A Conscious Citizen: Sam Cooke, Racial Performativity, and the Crisis of Crossover Music

Abstract

supper-club soul in the best sense of the word," writes scholar and biographer Peter Guralnick, "achieving a level of savoir-faire and uptown class that other soul singers like Joe Tex, Solomon Burke, and Otis Redding could only aspire to." 7 Sam Cooke at the Copa showed that black artists, and soul musicians in particular, could reach the summit of sophistication.Only until a record executive discovered the Harlem Square Club tracks in a storage bin would the concert finally be released to the public, over two decades after Sam Cooke's death. One Night Stand!, the resulting album, is now recognized over the Copa as his greatest performance and one of the most important live records of all time. 8 "Here is the harsher, grittier Sam Cooke of the SAR sound," Guralnick writes, referencing the SAR record label that Sam opened with his manager J.W. Alexander. "In the words of a number of people I know who saw him playing the clubs or R&B revues, this is 'the real Sam Cooke.'" 9 To some listeners, that's the reason behind its concealment. The record company didn't want people to hear the real Sam Cooke.Perhaps this is W.E.B. DuBois's "double consciousness" in practice: one soul that is the "perfect American boy," and one soul that is black, never to be accepted or even acknowledged by white America. In Souls of Black Folk, DuBois has this to say: "The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan-on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other 7