Bobby Womack Midnight Mover Read online

  Cooke and the Soul Stirrers got on something called the gospel highway. Now this was showbiz, man. Groups would ride up to some sleepy little town and they’d put on a performance, sometimes having church just before. There was a knack to this whole thing because you wanted to hit towns when folks had some green in their pockets. Maybe you’d plan to strike Raleigh or some of those places in North Carolina just after the tobacco harvest. You’d make it your business to know when the auto lines in Detroit filled out those pay cheques.

  When Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers arrived in our town, he gave us one hell of a boost. By this time, Sam was drawing in a whole new crowd. He’d pretty much had it with the gospel highway thing but there wasn’t any alternative. Gospel just didn’t cut it with the lifestyle of these guys, who’d be into women and drink. He was a pretty guy and there would be all these girls screaming like at a rock’n’roll show. Every artist and entertainer, they don’t chase the women; the women come after them ’cos they say, ‘If he is that dominant I want to see what he’s like in bed.’ They’re curious. It’s just normal. And if you got a dick and it don’t get hard, then something is wrong.

  The pastors got uptight about all that, but the church folk had a dilemma: they wanted Sam and these guys to tone it down, but when they looked out those pews were filled with a whole new congregation of kids they could never get to church on sermons alone.

  My old man went to see the Soul Stirrers, told them he had us five young boys and asked if we could open up the show. ‘They all got uniforms and they all dress alike,’ he told them.

  One of the guys said we should stick to Sunday school, but Sam wanted us to do it. He told us to get up there and work that house for him and the band.

  It was at the Friendship Baptist Church. We got up on stage and Sam came out from the wings and introduced us. There must have been over a thousand people there – it seemed like it anyway – with standing room only. He told them, ‘We got a group of brothers, the Womack Brothers. I want you all to give them a nice round of applause. We got to encourage them to sing gospel.’

  The kids in town that used to be down on us ’cos we were singing this sanctified religious stuff suddenly tagged us as hip. Usually when we had tried to hit on girls they ignored us, but now we had Sam’s blessing and nothing came down higher than that.

  We had little boxes for us to stand on so we could reach the microphone, which got the people laughing. I noticed Sam was laughing along with them. Cecil was so young he was still sleeping on his mother’s lap when we started, but when he heard us singing he twisted and turned and came flying up on stage to stand on one of those fruit crates.

  One of the songs we did was ‘Jesus Gave Me Water’, and one of my brothers cried, ‘I gotta go to the bathroom.’ Then he started peeing all over the floor. Soaked his clothes. Oh, man, we wanted to be seen as pro, not a bunch of hick kids pissing our pants. We did another song and that was it. Sam was back on stage and instructed the crowd to drop some ‘quiet cash’ – no nickels or dimes – in my mom’s purse when she went around for the collection. We loved Sam right from the off.

  His plan was to play every damn church in the town and then head out on the road again. I wanted to follow him, wanted to be just like Sam Cooke.

  CHAPTER 3

  CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’

  Sam was on that gospel highway so we got right on there after him. We started to tour the country opening up for acts, Dad calling us the Womack Brothers. Our harmonies blew people away, although often it was just four of us because Cecil, my youngest brother, wasn’t in the picture just then. Kids would come from all around and gather around to watch us and they thought it was very strange, a group of brothers all going to the same school, dressed identical.

  We started to get our first taste of life on the road, and I loved it. We travelled around by car. Me and my brothers in the back, my mom and dad up front. We had a U-Haul trailer on the back of the car to pull our gear.

  We started touring with a group called the Staple Singers, who had become big on the scene. They were a little older than us, but the girls were pretty. Their parents let them stay in the same bed as us – that’s how young we were – although I was starting to take notice of women by then.

  The Staples family were very inspiring to me because I could see a different way of life: it wasn’t like ours. The Staples drove around in a new Cadillac, which impressed me, and they had their own home where we could hole up between dates.

  Roebuck Staples – we called him Pops – was so different from my old man. Pops was always willing to take chances when all I heard from my father was, ‘You can’t do it like that’ or ‘Do it this way, that’s my way.’ I wanted to do it another way.

  Pops was also a great guitarist who recorded a lot of great gospel and soul recordings with a spiritual outfit called the Golden Trumpets and the Trumpet Jubilees. By the early 1950s, he rounded up two daughters, Cleotha and Mavis, and his son Pervis to form the Staple Singers. Pops and Mavis shared the lead vocals.

  We also ran into other families, the same as ours. Like a group called the Davis Family out of Chicago. There were 13 of them, brothers and sisters, and they were awesome.

  We also worked with the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, led by Archie Brownlee. There was another group on the circuit called the Blind Boys, but that outfit was the Blind Boys of Alabama, out of the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind. Blind since birth, Brownlee started out at the Piney Woods School, near Jackson, at the age of six. Within five years, he was scrambling up a racket with a few other guys: Lloyd Woodard, Joseph Ford and Lawrence Adams. By 1944, the group was on the road, all pro, with Brownlee leading. They were getting noticed, too, and their early-1950s single, ‘Our Father’, was one of the first gospel tunes to reach the Billboard R&B charts.

  When I was about 13, the Blind Boys hit Cleveland and put the word out that they didn’t have a guitar player, and that’s how I got playing with them. They had a guy lead them out on stage, but that’s all the help they needed. It was a big deal for me to get out there and groove alongside them ’cos I learned a lot.

  Pretty soon they asked my old man if they could take me to Chicago. Now, he felt sorry for them ’cos they were blind, but those guys were hip. Man, they were fast as anyone with eyes, although I made sure I did the driving.

  Brownlee was a cool guy. I used to go up to the hotel room he was staying in and he’d be in there swigging back a bottle of whiskey. He said it kept his voice clear. Then he’d call me over and touch my face and ask if I’d got any taller.

  The problem we had then was we often couldn’t get served at the roadside diners because of the colour bar. So the Blind Boys would all swing by our house and Mom would fix up a shoebox full with all kinds of sandwiches so we had something to eat on the road.

  Archie could demolish huge halls with the bluest version of the Lord’s Prayer ever recorded. He would interrupt his songs with a falsetto shriek that conjured up images of witchcraft or bedlam. He started that scream that all the big soul singers that followed used. Plenty of them screamed but Archie was the first, and maybe the best, too.

  That couple of nights I went with them to Chicago turned into about four weeks out on the road. I hung out with the Blind Boys all across Ohio and beyond until the school truant office caught up with my dad and called the cops on my ass. I got dragged back to Cleveland pronto. Of course, my old man threw a fit about that, told Brownlee, ‘You were only going to take Bobby to Chicago and then bring him right back.’ Man, I’m sure I saw Archie smile at that one.

  The record business came calling for the first time in 1954. It wasn’t exactly Motown knocking. There was this guy called Sneider, the guy who supplied records to jukeboxes in the bars and clubs in our neighbourhood around Central in Cleveland.

  He must have seen our set-up, us with our white shirts and black pants – you couldn’t miss us as young gospel kids. Sneider had some kind of contact with a record company and also a re
cording studio where a whole bunch of groups, including the O’Jays, had laid down tracks. One day he gave the old man a call and they fixed up a meet with some music-biz suits.

  These guys came around the house dressed up mighty fine. The only guys who came to the neighbourhood with a suit on were white: the insurance man, the bill collector, someone important, so we thought these guys must have been important too. They wanted to record us, but they told Dad they wanted to record us doing bebop. My father was not having that. He started yelling that we were true gospel and there was no way we’d sing anything but the Lord’s music. One of the guys said he only wanted us to record a couple of tracks and one of those was a little song called ‘Buffalo Bill’. My dad still said no. The guy put a few hundred bills on the table and asked if that would help. My dad said OK.

  But, it being my old man, there was still a problem. This guy had a whole bunch of seasoned pros ready to roll on the tracks. But Womack Sr, he was pushing to get his own sound on that record. He insisted, ‘Sir, if you want this record to come out, I gotta play my guitar on it. No me, no record.’

  We did the session. That was my first experience of recording. It felt like the big time. None of us had seen inside a studio before, but it made me feel alive. I felt right at home amongst all the equipment. We cut two tracks and the record company guys counted out the $300 and handed them to dad. We were on our way to riches – so we thought.

  The very next day, Sneider called up and told us someone had broken into that studio of his and stolen our tapes. I thought that was the weirdest thing because it wasn’t like a new cut by Sam Cooke, just a track by some young greenhorns. Of course, my daddy had the answer. ‘I told you,’ he told us, still running the line that nothing good came from music that didn’t come with a preacher’s blessing. ‘You work with the devil and see what happens.’

  Someone put that record out only with a different group name. We kept hearing those tracks of ours on the radio. ‘Man, that’s us,’ we’d tell each other, ‘only the name ain’t right.’ I guess they thought they got us cheap and didn’t have to pay royalties or anything. So right from the off I was ripped off. Nothing changed. The record business started screwing me then and hasn’t stopped screwing me since.

  Funny thing was, around 30 years later, I opened my mailbox and out popped those tapes we did at Sneider’s. There was a note from Sneider with them: he was in the Veteran’s Hospital in Cleveland by then. He wrote that he wanted to set the record straight ’cos it was him that had stolen our masters. They’d been no break-in. It was just a scam to get our music cheap. He wrote that he was proud of how me and my brothers had turned out. I called the hospital immediately, but Sneider had died just hours before.

  We did earn on the circuit, though, and my father would take all the cash we earned to pay the bills, put food on the table, get new shoes. That was fine, but I thought we weren’t getting anyplace fast. I wanted to play rock’n’roll or boogie-woogie.

  One day I had it out. I said, ‘Daddy, I got something I want to talk to you about.’

  He knew what was coming. ‘Oh yeah?’

  I said, ‘Sit down. We want to talk to you.’

  He said, ‘We or you.’

  I said, ‘We. We want to change over.’

  He said, ‘Change over, to what?’

  ‘Boogie-woogie.’

  He jumped and started punching me like he was Muhammad Ali. Everywhere from under my feet up to my nuts. He said, ‘I’m going to boogie your woogie.’

  He knocked me down and I screamed for him not to hit me no more.

  He said, ‘You still want to play boogie-woogie?’

  I guessed not. I said, ‘I want to play gospel for Jesus.’

  He messed me up pretty good and none of my brothers came to help. They were on the floor laughing and my old man picked me up and threw me down with them.

  ‘You get that out your mind,’ he said. ‘You ain’t going nowhere. I promised God y’all are going to serve him. What you going to do?’

  ‘Serve God,’ we chimed.

  But it wasn’t that simple. Sam Cooke was already doing well with rock’n’roll and he knew it was the key. It was going to enable him to cross over from mostly black audiences to become big in all parts of town, black and white. That was the future, he told us, and we trusted him. Sam explained how it worked. ‘Bobby,’ he asked, ‘you ever been to a white church? You go into a white church, the preacher is preaching. The people just sit there and look, say amen and church is over for the day.’

  It was the same for a white funeral. ‘You go to a white funeral,’ he told me, ‘maybe a woman is sobbing a bit, then they go home, just quiet, respectable and everything is back to normal.’

  But a black funeral, that was different. Sam said, ‘Momma is crying, she is trying to get into the casket. People are trying to pull her out. It’s like a circus. Then go to a black church and people are shouting all over the place.’

  His point was that there were two cultures and they were totally different. ‘They look at us and think, “Fucking crazy”,’ he said. ‘We are different so until we bridge that gap they are not going to understand you singing and screaming like James Brown.’ Sam’s game was to teach the whites to scream and shout. ‘Believe me, it’s not that they can’t,’ he claimed. ‘It’s just that they have never been taught.’

  From where us kids were standing, Sam and his rock’n’roll brothers looked like they had life mapped. But the church wouldn’t take it lying down. The preachers continued to warn us that any man who switched from serving God to serving the devil with his rock’n’roll tunes had something coming.

  We thought they were right. In 1958, Lou Rawls, one of the silkiest singers around and a high-school classmate of Sam’s, was in an auto accident. He, his band the Pilgrim Travellers and Sam had been touring the South when the smash happened. The driver had his head cut clean off. Lou was in a coma for five days and it took him months to regain his memory. Sam was lucky. He got thrown out with some glass in his elbow and eye.

  I thought, ‘That’s just the start. Does God punish people like that?’Then I thought, ‘That seems more like the devil’s work. Why put that on God?’

  The Blind Boys were still out on that gospel highway, but the road took its toll on Archie. By the end of the 1950s, he was real sick, and by 1960 he was dead in New Orleans. Pneumonia. He was only 35.

  The group got Roscoe Robinson to take over the reins as the main lead. One night Roscoe was staying around our house and grilling us on our ambition. Nothing had really happened for us since Sneider. We were still singing gospel, not rock’n’roll, in those same churches. Still playing to my father’s tune, but we wanted to move up. And we had gotten old. Christ, we were teenagers.

  Roscoe got right on the phone and called Sam Cooke. Sam had quit the Soul Stirrers in 1957 and moved to California to start playing the brand of secular music he had told me about. He had already had a hit with ‘You Send Me’ in 1957, proving his theory right: ‘You Send Me’ sold to white folk so he was selling records to blacks and whites, more than a million of them all told.

  We all gathered around and listened as Roscoe rapped with Sam. Roscoe told him we were still toiling in the churches, making a little scratch, but not throwing up much dust. Sam had got himself a little house in the Los Feliz part of Los Angeles and just started a new label, SAR.

  SAR was named after Sam and his manager JW Alexander: Sam & Alex Records. It had a little green, yellow and white label. They each had a stake in the company and the roster boasted acts like former Soul Stirrer Johnny Taylor, Johnny Morrisette and the Sims Twins. Sam wanted to stack SAR with acts. He wanted to know if we were available.

  We were available for birthdays, weddings and funerals up to this point so we were going to be available for Sam Cooke. The only downside: Sam didn’t want to deal with the old man on account of him being religious. He told Roscoe to cue me up on the call. ‘Listen, Bobby,’ said Sam, ‘There ain’t no money i
n gospel any more. We need to step it up to the next level. I want you to write something with crossover appeal – for the whites too.’ I told him that it was gospel or nothing as far as Dad was concerned. ‘OK, I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll cut you a gospel record and if it don’t hit, then you cut me something I want.’

  Man, that was it. We were in with Sam. He told us to get over to United Sound Studios in Detroit. Dad drove us up from Cleveland and called Sam from our motel. He was over in 20 minutes and we told him what we had.

  The first songs we gave him were ‘Yield Not To Temptation’, ‘Somebody’s Wrong’, ‘Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray’ and ‘Somewhere There’s A God’.

  We picked the first two tracks – ‘Somebody’s Wrong’ on the A side, ‘Yield Not To Temptation’ on the flip – for our debut single, out in 1961 on SAR, credited to the Womack Brothers, like the group my old man had with his brothers. Man, we were proud. And so was dad.

  As Sam predicted, the track did nothing, didn’t even fly near the charts, let alone dent them. Sam wasn’t going to let that faze him. He said, ‘OK, let’s keep that track “Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray” and write some new lyrics.’

  I wrote a few new words, we ditched the gospel and crooned about love and lust, and out came ‘Lookin’ For A Love’. JW told us to change our name from the Womack Brothers to The Valentinos and we put the track right out there in March 1962. ‘I’m looking for a love, I’m looking for a love/I looked here and there, searching everywhere.’ We also re-cut ‘Somewhere There’s A God’ and substituted ‘girl’ for ‘God’.

  ‘Lookin’ For A Love’ hit big: two million copies big. We were on our way. Friendly and Curtis had already graduated school, but me, Harry and Cecil quit school straight off. Some of our classmates were starting to ask for autographs. Plus, I had a teacher, name of Mr Washington. He always told me I wouldn’t amount to jack shit. Yeah, I didn’t know who invented the cotton mill, but I knew who invented soul. I reckoned it was Sam. And he had called us, asked us to move out to California. Proving Mr Washington wrong was a powerful motivator.