Florence M. Howard

On Saturday, Aug. 8, two friends – Dr. Yvonne Osborne and Ester Patrick – and I decided to take a road trip to visit Ground Zero Blues Club and the Delta Blues Museum.

In Clarksdale, located 75 miles south of Memphis out Highway 61, serendipity showed itself in the form of the 22nd Annual Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival.

Ground Zero is situated a few steps from the museum and the three-day festival – complete with food vendors and a massive stage – occupied a large expanse of land outside the museum for the event on Aug. 7-9.

Yvonne, Ester and I had no idea the festival was going on when we embarked on our day trip. We entered Ground Zero ready to enjoy the catfish, fried green tomatoes, tamales and barbecue promised on the club’s Web site. We left with a first-hand experience with the legend of Sam Cooke, his music and his family.

Dr. Yvonne Osborne (right) and Ester Patrick share a table with Jackie Lee Heard, a former member of the Soul Stirrers, the gospel quartet that Sam Cooke helped make famous. Heard, who joined the group after Cooke left to go solo, paid tribute to Cooke, but never met the singer who was inducted as a charter member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. (Photos by Florence M. Howard)

The entire festival was dedicated to Cooke, a native son of Clarksdale born Jan. 22, 1931. Cooke was fatally shot on Dec. 11, 1964 in Los Angeles at age 33. His influence in gospel, pop, R&B, and soul music lives on.

Serendipity, says the dictionary, is the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. The fine print should read, “See Yvonne, Ester and Florence in Clarksdale.”

Talk of making a day trip first surfaced about a year ago. Some time passed and we had not seen each other for a while when the idea floated back into the conversation. There actually were four of us, but with the first day of school looming, our fourth partner, Marsha Johnson, had to take a raincheck and get her kids ready for the new year.

Soonafter we drove into Clarksdale, Yvonne was talking on her cell phone to someone in California who knew about the Sunflower Festival and thought that was the reason for our trip.

Serendipity!

I don’t recall who said what, but a rush of excitement came out of us and sounded like this: “We picked the right day…We lucked out…This is great.”

The sounds of “You Send Me,” a Cooke classic, welcomed us as we entered the spacious club with its quintessential juke joint motifs. As we waited for lunch, the manager announced that the “Remembering Sam Cooke” forum would start at 2 p.m.

Chairs were placed in front of the stage, soon to be filled by Sam’s brother L.C. Cooke, his sister Gwendolyn Green, his nephew and biographer Erik Green, two nieces and Jackie Lee Heard, who joined the legendary Soul Stirrers after Sam Cooke had left the gospel quartet for a solo career.

Ester Patrick of Memphis got a fresh lesson on the value of a chance meeting when she encountered L.C. Cooke (center), the brother of legendary singer Sam Cooke, at the second annual tribute to Sam Cooke at the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Miss.

Artist Henry Dorsey said it it took about five weeks to paint this Sam Cooke portrait, which he created for the Sam Cooke tribute held at Ground Zero in 2008.

Rev. Charles Cook and his wife, Annie Mae, had seven Children, Sam Cooke being one of them. The family moved from Clarksdale to Chicago when Sam was three years old.

During the forum, L.C. Cooke was asked what he thought about his brother’s move away from gospel music.

“Don’t tell me that if you had a chance to make money, you won’t take it,” Cooke told the young man who asked the question.

Cooke also wanted people to remember that his brother owned the rights to the music he wrote as well as his masters and that he formed his own recording and publishing company at a time when few African-American performers had the business foresight and wisdom to do so.

Young Sam Cooke once sang with his family members in a group called the Singing Children and later was lead singer for the Highway QC’s. In 1950 at the age of 19, he became lead singer of the Soul Stirrers, the Chicago quartet with whom he recorded “Jesus Gave Me Water,” “Peace in the Valley,” “Jesus Paid the Debt,” “One More River,” “How far am I from Canaan?” and many other songs.

The Soul Stirrers are associated with changing the way quartets performed and interacted vocally. Cooke left the group in 1957. In 1989, The Soul Stirrers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – the only gospel quartet so honored.

Between 1957 and 1964, Sam Cooke had 29 Top 40 hits, including “You Send Me,” “A Change Is Gonna Come,” “Chain Gang,” “Wonderful World,” “Twistin’ the Night Away”and “Bring It on Home to Me.” Named the fourth ‘Greatest Singer of All Time” by Rolling Stone magazine in 2008, he was inducted as a charter member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 and honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999.

Saturday’s forum at Ground Zero included a musical tribute performed by the Men’s Ensemble of Chapel Hill Missionary Baptist Church. With lead singer Aubrey Brown, the group sang from the Soul Stirrers’s repertoire – “Wonderful,” “Nearer to Thee” and “O Lord.”

Taft Hawthorne, a Cooke admirer who has been called “The Sam Cooke of the South” because of the similarity of his voice to Cooke’s also performed during the tribute.

An original portrait of Cooke was on display during the forum. Artist Henry Dorsey, retired chairman of the Art Department at Coahoma Community College, said it it took about five weeks to paint the portrait, which he created in 2008 for the Sam Cooke tribute held at Ground Zero.

The Clarksdale Board of Mayor and Commissioners officially proclaimed Aug. 7-9 as “Sam Cooke Weekend.”

“The City of Clarksdale has been wonderful and kind to the family,” said L.C. Cooke in closing remarks at the forum.

“We’re grateful and thank you for loving Sam.”

At one point, when Cooke’s unique tenor filled Ground Zero with the spiritual melody of “If I could just touch the hem of his garment, I’ll be made whole,” childhood memories flowed and many sang along softly.

“I grew up on that,” said Ester.

Wow, what a day!