Understanding the life and tragic death of Sam Cooke

The lingering conspiracies surrounding the soulful Sixties crooner threaten to overshadow a life of music and civil rights activism, writes Mark Beaumont, not to mention a voice that would influence Otis Redding and Tina Turner

- Mark Beaumont

Rarely has the manner of a man's demise been so unbefitting of their life. On the evening of 10 December 1964, soul sensation Sam Cooke dined with friends at Martoni's restaurant, the Los Angeles hangout of Hollywood A-listers and those that fed off them, flagrantly flashing around the $5,000 in cash he’d made from recent tour dates. After several drinks, he began chatting with a young woman at the bar. Later, he failed to show up at the nightclub his friends had gone to.

Instead, in the early hours of the next morning – 60 years ago this week – Cooke was fatally shot by the manager of the Hacienda Motel, a haunt of sex workers and pimps, amid accusations of kidnap and violence. His killing would eventually be dismissed as “justifiable homicide”.

Such a shocking death, at just 33, for a man considered a gentle and high-class character by those who knew him best, inevitably led to alternative theories. That Cooke was the victim of a honeytrap sting. That he’d been murdered by mobsters muscling in on his lucrative SAR Records business, or killed by his manager Allan Klein, whose shady dealings Cooke had recently uncovered. Or that the FBI, having kept Cooke under surveillance due to his prominent and powerful position in the civil rights movement, had a hand in his untimely death.

Out of the murk, however, swiftly drifted away the real significance of Cooke’s life. Just 11 days after his death, the single “A Change Is Gonna Come” was released, a final showcase for one of the greatest soul voices of its generation and a cry of hope and defiance from the sharp end of American racism and segregation. “I go downtown, somebody keep telling me ‘don’t hang around’,” Cooke sang over noble orchestration, “... but I know a change ‘gon come.”