The one singer Art Garfunkel thought was out of everybody’s league:
Being able to command a stage just through the human voice has become a bit of a lost art. Before the lavish shows that you see out of people like Taylor Swift now, artists like Billie Holiday could keep the entire room wrapped around her finger just through the power of her voice, knowing that whatever she had was going to leave listeners in shambles. Art Garfunkel may have studied some of the best rock singers of all time, but even he admitted that no one came close to Sam Cooke.
Compared to Garfunkel’s folksy approach to his Simon and Garfunkel tunes, though, Cooke feels like the polar opposite of what he was trying to do. Since most of Garfunkel’s melodies are meant to be very tender throughout every song, hearing the R&B-soaked energy of songs like ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ is another matter entirely.
When looking at how Cooke constructs his melodies, his strength was always in creating heartbreaking ballads. He may have been a voice of the people in his time, but hearing Cooke sing a song like ‘You Send Me’ is one of the most sublime feelings in the world, sounding like he’s on cloud nine after meeting his lover.
Whereas most artists were known to apply the vibrato on pretty thick, Garfunkel thought that Cooke was the ultimate example of taste when singing, telling Rolling Stone, “He had fabulous chops but at the same time fabulous taste. I never felt that he was overdoing it, as I often feel with singers today…I used to think he was just a great singer. Now I think he’s better than that. Almost nobody since then can touch him”.
Even though the quality of the recording equipment may not do justice to what Cooke can do sometimes, it’s easy to see where every R&B singer got their chops from afterwards. From Marvin Gaye’s soulful croon to the pure power behind Whitney Houston’s delivery, Cooke was the one putting everything together for them, including the massive reliance on going on vocal runs that became a huge trend in the 1990s.
For all of the changes that music has taken since then, Cooke is still being felt now. Since he had influenced the kind of showmanship you hear out of singers like Mariah Carey, it’s not that hard to draw a straight line from Sam Cooke to Carey all the way down to Ariana Grande today.
This supreme talent wasn’t just recognised by Garfunkel. Cooke has been routinely lauded by some of the finest singers of all time as one of the best. Bruce Springsteen, Otis Redding and Rod Stewart all named him as an immense talent. Perhpas the greatest praise of all came from Aretha Franklin.
“All singers aspired to be Sam,” she once declared during a conversation with Rolling Stone, complimenting not only his voice but his personality, too. “He was a beautiful man,” she enthused, “Very charming, engaging – a great artist with a whole lotta personality. It was thrilling for me – and every other woman – to be in the room with him.”
“Sam was what you call a singer’s singer,” she continued to gush, explaining how Cooke didn’t have to rely on anything else for his music or performance due to the beauty of his vocals. “As a performer, he was very simplistic,” she recalled, “He didn’t do a lot of running around on the stage, and because he knew he didn’t have to.”
“He had a voice,” she concluded, “and he didn’t have to do anything but stand in one place and wipe you out.”
Garfunkel hadn’t forgotten the lessons that he learned from Cooke, either. Whether he was working on his solo ventures or reuniting with yet another reunion with Paul Simon, he always rehearsed with songs like ‘You Send Me’, often harmonising with Cooke to get the best sound he could out of every note.
Because when you break down what Cooke was trying to do, it was never just about singing a song as best you could. It was about telling a story through your voice, and Cooke was a master storyteller who was taken far too soon.
