainly girls who would rush to the stage
when the Soul Stirrers hit the stage just to get a glimpse of Cooke.[10]
Death
Cooke died at the age of 33 on December 11, 1964, at the Hacienda Motel
at 9137 South Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, California.
Answering
separate reports of a shooting and of a kidnapping at the motel, police
found Cooke's body, clad only in a sports jacket and shoes but no shirt,
pants or underwear.
He had sustained a gunshot wound to the chest, with
it later determined that the bullet had pierced his heart.[16][17]
The motel's manager reported that she had shot Cooke in self-defense
after he broke into her office residence and attacked her. However, the
details of the case involving Cooke's death have remained in dispute.
In 2008, Cooke was named the fourth "Greatest Singer of All Time" by Rolling Stone.[35]
In June 2011, the City of Chicago renamed a portion of East 36th
Street near Cottage Grove Avenue as the honorary "Sam Cooke Way" to
remember the singer near a corner where he hung out and sang as a
teenager.[36]
