Allan Klein Crockett Tx

Sam Cooke « garlic never sleeps

Is more than just a biography of Sam Cooke; it’s also a revealing historical snapshot of the USA in the 1950s and early 1960s, an era when the country was still wrestling with the injustice of racial inequality and outright hate and bigotry. There is a fascinating cast of characters populating this book; well-known musicians such as Bobby Womack (who scandalously married Cooke’s widow only a few months after Sam was buried), Little Richard, Johnnie Taylor, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick, Solomon Burke, Mavis Staples, Clyde McPhatter, Lloyd Price, Roy Hamilton, Jackie Wilson, Sammy Davis Jr., Herb Alpert, Lou Rawls, Etta James, Ray Charles, and many more. Their reminiscences of Cooke and those musical times make for engrossing reading. A young boxer named Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) also makes several appearances (he calls Sam Cooke up to the ring on the night he defeated Sonny Liston), as do Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Cooke’s ruthless business manager Allen Klein.

One of the more interesting, and frequently quoted acquaintances of Cooke’s is a woman with the so-good-you-couldn’t-make-it-up name of Lithofayne Pridgeon. It may not be accurate to call her a groupie, but she obviously knew who was who in music circles of that era. Before dating Sam Cooke she was also a girlfriend of the singer Little Willie John. Later, in the early 1960s, she introduced Sam Cooke to her newest boyfriend, a young guitarist by the name of Jimi Hendrix. While doing a bit of online research I ran across a very colorful statement that Lithofayne, also known as Faye, made about Hendrix:

“He was well-endowed. He came to the bed with the same grace a Mississippi pulpwood driver attacks a plate of collard greens and corn bread after ten hours in the sun. He was creative in bed, too. There would be encore after encore, hard-driving and steamy like his music. There were times when he almost busted me in two, the way he did a guitar on stage.