Sam Cooke was an African American singer, songwriter and entrepreneur born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1931. His family moved to Chicago in 1933, where he attended Wendell Phillips Academy High School, the same school Nat King Cole had attended a few years earlier. His music drew on gospel and reached audiences through R&B, soul and pop.
In 1950, at nineteen, Cooke became lead vocalist of the gospel group the Soul Stirrers, replacing the established tenor R.H. Harris, and served in that role until 1956. Crossing into secular music, he collected twenty-nine top-40 hits in the United States between 1957 and 1964. His first solo single, "You Send Me," recorded in Hollywood in 1957 and released on Keen Records, reached number one on both the pop and R&B charts, completing a crossover few gospel singers had managed. Songs associated with his career include "Chain Gang," "Wonderful World," "Bring It on Home to Me" and "A Change Is Gonna Come."
Alongside performing and writing, Cooke established a music publishing company, Kags Music, and founded SAR Records with J.W. Alexander and S. Roy Crain, producing the Soul Stirrers for the label. Those ventures made the business of recordings and compositions part of his professional work, and he was among the first modern Black performers to attend to the business side of his career, retaining rights to his work at a time when the industry largely took them from artists. He also participated in the civil rights movement.
Cooke died in Los Angeles on December 11, 1964, at thirty-three. Kags Music and SAR Records stand as the business side of a career he had kept in his own hands.
