Chapter 1Justifiable

Foreword

I came to writing about music through the records and stayed for the paperwork, which is not the usual direction. It left me with one fact I keep repeating to people who do not want it. A commercial record is not one object. It is three, and they can belong to three different people.

There is the master, the recording itself, which belongs to whoever paid for the room. There is the song, a separate copyright with a separate life, which belongs to a publisher and earns again every time anybody cuts it or presses it or plays it on a radio. And there is the performance, the only part the singer holds, bought once, outright, at a rate somebody else set, before anyone knows what it will be worth. None of this is secret. The people who most need it are simply young, in a hurry, and being handed a pen by the only person in the room who has read the document. Nearly every musician I have asked about money has described the same afternoon: the one on which they found out which of the three they had.

Sam Cooke had worked it out by the time he was twenty-eight, and that is the reason for this book.

I got to him sideways, by a discrepancy on the back of a reissue. In 1994 ABKCO Music and Records gathered the surviving sides of the label Cooke built and issued them as Sam Cooke's SAR Records Story 1959-1965. The reference works say the label was founded in 1961. That is two years, on the spine of a product sold by the company that has owned the material ever since, and nobody has settled it. What stopped me was not the contradiction. It was working out that closing it would take a certificate of incorporation and one afternoon in a county office, and that in sixty years nobody has spent the afternoon.

So I made a list of the other things nobody had gone to get. The sworn testimony taken at the coroner's inquest in Los Angeles in December 1964, a public proceeding. The autopsy report. The police homicide file. The civil suit Bertha Franklin brought against the estate and won in 1967. The probate. The 1963 agreement that gave Cooke his own master recordings, whose terms every published account carries and none has reproduced from a filed copy. Every one is a document, made by an institution, in a country that keeps things. Not one has ever been the spine of a published account of this man, and — this belongs in the same breath — not one is the spine of this one either.

There is a demonstration of what that costs. On January 12, 1963, RCA Victor recorded Sam Cooke at the Harlem Square Club in Overtown, in a segregated Miami, working a Black audience he did not have to be careful in front of. The label listened, decided the singer on the tape was not the product it was selling, and put the reels away. They came out in June 1985, twenty-two years later, because Gregg Geller went and threaded one. Nothing had been destroyed and nothing had been hidden in any sense a lawyer would recognize. The best surviving evidence of what this man could do sat cataloged, in the possession of the firm that paid to make it, while the general idea of him set permanently in its absence.

The argument of this book is that the singing was the second most remarkable thing Sam Cooke did.

By the last year of his life he owned his songs, through a publishing company called Kags Music. He owned a record label, SAR, built to sign and produce other people, several of them drawn out of the gospel world that had condemned him for leaving it — including the Soul Stirrers themselves, and the man hired to replace him in them. And through a holding company named for his daughter he owned the master recordings of his own voice, which RCA Victor did not own and was contractually reduced to distributing. No Black American recording artist of his generation held that position; the ones who got it afterward got it a decade later and with lawyers. He assembled it in roughly five years, between twenty-eight and thirty-three, while working a Southern circuit whose hotels would not rent him a bed — and on October 8, 1963, with the machine built and running, he was turned away from a Holiday Inn in Shreveport and ended the evening under arrest.

You may think that is the wrong order of importance, and many people do: the voice is why anyone is still reading, and the companies were small. It is also true that he could have been talked out of almost anything except the companies, and that when he was killed the thing that came apart was not the voice.

I should say what this book is not. It is not a tribute, and the tribute version fails the same way every time: it has to leave something out, and it always leaves out the same thing. He was married. He had been drinking that night. He habitually left an evening with a woman he had met that evening, which the friendly sources report as readily as the hostile ones. That is here once, from named sources, in Chapter 8 — eleven chapters before the night it bears on — placed there precisely so that it cannot arrive in the middle of a homicide and do the work of a verdict. A man who lived that way has told you something about his marriage and nothing whatever about how he died.

Nor is it a solved murder, in either of the two available directions. The chapters on the night say two things and keep 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, then or now: five days from a body on an office floor to a closed file, three witness accounts, one of them from a woman at the far end of a telephone line, no adversary, no charge, no trial. Both funerals came after the verdict. Those are two findings and not one, and sixty years of argument have insisted on collapsing them. A careless inquiry can reach the truth and a meticulous one can miss it. What an inadequate investigation reliably produces is not a wrong answer but an unverifiable one, and an unverifiable answer is what his family was handed. On that ground they are right, and being right about it does not make them right about anything else.

It is also not the story in which a provincial church world failed to notice that its best singer had outgrown it. Gospel was a Black-owned economy, and the people who warned him that crossing meant entering a white-owned one on its terms had the transaction right. They were wrong only about whether one man could beat it.

A word on method. The recordings are the primary evidence here and not the illustration: the Specialty gospel sides, the RCA run, Night Beat, the Harlem Square tape, Sam Cooke at the Copa, the January 30, 1964 master. Behind them are the two standard biographies, the memoirs, which I have used with the suspicion memoirs deserve, and the family's own published history, which I have read as testimony, graded as testimony, and declined to adopt. I have conducted no interviews, and I obtained none of the documents on that list — failures reported in the chapter that would have used each one, not in a note at the back. That is why no blood alcohol figure appears here, why the shot count is given as one established wound and no other number, why the founding year of SAR is left open, and why the 1963 terms are labeled throughout as reported. Where a grave allegation about a woman who may be living could not be traced to a record, it is not printed with a caveat; it is not printed. Where the record is contested, both versions go on the page and are graded — supported, unsupported, unfalsifiable, unknowable. And where the record simply stops — in the childhood, in the drowning of his son in June 1963, in the last hour of his life — this book stops with it.

Twenty-one chapters. The killing has four of them, one at the front and three at the back. The other seventeen are what was standing when he walked into that office, because the case his family has been making since 1964 is not really about four words spoken to a motel manager. It is about a man dead in ninety seconds and dispossessed in eighteen months, and about the fact that the ninety seconds were examined — badly, briefly, by a proceeding built for a narrower question — and that nobody with power to compel an answer has ever examined the eighteen months at all.

The records are still here and anyone can play them. The paper is still somewhere and almost nobody has read it. This book is written from the first, and it says so, every time it would rather have had the second.

Chapter 1 · Justifiable

Five days after Sam Cooke was shot through the chest in the office of a motel on South Figueroa Street, a coroner's jury in Los Angeles heard the surviving accounts of what had happened there and returned a verdict of justifiable homicide. He had died on December 11, 1964. He was thirty-three years old. No one was charged with anything arising out of that night, then or since. No criminal court has ever examined it. Neither the woman who fired the shot nor the woman who had been in the room with him was ever charged with an offense, and the file closed with the finding that the shooting was lawful.

That is the official disposal in full, and it belongs at the front of this book before anything else does, because every argument made about this death in the sixty years since has been an argument with those sentences. Cooke's family, then and since, has rejected all three of the accounts the jury heard — not only the account of the woman who was in the room before the shooting, but the account of the woman who fired and the account of the woman on the other end of a telephone line. The rejection is the reason this book exists. But a book that begins by arguing with a verdict has smuggled its conclusion into its first paragraph, and this one is going to read the record first, in the order the record was made, and take up the arguing later, when it has earned the standing to do it.

Here is the first thing to say about that record, and it is not a small thing. The inquest was a public proceeding and the testimony given at it was sworn. Whether a complete transcript of that testimony survives, where it is held, on exactly what date the jury sat, and the full list of who was called before it — none of that is established in these pages. This book has not obtained the transcript. It has not confirmed that one exists. Every published treatment of Sam Cooke's death, including the two standard biographies — Daniel Wolff's You Send Me, written with men who had worked for Cooke, and Peter Guralnick's Dream Boogie — works from the newspaper coverage of the inquest and from interviews conducted long afterward, rather than from the sworn testimony itself. The coverage sits in the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, and in the Black press, the Los Angeles Sentinel and the Chicago Defender and Jet, which reported this death very differently from the white dailies. What follows, then, is not the transcript. It is the account of the inquest as it reached print and has stood there ever since, and the distance between those two things is itself the first finding in this chapter.

It is worth being specific about the shape of that gap, because it is not the ordinary vagueness of an old story. Sworn testimony is a document. It has a date on it, a list of the people called, a sequence of questions and answers, and a physical location in somebody's records. All four of those things are recoverable in principle from the Los Angeles County records that hold coroners' proceedings, and none of them is settled here. The police file is a separate question again — whether the homicide file compiled by the Los Angeles Police Department in December 1964 can be obtained at all is not known to this book, and if it cannot be, that refusal is itself a fact worth reporting rather than a hole to be papered over. So the reader should understand what is being handed to them in this chapter. It is the version of the inquest that has been in circulation for sixty years, restated carefully, with its provenance named. It is not the primary record, and no book about Sam Cooke has yet been built on the primary record.

What is established without dispute is a body and a wound. Sam Cooke was killed by a single gunshot to the chest that pierced the heart. That much has never been in question in any version of the night, from any party, at any point in sixty years. Around it, almost immediately, the numbers begin to blur. The count of shots fired in that office is printed at one in some accounts and at three in others; what is established is one wound. Cooke had been drinking that evening, and a figure for his blood alcohol level is quoted widely in the popular literature and sourced rarely; no figure appears in this chapter, because the autopsy report is not in this book's hands and a number of that kind, taken from a secondary source and set in type, becomes a fact by repetition. The full autopsy findings, the death certificate, and the property inventory a coroner's office makes of a body are documents this book will have to answer for later. It does not have them now and says so here.

The asymmetry that produces is worth stating plainly at the outset, because it governs everything that follows. This is a book about a musician whose working life is documented to an unusual depth. There are session logs, contracts, chart runs, catalog numbers, the recollections of the men who played on the records, and, above all, the records themselves, which can be put on and listened to and argued about by anyone who wants to check the argument. Set against that, there is less hard evidence about the most examined event in Sam Cooke's life — the hour in which it ended — than there is about any single recording session he sat through in 1963. That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a statement about the relative volume of surviving paper, and it means that a biography of this man has to do two entirely different kinds of work in the same book: one kind where the material is abundant and the discipline is selection, and another kind where the material is thin and the discipline is refusal.

The inventory that does survive in the published account is a partial one, and it comes from the testimony rather than from a form. In the account given by Bertha Franklin, the manager of the Hacienda Motel at 91st and South Figueroa, the man who came through her office door that night was wearing a sport coat and one shoe. That is the description, and it is the whole of it. Nothing in the published record adds a second shoe, or trousers, or the rest of what a man leaves a Hollywood restaurant wearing. Set that beside the account of Elisa Boyer, who testified that she had left the room with her own clothes and his, and the two descriptions meet at a seam without anyone having to argue that they do.

Boyer testified. She was reported to be a young woman in her early twenties. She said she had left a restaurant in Hollywood with Sam Cooke that night; that she had gone with him to the motel at 9137 South Figueroa, a place that rented rooms by the hour for three dollars; that once they were inside he had forced her onto a bed and stripped her; and that when he went into the bathroom she gathered up her clothing and his and fled. That is an allegation of rape, made under oath, hours after the man it accuses had been shot dead, by the only living person who had been in the room. It is in the sworn record and it cannot be left out of a book about this death. It was also never tested by cross-examination in a criminal proceeding, because there was never a criminal proceeding; the man it accused could not answer it; and it was made by the one person in the world with an interest in its being believed. All of those things are true simultaneously and none of them cancels the others. Elisa Boyer was never charged with any offense arising from that night. What she said is her testimony, and this book will treat it as testimony — quotable, unproven, and not disposed of by either its usefulness to her or its inconvenience to everyone else.

Bertha Franklin managed the motel. In her account, a man came to her office in a sport coat and one shoe, demanding the woman, and when she would not produce her, he broke in. She said he attacked her. She said she got a gun and fired. She said he then spoke four words — "Lady, you shot me" — and that she picked up a broom and struck him with it.

Whatever else about that office is contested, this is not: the last words the record attributes to Sam Cooke are those four, and they were reported by the person who had just fired the gun into his chest. He had spent his working life in the business of being heard exactly as he intended. He wrote in plain vocabulary, on purpose, and built melodies that people could sing back after hearing them once, on purpose. He had gone from a gospel quartet stage to a national pop audience without letting go of the voice that got him onto the first one, and by 1964 he had spent five years constructing a set of companies whose entire function was to keep control of what he made and how it went out. Then, at the end of it, he became the only party to the story who never gave an account of it, and the sentence the record hands down to him is four words long and arrives in somebody else's mouth. There is no way to write that paragraph without noticing what it costs. A man whose entire professional method was the management of his own reception — who chose plain words because plain words carried, who kept the church cry in the pop records because the cry was the thing people recognized, who by the end had bought the machinery that decided which of his performances the public was allowed to hear — went silent at precisely the moment his voice would have settled the question, and has been argued over ever since by people working from the testimony of others.

The third witness was Evelyn Carr, who owned the motel and was not in the office. She had been on the telephone with Franklin when the confrontation began, and she testified that she heard it through the receiver — the argument, and the shot. Her account corroborates Franklin's from outside the room, and it is the only corroboration of any kind that exists. What a person on the far end of a telephone line can and cannot establish about events in a room she is not in is a question with real weight, and it is a question this book will take up at length, in its place, with the accounts laid side by side and the physical findings read against them. It is not the work of this chapter. The work of this chapter is to record that the corroboration was heard, was given under oath, and was accepted.

The jury returned justifiable homicide. It is worth being exact about what that verdict is and is not. A coroner's jury is not a criminal court. It sits to determine how a person came to die, and its verdict neither convicts nor acquits anyone of anything; the county's prosecutors remained free afterward to bring a charge, and no charge was ever brought. So the finding at the end of the proceeding was, in its own terms, a narrow and unremarkable one: a woman had shot an intruder in her own office, the jurors believed her, and the county's inquiry into the death of Sam Cooke was complete. Read only as a document, and read only against the testimony put in front of it, the verdict is not obviously wrong. Read as the sum total of what the state of California ever did about the killing of a thirty-three-year-old man, it is something else, and the something else is a matter of arithmetic rather than opinion. Five days ran from the body on the office floor to the closed file. Both of his funerals — Chicago on December 18, Los Angeles on December 19 — came after the verdict. The county had finished with the question before either city had buried him.

What happened afterward to the woman who fired the shot is part of the record too, and it is not the record of a person who was believed to have gotten away with something. Bertha Franklin was found by a jury to have killed lawfully, and she was never charged; she was also, by the accounts that survive, threatened with death for it, and she gave up the job and moved without telling people where she had gone. Her age is printed with variation from one account to the next, and so is the question of when and where she died; this book does not fix either, because it cannot. She is not a villain here and she will not be written as one, and she will not be written as anybody's instrument either. The most that can honestly be said at this stage is that a woman working the office of an hourly motel on South Figueroa said a man had forced his way in and attacked her, that she was believed, and that being believed cost her the life she had.

That distinction — between what an inquest found and how it went about finding it — is the discipline this book intends to hold, and it is easier to state than to keep. There are two separate questions in this case and sixty years of argument have insisted on treating them as one. The first is whether the verdict was right. The second is whether five days, three witnesses, no adversary, no cross-examination and no trial constitute a serious inquiry into the death of a man. A finding on the second question is not a finding on the first. An investigation can be careless and still arrive at the truth; it can be thorough and still get it wrong. Anyone who cannot hold those two things apart will end up either defending a bad process because they accept its outcome, or rejecting a sound outcome because they are appalled by the process. This book is going to try not to do either, and the reader is entitled to hold it to that.

There is a second inventory to set down, and it is the one nobody made. An inquest asks how a man died. It does not ask what he was, and there is no reason it should. So the papers that were not in that room, and had no business being in that room, are worth naming anyway, because they are the reason this book is not simply another account of a shooting. By December 1964 Sam Cooke owned his songs, through a publishing company called Kags Music. He owned a record label, SAR, which he had built to sign and produce other people, and he wrote and produced for its roster and kept the copyrights. And through a holding company named Tracey Ltd., after his daughter, he owned his own master recordings, which RCA Victor did not own but merely distributed. That structure had been assembled in five years by a man simultaneously working a Southern touring circuit whose hotels would not rent him a room. Nothing in the inquest touched any of it, and nothing had to. But within eighteen months the label had folded, the catalog had passed to his business manager, and the widow had sold what remained. None of that is evidence about what happened at the Hacienda Motel. All of it is the reason the verdict has never been allowed to rest.

And the last thing not before the jury was the voice, which is the only part of this that anyone can still check for themselves. It had changed shape three times in fourteen years and it was recognizable in all three. There was the gospel lead who took R. H. Harris's chair in the Soul Stirrers in 1950, at nineteen — Harris being the standard against which every gospel singer of the era was measured — and who settled the argument about his fitness for it inside a single record. The equipment is audible from the start and never left him: the yodel, the little catch on the turn of a phrase, the small ascending cry that was still there in "Twistin' the Night Away" twelve years later. There was the pop tenor of the crossing, who put "You Send Me" at number one in December 1957, the only pop number one of his life, and who then spent the rest of it fitted into arrangements built by other men to sell him to an audience that had not been told what it was listening to. And there was the third one, the singer on a Miami stage in January 1963 in front of a Black audience he did not have to be careful with, who sounds like neither of the others and whose tape his own record company declined to release. On January 30, 1964, he had recorded a song with French horn and strings and timpani that used a scale nothing else in his catalog had used. It was unreleased when he died. RCA put it out on December 22, 1964, eleven days after the killing, on the B-side of "Shake."

That is the file as it stands. Three accounts, two of them from survivors with obvious reasons to shape a story and the third from a woman holding a telephone; one wound; no independent witness inside the room; no forensic testing on anything resembling a modern model; five days; a verdict; and no trial. The record does not establish what happened in that office, and this book is not going to pretend that it can be made to. What the record does establish is that the question was asked once, quickly, in a proceeding designed for something else, and was never asked again by anyone with the power to compel an answer. The family's refusal to sign the verdict begins there and has never moved. Before this book can say anything useful about whether they are right, it has a life to lay out first, because the case they are making is not really about four words spoken in a motel office. It is about what a man had built by the time he walked into it, and what was left of it when they carried him out.