
Illustration by Andre Helle from Fables de la Fontaine, 1924
You know who your real friends are because they are the ones who buy you box sets. My special lady friend bought me The Man Who Invented Soul recently, and I've been digesting its four discs slowly over a couple weeks. I'm not a natural admirer of great voices - if you sing on key, I'll listen, and if you have a voice I find interesting, I pay attention. But I was blown away by the voice of Sam Cooke in a way that I wasn't entirely comfortable with at first - his voices is supernaturally smooth, nuanced, and beautiful, matched only, maybe, by Smokey Robinson. I was also surprised at Cooke's songwriting skills beyond the big hits he wrote that are now standards - everyone knows "Chain Gang", "Twistin' the Night Away", "Cupid", and "Another Saturday Night", but there was much more to Cooke's songwriting. He's almost a match for Robinson in that category, putting them more or less even as the two geniuses who shaped the world of soul music.
I have nothing insightful or critical to say about Cooke, but I do have some comments on how The Man Who Invented Soul is arranged. I don't think there's any doubt that it is the essential document of Cooke's career, even though it doesn't cover his early gospel work with the Soul Stirrers or his last albums with ABKCO before his untimely death in 1964 at the age of 33. But the set hits all the highlights from the meaty middle portion of his career, presenting his best singles and album cuts in amazingly pristine audio - recordings from 1957 sound like they could have been made last week.
The first disc starts with his first big pop hit, "You Send Me", and covers the stuff Cooke recorded for Keen Records between '57 and '60. It's the shortest disc in the set with only 21 tracks, but these early recordings are impressive in how contemporary they sound for pre-1960 pop. The second half of the disc covers several tracks from 1959's Tribute to the Lady, Cooke's LP of Billie Holiday covers. These songs sag a little in comparison to the "singles" tracks, particularly Cooke's excellent compositions, but the disc ends strong with the awesome Cooke original "(What a) Wonderful World" (not the Armstrong one, the "I don't know much about history..." one).
This disc sets the pattern that is followed by discs two and three of The Man Who Invented Soul - each disc starts with a great string of pop singles before devoting several tracks to one of his covers-heavy "standards" LPs and then ending with a couple more great singles. The second disc presents Cooke's first singles for RCA, including "Chain Gang" and "Cupid" - the latter song has always been a favorite of mine, but repeated listens to Cooke's definitive version make it an "all-time Top 10" song for me. The ten tracks from My Kind of Blues on disc two are okay, but some of his blues covers are ho-hum. This disc also makes the classic box-set mistake of putting alternate versions of songs next to each other, which reduces the disc's listenability - I like "Sad Mood" and "Tenderness", but I don't need to listen to two almost-identical versions in a row. Disc Three covers more of Cooke's pop material, hitting highlight singles and tracks from the Twistin' the Night Away LP, but also devotes seven tracks to the less accessible Mr. Soul album.
Disc four of The Man Who Invented Soul is perhaps the most essential document in the set, composed of the Night Beat and Live at the Harlem Square Club LPs in their entirety. I have a pet peeve about mixing studio tracks and live tracks, so I can't listen to this disc straight through, but I love the two halves of it. Night Beat, in particular, is the definitive document of Cooke's amazing vocal ability, as the minimal arrangements and great song choices give him ample room to showcase his singing.
All you have to do is buy a Soul Stirrers collection and a copy of Cooke's last LP (Ain't That) Good News to supplement The Man Who Invented Soul, and you have the bulk of Cooke's amazing work. You don't have everything, of course - I noticed that this box set excludes some of Cooke's less successful singles like "You Understand Me", which is a really good song. Oddly, the set does include the b-side from the "You Understand Me" single, a reworking of Jacques Brel's French-language hit "Quand On N'a Que L'Amour" titled "I Belong to Your Heart" - this is a great song as well and could have been an a-side. The opening reveals an old-fashioned-sounding backing track, but that becomes irrelevant as soon as Cooke starts singing. The song immediately becomes removed from time, and Cooke delivers what I consider one of his best vocal performances.
"I Belong to Your Heart" by Sam Cooke









