# Eighteen Months *Sam Cooke and the Property No Court Was Ever Asked to Examine* — Legendary Biographies No. 259 - **Subject:** Sam Cooke - **Written by:** Tariah Robinson - **Shelf:** Music / R&B & Soul - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 232 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-539-8) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-648-7) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/259-eighteen-months.html ## About this book Who ended up with the companies Sam Cooke built, and how long did it take? Eighteen months. SAR, the label he built to sign and produce other people, did not survive him; his widow sold the remaining rights to his business manager, Allen Klein, and ABKCO Music and Records has held the catalog ever since. On March 5, 1965, eighty-four days after the killing, she married Bobby Womack, one of the label's own artists. The killing was examined once, briefly, in public. The disposal of the property has never been examined at all. The argument here is that the singing was the second most remarkable thing Cooke did. Under a 1963 arrangement Klein built with RCA Victor, a holding company called Tracey Ltd. manufactured the records and RCA took exclusive distribution for thirty years, after which the rights reverted. He held his songs through a publishing company, Kags Music. He assembled all of it in roughly five years, between twenty-eight and thirty-three, while working a Southern circuit whose hotels would not rent him a bed. He was turned away from a Holiday Inn in Shreveport in October 1963 and ended the night under arrest. He was shot dead on December 11, 1964 in the office of a three-dollar motel on South Figueroa Street in Los Angeles. Five days later a coroner's jury heard three accounts and returned a verdict of justifiable homicide. No one was charged, then or since. The book states two findings and keeps them apart: the physical evidence, as it has been reported, is consistent with the account Bertha Franklin gave, and the investigation was inadequate by any standard. It does not solve the killing, and says so. The book obtained none of the documents its argument would most want — the inquest transcript, the autopsy, the police file, the probate, a filed copy of the 1963 agreement — and reports each failure in the chapter that would have used it. That is why no blood alcohol figure appears anywhere in it. No lyric of the anthem is quoted. ## Contents 1. Justifiable 2. Clarksdale 3. The Highway QCs 4. R. H. Harris's Chair 5. Specialty 6. Dale Cook. 1956 into 1957 7. You Send Me 8. Greenville 9. Hugo and Luigi 10. SAR 11. Bring It On Home to Me. 1962 12. Harlem Square 13. Night Beat 14. Vincent 15. Shreveport 16. January 30, 1964 17. Hampton House 18. Tracey Ltd 19. 9137 South Figueroa 20. What the Family Says 21. Kags ## Questions **Who is Eighteen Months about?** Sam Cooke. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Eighteen Months — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,701 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 71,500 words, 21 chapters, 232 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Tariah Robinson is a Detroit-born R&B critic whose work for Pitchfork and The Ringer established her as one of the careful chroniclers of late-1990s Black radio. Her first book, on Aaliyah, was an NPR best book of the year.