Eighteen Months

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.