Sam Cooke once explained the “key to singing”
In the late summer of 1964, the ‘King of Soul’ Sam Cooke took part in a few interviews to promote… nothing in particular, really; just himself and his incredible seven-year streak of hit records. One reporter even compared him to a baseball player with a 1.000 batting average. In other words, he got a hit every time he came to bat.
“But it spurs you on,” Sam said in a syndicated newspaper story that was published in hundreds of US papers that August. “When you have put together a string of hits, it would hurt if one came out and wasn’t a hit. Inevitably, there will be such a time, but you keep trying to forestall it.”
The career decline never actually came for Cooke. Just a few months after this interview, on December 11th, 1964, he was shot and killed in a Los Angeles motel, silencing one of the great voices in pop history at the age of just 33.
In the aftermath of Cooke’s shocking death, most obituaries attributed his great success to that distinctive, silky smooth voice—one he’d honed first as a choir boy in Chicago, and later as a member of his first singing group, the Soul Stirrers. As a solo artist, though, Cooke was also an incredibly accomplished songwriter and lyricist, and while he could make the phonebook sound captivating with his singing voice (to use the sort of reference they might have picked in the ‘60s), he understood that great singing was about more than just having the pipes. In that aforementioned 1964 interview, he explained it quite directly.
“The key to singing is interpretation,” Cooke said. “If you give a song the proper interpretation, you come up with new things automatically.”
It’s a deceptively simple idea, but it reveals the core of what made Sam Cooke who he was. He didn’t just sing songs—he lived inside them, reshaping each lyric with phrasing, timing, and emotion that seemed to flow effortlessly from within, while still incorporating some precision mathematics. He could take a standard like ‘That Lucky Old Sun’ and make it feel like it was being sung for the first time, or turn a romantic pop ditty like ‘Cupid’ into something spiritual.
Packaging was important, too—specifically, Sam was very careful about determining which songs were potential singles, to be sung as such, and which belonged on long-play albums.
“Singles have to move listeners emotionally and make them want to dance,” he said, which explains why the typical Cooke 45 pulsed with rhythm, joy, and heartbreak in equal measure. Songs like ‘Twistin’ the Night Away’ and ‘Another Saturday Night’ were infectious, instantly memorable, and engineered to lift the listener out of their seat.
For his LPs, meanwhile, Cooke saw a different kind of opportunity—one for reflection and intimacy. “Subtlety enters into an album,” he said in the summer of ‘64. “We tried a new concept on my last album, Ain’t That Good News. On one side I had songs for dancing, and on the other, songs for listening. It worked pretty good.”
Released in March 1964, Ain’t That Good News turned out to be a triumphant farewell. The first half plays like a celebration: upbeat, groove-driven tracks like ‘Meet Me at Mary’s Place’ and the title track are pure Cooke charm. But flip the record, and as the man himself suggested, a different mood emerges.
The all-time classic highlights side B ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, Cooke’s aching anthem of hope and racial justice. It’s a song that, in less capable hands, could have fallen short of its goal or turned into melodrama. But from the moment he sings the opening line, “I was born by the river…”, the listener is entranced. The tone feels grand and operatic with the swirling string section behind it, but Cooke’s decision not to over-perform his vocal—to avoid sitting on any note for too long or undercut any of the authenticity in his live delivery—is what makes the message come across. He was never out to overpower a song—he wanted to serve it, to find its heartbeat and amplify it through feel rather than force.
Sam Cooke is still widely viewed as one of the most influential voices of the 20th century, a pioneer of soul music and a blueprint for the artists that followed quickly in his wake, from Otis to Marvin to Aretha. But the true brilliance of Cooke isn’t just that he could sing better than almost anyone—it’s that he knew why he was singing. And he knew how.
