Sam Cooke

📍Bronzeville, Chicago, IL 60653, USA

“I was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in January 1931, the fifth of eight children of the Reverend Charles Cook, a Holiness minister, and his wife, Annie Mae. When I was two, my father went north to Chicago looking for work and a congregation, and the rest of us followed. We settled in Bronzeville, the heart of Black Chicago, on Cottage Grove Avenue near 35th Street, a few blocks from the lake and from Doolittle Elementary School, where we children went to school. Bronzeville in the 1930s and 1940s was a city within a city, full of churches, theatres, blues clubs, Black-owned businesses and newcomers from the South like us. Sundays belonged to church. My father, who opened every sermon with a song, saw that his children could sing, and he formed us into a group called the Singing Children. I sang tenor, and we performed at his church in Chicago Heights and travelled with our parents to churches across the Midwest. At fifteen I became the lead singer of a teenage gospel group, the Highway QCs, and at Wendell Phillips High School, where Nat King Cole had studied before me, I kept my grades up while singing every weekend. In 1950 I joined the Soul Stirrers, one of the great gospel quartets, and later crossed over to popular music with songs like You Send Me and A Change Is Gonna Come, bringing the feeling of gospel to soul music. In 2019 Chicago renamed a stretch of street near my boyhood home Sam Cooke Way.”

Sources: wttw.com wbez.org hmdb.org Wikipedia: Sam Cooke