With all due respect to James Brown and Otis Redding (or any other soul singer that you may put on high ground), one of the all-time greatest live performances of a soul song belongs to Sam Cooke. You may not realize this but it is true. And you may not realize this because the seminal live soul recording in question that I am referring to—which resides on the album Live At The Harlem Square Club, 1963—is a recording that most people seem to be unaware of. (Whereas James Brown’s Live At The Apollo Theater 1962 and Redding’s Live In Europe are a bit more known and popular amongst casual music fans.)
The fact that a Sam Cooke live recording would go relatively unnoticed is not without its irony, as Cooke seems destined to become more and more forgotten as time goes by. All Sam Cooke ever did was legitimize soul as a genre, and he helped popularize it for a mainstream audience that maybe never attended a raucous, small town Southern church setting.
Cooke was killed in December 1964 by Bertha Franklin, who shot him in self-defense (she said he was threatening her). This means that he never had the chance to self-promote himself like James Brown did, and that he did not get the opportunity to maybe fall into the Monterrey Pop Festival like Redding did and strike a chord with a large, diverse audience. And because he died so young there was no ability to craft a legacy.
I cannot possibly carry the torch for Cooke’s legacy but I do want to make a proclamation and I want to make it very clearly: if you describe yourself as someone who loves music (i.e.–a notch or several notches above “casual music fan”), if you sometimes crave the feeling that a truly great song can attach to your ears and brain, the live version of “Bring It On Home To Me” is 100%, no questions asked required listening if you have never heard it. (I am guessing that if you are reading this, you have not heard it before. If you have heard it before I think you know what I am talking about.)
The live performance of this song is set up as such that the song does not truly begin until around 2:45 mark. Cooke starts the song off with a quasi-medley/spoken word intro with lines like “Sometimes me and my baby, we fuss and fight” and “‘Who is this?’/'This is the operator’/'I don’t want you operator, I want my baby!’” But once the song hits its final gear, you hear not only how great Cooke’s voice was but you also witness just how great his command was of the audience.
At around the 4 minute 45 second mark Cooke gets the audience to chant “yeah” and the way that everyone joins in on it is nothing short of goose bump-inducing. And the fact that you can clearly hear a woman scream too quickly when it comes time for the second go-round is just a perfect and non-manufactured touch that proves how on he was that night in 1963.
The best live songs are ones that, when you listen to them, you have the feeling that you wish that you could have been there while it was happening. If the live version of “Bring It On Home To Me” does not make you wish that you could have been there (or, at the very least, make you turn up the volume or move your feet or sway your head, or something) then I don’t know what to tell you. To me, this is a hell of a live performance—it is not only one of the best live songs I have ever heard, but it is also an amazing single song portrait of someone who is quite possibly the most overlooked singer in modern music.[1]
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[1] I would be remiss if I did not mention the music of this performance. The studio version of “Bring It On Home To Me” is polished and kind of pristine; the live version has a much looser vibe and an energy that is completely infectious (even the medley/spoken word intro isn’t half-assed; it demands attention). Albert Gardner on the drums, Clifton White and Cornell Dupree on guitars, and King Curtis on saxophone, they all combine to create a wonderful and moving foundation for which Sam Cooke can take to another level with his strong, booming voice. While the focus of the song will inevitably fall on to Cooke’s vocals, the music here is really terrific and definitely worth a lot of praise.
