307. Sam Cooke, "Portrait of a Legend"

 


For whatever reason, the cosmos has been interested in sending the song "Summertime" across my path a lot lately.  First there was the Lana del Rey album, with its "Doin' Time" which is actually a cover of Sublime's "Doin' Time," which is built on a sample of Herbie Mann's "Summertime," which is a cover of the Gershwin original.  Lana's cover has her referencing "Ras MC" and talking about the "LBC" all in her sultry white girl voice.  It seemed silly to me.  Then I read this really excellent article about Sublime called "The Sun Gods of the LBC" in The Ringer that made me grudgingly appreciate Sublime a little more even as I recoiled in horror at their drunken, drug-fueled antics that endeared and alienated them to all the right/wrong people.

So it was no surprise that the universe served me up yet another "Summertime," this one a pretty straight cover of the original in Sam Cooke's perfect, easy croon.  Just listen to him wrap his voice around "eeeeaaaaasy" and bend it into two or three notes.  On this collection, it comes right after "Chain Gang," a song you definitely know and which I was mildly surprised to learn that Cooke wrote.  He also wrote "Cupid," which is on here, another song firmly entrenched in the collective knowledge.

This collection really shows off why some have said Cooke was the Greatest Singer Ever (which I've also seen applied to Otis Redding and Al Green, among others).  His voice is just a pleasure to listen to.  Cooke, of course, met a bad and untimely end in a Los Angeles motel after allegedly advancing menacingly on a hotel clerk, who shot him.

After all the songs about love and longing and the usual concerns of pop music, one of the songs near the end of this record is "A Change Is Gonna Come," a powerful and moving plea for equality that became a civil rights anthem and has been called one of the greatest songs ever recorded.  I have to say, I was unexpectedly moved by the song, which carries the same emotional weight and baggage that it did in 1964.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Yes.

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