Sam Cooke “Live” at Harlem Square 1963 (Courtesy)
“January 12, 1963. The Harlem Square Club, Miami — the night a nervous twenty-year-old newspaper photographer took the only two photographs anyone would ever get of Sam Cooke completely off guard. One photo made it into that week’s paper. The other one, Sam Cooke told him himself, was “the one that’s actually true” — and it never ran at all. RCA had a tape recorder running that same night too, capturing a set so raw the label quietly locked it away for over two decades. What happened to the photograph the newspaper wouldn’t print took almost exactly as long to come back into the light. Images are AI-assisted historical recreations.” (Courtesy YouTube)
Sixty-three years ago in 1963, RCA Records recorded a “Live” performance of Sam Cooke at the Harlem Square Club in Miami. A young 20-year-old newspaper photographer, Curtis Boyd, was assigned to the event billed as “One Night Stand.” The two-track recording of the album was so raw, that RCA executives thought it was too raw for the times, and for the image of the polished, smooth, effervescent and handsome singer, so they shelved it—for over twenty years!
When it was announced that the recording existed, and finally released, I bought the album in 1985. As I listened to it, tears welled up in my eyes as I remembered the emptiness I felt after Cooke was killed in December 1964. “One Night Stand” was recorded in 1963 before Medgar Evers was killed; before the Birmingham church bombing that took the lives of four little Black girls; and before Dr. Martin Luther King’s march in Detroit and then in Washington D.C. where he delivered the famous “I Have A Dream” speech—and all the other atrocities that took place during that time. It’s like Cooke had a crystal ball that revealed what was ahead and gave as much spirit as he could from the platform he had attained.
For more information about the life of Sam Cooke, please read the biography “You Send Me (The Life and Times of Sam Cooke)” on Amazon.
Listen to the soul and fervor he puts in the intro to “Somebody Have Mercy”; Cooke was on fire that night!
Here’s the link to the AI-assisted video of “One Night Stand” just released on YouTube.
Sam Cooke (AI assisted)
Original article
Comments