December 11, 1964: Sam Cooke dies under mysterious circumstances in Los Angeles.
Born on January 22, 1931 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, as Samuel Cook (no middle name), he was taken to Chicago by his family at age 2. He attended Wendell Phillips Academy, an all-black high school on the South Side. That school had already produced singers Nat "King" Cole and Dinah Washington, comedian George Kirby, Negro League star Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe, and Pro Football Hall-of-Famer Buddy Young. Actress Marla Gibbs was a classmate. It would later produce Herbie Hancock and football players Mike Pruitt and Chris Hinton.
In 1950, he replaced R.H. Harris as lead singer of The Soul Stirrers, then the country's biggest black gospel group. He infuriated gospel fans by turning secular in 1957, adding an E to the end of his name, and had a Number 1 hit with "You Send Me."
The hits kept coming: "Only Sixteen" in 1959, "Wonderful World" and "Chain Gang" in 1960, "Cupid" in 1961, "Twistin' the Night Away" in 1962, "Another Saturday Night" in 1963, and "Good News" in 1964. Sam wrote, or co-wrote, all of these, some with his brother Charles Cook, with Robert "Bumps" Blackwell producing them. He also had hits with covers of the blues songs "Frankie and Johnny" and "Little Red Rooster."
His concerts became a sensation, including at the Copacabana in New York. Women threw themselves at him. He was married twice, raised his 1st wife's son, had 3 children with his 2nd wife, and is believed to have had 3 other children.
In 1963, he signed a contract with Allen Klein, who would later manage The Rolling Stones and mismanage The Beatles. Cooke had no problem with him, as he negotiated one of the best record-and-royalty deals any star, regardless of race, had ever gotten.
That year, he heard Bob Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind," which had verses reflecting both the civil rights and antiwar struggles. It stuck in his mind, and made him want to write a similar song. But he was afraid of losing the white fans he'd gained. So he compromised, recording "Blowin' in the Wind," and singing it at his shows. He didn't lose many fans.
On October 8, 1963, he made reservations for himself, his wife Barbara, his brother Charles, and his backing group at the Holiday Inn North in Shreveport, Louisiana, a segregated city. When they got there, the desk clerk, according to a contemporary report, "glanced nervously," and said there were no vacancies.
Sam had a fit. He demanded to see the manager, and refused to leave until he did. Barbara was scared, telling him, "They'll kill you!" He said, "They ain't gonna kill me, because I'm Sam Cooke." He must have forgotten that his fellow Phillips alumnus, Nat "King" Cole, an even bigger star, had been badly beaten onstage at a concert in Birmingham, Alabama in 1956.
Finally, Sam was convinced to leave. He found a payphone, and called the all-black Castle Motel, and made a reservation there. The police had been tipped off: When the Cooke party got to the Castle, they were arrested for disturbing the peace. It took until 2019 for the City of Shreveport to offer an official apology to the Cooke family.
On January 30, 1964, Sam recorded a new song he'd written, "A Change Is Gonna Come." It had been 7 months since the assassination of Medgar Evers and the removal of George Wallace from the schoolhouse door, 5 months since the March On Washington that featured Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, 4 months since the Birmingham church bombing, 3 months since the Shreveport arrest, 2 months since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and 17 days since Dylan released his civil rights-heavy album The Times They Are A-Changin'. (It had also been 5 days since The Beatles hit Number 1 in America with "I Want to Hold Your Hand," but that had nothing to do with civil rights.)
Klein loved the song, and booked Sam on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson for February 7. It was the 3rd time he'd appeared on the show. He sang "A Change Is Gonna Come." Johnny did not object. Nor did producer Fred de Cordova. Nor did NBC executives. Nor did NBC censors. Nor did NBC's sponsors. In fact, there was very little attention paid to it, mainly because this was the day The Beatles arrived in America, to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show 2 days later. (Sam had appeared on Sullivan, twice in 1957 after his initial burst of success, but hadn't done so since.)
On March 1, Sam's album Ain't That Good News was released, with "A Change Is Gonna Come" on it. But it wasn't yet released as a single. And he got nervous, not singing it in concert after The Tonight Show. On November 16, Sam recorded "Shake," a great dance number, and it was set to be released on December 22, with "A Change Is Gonna Come" as the B-side.
On December 10, 1964... We may never know the full facts. Sam was in Los Angeles, and had dinner with Al Schmitt and Schmitt's wife at Martoni's, an Italian restaurant popular with music industry people like Schmitt. They drank martinis, apparently to excess. They made plans to go to a nightclub named PJ's. The last time Schmitt saw Sam, he was at the bar at Martoni's, talking to a woman Schmitt didn't recognize.
Interviewed in 2020, Schmitt said that he and his wife went to PJ's, "But Sam never showed up. So I went home. I was told later he got there about 15 minutes later, just before closing time, and they wouldn't let him in. He was with this girl."
"This girl," apparently the same one Schmitt saw Sam talking to at the Martoni's bar, was Elisa Boyer, then 22. Sam took her to his cherry-red Ferrari, and drove her to South Central Los Angeles, to the Hacienda Motel, a known hangout for men cheating on their wives. They checked in at 2:35 AM on December 11, signing the register as Mr. and Mrs. Sam Cooke.
Boyer told the police that Sam pinned her on the bed and began to tear off her clothes, intending to rape her. Then he went to the bathroom to take off his clothes. She then grabbed her clothes, and his as well. She found a phone booth and called the police, saying she'd been kidnapped.
The hotel's manager, Bertha Franklin, told the police that Sam, wearing the one piece of clothing he still had, a sport coat, came at her in a drunken rage, grabbed her, and asked, "Where's the girl?" She said she pushed Cooke away, grabbed a gun, and fired 3 shots. One missed, another went through Sam's heart, another through his lung. He yelled, "Lady, you shot me!" And he fell, dead, at age 33.
The Los Angeles Police Department, notorious for racism at the time (and for a long time after), ruled his death a justifiable homicide.
Nobody who knew Sam believed that. They knew he was a womanizer and, if not an out-and-out alcoholic, certainly a drinker. But he was not by nature a violent man. And not only was the Hacienda a known hooker's hangout, but Franklin herself had a criminal record as a madam. The prevailing theory is that Boyer was a prostitute who decided to take Sam's money, and also his clothes so that he couldn't just run out after her.
What's more, at his funeral, singer Etta James noticed that he'd been beaten: "His hands were broken and crushed... They tried to cover it up with makeup, but I could see massive bruises on his head." These injuries were not mentioned in the autopsy report. Some people suspect that he was killed elsewhere, and dumped at the Hacienda, and that Boyer and Franklin were paid off to tell the story they told.
Sam had met Muhammad Ali, football star Jim Brown, and Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X at the Hampton House hotel in Miami after Ali won the Heavyweight Championship of the World 10 months earlier, beating Sonny Liston. Ali said, "If Cooke had been Frank Sinatra, the Beatles or Ricky Nelson, the FBI would be investigating."
Bertha Franklin had to quit her job at the Hacienda. She died in 1966, at age 57, of a massive heart attack. The Hacienda still stands, under the name Polaris Motel, at 9137 South Figueroa Street, 4 miles (52 blocks) south of the Los Angeles Coliseum, and 7 miles (80 blocks) south of the Crypto.com Center.
Sam's Ferrari from that night would figure in another rock star's death. Dennis Wilson, the drummer for the Beach Boys, bought it, and it was parked nearby when he drowned in Marina Del Rey. In 2007, a Japanese collector bought the car.
On January 11, 1965, exactly 1 month after the murder, as "Shake" was becoming a Top 10 hit and "A Change Is Gonna Come" was struggling to reach the Top 40, Elisa Boyer was arrested for prostitution. Maybe somebody told her to "lay low," and she misunderstood. In 1979, she murdered her boyfriend, and was found guilty, and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. At the age of 79, she is still incarcerated.
In 1986, Sam Cooke was 1 of 10 charter acts inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Had he lived, he would have been 55. In 1989, The Soul Stirrers were elected to the Rock Hall in the "early influences" category, making Sam only the 2nd double inductee. (Clyde McPhatter had been elected as a soloist in 1987 and as one of The Drifters in 1988.)
Sam was played by Paul Mooney in The Buddy Holly Story in 1978, and Leslie Odom Jr. in One Night In Miami in 2020.
*
December 11, 1964 was a Friday. Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. And no NHL games were scheduled for that night.
But there were 2 games played in the NBA. The Boston Celtics beat the Philadelphia 76ers, 118-109 at the Philadelphia Civic Center's Convention Hall. And the Detroit Pistons beat the San Francisco Warriors, 104-100 at the Cow Palace, outside San Francisco in Daly City, California, despite 40 points from the Warriors' Wilt Chamberlain.