L.C. and I always called each other on our almost-shared birthday.
It was always great to talk to L.C. He had a positive word for, and about, everyone. How’s your Dad? he would say. Give your wife a kiss for me. Grandkids doing good? That’s good. It was just his nature.
If you met L.C., you might think you were meeting his older (by 23 months) brother, Sam. Like Sam, he was charming, talented, outgoing, and thoughtful (L.C., he said, which in fact was his full Christian name, stood for “Loads of Charm”) – but he wasn’t Sam. He was L.C., and he knew it. If you asked him how he was doing, he declared, “I’m better than good.”
He was, as I say, one of the warmest and most gracious people you’d ever want to meet. Also, one of the most truth-telling. Nothing was ever prettified or embroidered. Nothing ever changed in his account. And he was always able to paint a picture, right down to the last vivid, eidetic detail. Because, without ever saying anything negative about anybody (there was only one person I ever heard L.C. speak ill of, and he was quick to point out that was the only one), he was a keen observer, an appreciative student of human nature, who didn’t believe in leaving anything out. “What’d you tell that man that for?” his sister Agnes said of some R-rated scene he had recounted to me for my biography of Sam. L.C. just shrugged. “Because it’s the truth,” he said. To L.C., a deeply religious man, who was a member of Christ Universal Temple, where his wife, Marjorie, served as assistant minister, for over fifty years, there was nothing alien in the human experience – which meant there was nothing to be ashamed of either.
There was unquestionably a cocky side to him, too. (L.C. would have called it confidence – though I’ll bet he would have accepted “cockiness.”) You could see it in his walk, hear it in his talk. And like all the Cooks (Sam added the “e”), he was not going to allow himself to get pushed around. He and his brothers and sisters had been taught by their father never to shrink from a challenge – whether it was from the cop on the beat or the massed forces of Jim Crow. It got him in trouble in the army, where he was almost court-martialed for defying the accepted rules of segregation. You could see it surface occasionally – but only occasionally – when he felt he was being disrespected. In situations like that, whether public or private, he was not about to back down. But you rarely got to see it – it was reserved for that rare moment when his charm failed to deflect what he perceived as a direct affront.
When I first met the family in Chicago in 1996 – I had known L.C. at that point for several years, but this was the first chance I got to meet his four living brothers and sisters and his 98-year-old father – I was so overwhelmed by the experience that I told L.C., “Man, I want to be a Cook.” “Okay,” said L.C., without seeming to give the matter a whole lot of reflection, “you are.” I said, “L.C., you can’t just speak for the whole family, can you? Don’t you have to consult with anyone else?” He looked at me like I must be crazy. “Naw, I’m the head man now,” he said. “You’re my brother.” And while I don’t really know how anyone else in the family felt about it, I felt great. And I still do.
For as long as I knew him, L.C. was pretty much of a homebody. He had long since stopped performing, and while he maintained all of his far-flung show-business connections (L.C. knew everybody, and everybody knew L.C.), he never showed any interest in returning to the life he had led. He cherished his friends. He cherished his family. He cherished his memories. And he cherished his wife, Margie, whom he met when her family had a restaurant on the South Side that all the r&b singers frequented. The church, while always important, became more and more so in later years. At his funeral at Christ Universal the story was told of how he became an usher, a position of great respect, when he started going to prayer meetings and, after a number of invitations, offered up a prayer. When he finished, everyone was in agreement, they wouldn’t need to have church now, because, after L.C.’s comprehensive praying, they had already had it. As an usher, he was given the honorary title of “Bishop,” the same as his father, a prominent evangelist in the Church of Christ (Holiness), and he wore it proudly until his death.
In his last years he suffered from a debilitating condition which left him in a wheelchair, but with the help of Margie and his good friend, “Junior” Mayfield, he remained undaunted in spirit, dedicated to his rehabilitation, and to the end he never gave up the hope that someday he might walk again. “You don’t ever have to check up on anything I tell you,” he said the first time we met. “Because I’m going to tell it to you the same every time.” And he expected me to hold up my end of the bargain, too. “Didn’t I tell you that before?” he would say with some exasperation, when I tested my own understanding of the story from time to time. “Thank you.”
The only time I ever had reason to question his total reliability not just as a family chronicler but as a social historian arose when we were looking at a bunch of family photographs supplied by his sister Agnes. “That’s Sam!” L.C. said proudly, holding up a picture of a young boy in a button-up sweater, with a kerchief around his neck. A year or two later, when my friend Susan Marsh was designing the book, she said, “That looks an awful lot like L.C. to me,” and Alexandra thought so, too. “Well, they were brothers, weren’t they?” I said. “I mean, they did kind of look alike.” At Susan’s insistence, though, I went back to L.C., and was met with the predictable reaction, which fell somewhere between indignation and hurt. “Man, I already told you that was Sam,” he said. Which necessarily settled the matter. But then, not long after the book came out, I was talking with Agnes, and she asked me why I had labeled the boy in the picture as Sam, when anyone could plainly see it was L.C. I told her that her brother had been very emphatic on the subject. Agnes just laughed. “That fool don’t know his own self,” she said. But, of course, he did, with perhaps that single inexplicable exception. And he laughed about it afterwards, reluctantly conceding that Agnes was right.
I can still hear his liltingly assertive voice, the seductive rhythms of his speech. I will always recall his warm smile, that warm laugh. And I think about when his debut SAR album came out in 2014, fifty years after it had been completed and announced for release just before Sam’s death. (SAR was the label Sam started to record some of the artists he most admired both in gospel and pop, artists like the Sims Twins, Johnnie Taylor, Bobby Womack, and the Soul Stirrers.) What was revelatory about hearing so much of L.C.’s early work all gathered together on one disc was not how much L.C. sounded like Sam (everyone already knew that) but how much he possessed a voice of his own. “Sam wanted me to be different from anybody. He wanted me to stand out alone,” L.C. said, and even though Sam wrote most of the songs and produced all of the SAR sessions, it is L.C.’s voice that comes through most of all: jaunty, buoyant, upbeat, but more than capable, as it turns out, of really bearing down on a deep-soul classic like “Put Me Down Easy.”
He started out at the age of five singing bass with his brothers and sisters in the family group, the Singing Children. He sang with Lou Rawls in a teenage gospel group, the Holy Wonders, and met Elvis Presley at the WDIA Goodwill Revue in Memphis when he was singing with the Magnificents in 1956. (“You’re not related to Sam Cooke, are you?” Elvis said with almost awestruck wonder, at a time when Sam was still singing gospel with the Soul Stirrers and scarcely anyone in white America knew his name.) Even after L.C. stopped performing professionally, he might still sing occasionally with old friends at informal gospel singing reunions or events like Lou Rawls’ 2006 funeral. When the album came out, he relished the attention that both he and the music were getting, without ever being tempted by the numerous offers to perform that came his way. Talking to him about the album just before it came out, I asked if he had any favorites, and of course he named “Put Me Down Easy” as one. But it was his own, self-penned “If I Could Only Hear,” recorded for Chess just before he started recording for his brother’s label, that he felt represented him best. “It was probably the best song I ever did in my life,” he said. “To me. You know, sometimes you cut a song and you listen. You say, ‘I could have done that better.’ But ‘If I Could Only Hear’ – if I had sung that song for 100 years, I couldn’t have done that song no better than what I did. That’s always been my favorite song. And I think you all will agree.”
