Sam Cooke Keep Movin' On CD

At last, a CD with Sam's civil rights anthem, 'A Change Is Gonna Come,' plus 21 other tracks from the last year of his life including the unreleased 'Keep Movin' On!' Restored, remastered and repackaged! Super Audio CD format (playable on all machines). Digipak. Abkco. 2003.

Personnel includes: Sam Cooke (vocals); Rene Hall, Joseph Hooven (arranger, conductor)
Producers: Sam Cooke, Luigi Creatore, Hugo Peretti, Al Schmitt.
Engineers include: Dave Hassinger, Bones Howe, Dick Bogart.
Recorded between 1959 & 1965. Includes liner notes by Peter Guralnick.
This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.
Personnel includes: Sam Cooke (vocals); Rene Hall, Joseph Hooven (arranger, conductor)
Producers: Sam Cooke, Luigi Creatore, Hugo Peretti, Al Schmitt.
Engineers include: Dave Hassinger, Bones Howe, Dick Bogart.
Recorded between 1959 & 1965. Includes liner notes by Peter Guralnick.
This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.
This 23-song CD stands in Sam Cooke's output roughly where those four posthumous LPs (beginning with Dock Of The Bay) stand in Otis Reddings catalog, with the major difference that Cooke's work included far fewer leftovers and sides that were justified simply by being available -- he seemed to throw a special effort into almost everything that ever recorded, and that goes double for this disc's content, which encompasses the final year of his recording career. This was a period in which he explored several promising musical directions and broke through both to an extraordinarily sophisticated synthesis of his gospel roots with topical songwriting within a pop context. Listeners won't find his most popular songs -- "You Send Me", "Chain Gang", "Only Sixteen", etc. -- here, a result of the split control of his catalog between RCA and ABKCO, but they will find his most important and influential songs. Cooke was inactive in the studio for a significant chunk of 1963, following the drowning death of his infant son, and when he resumed work late in the year it was under a new contract that was to ultimately give control and ownership of his recordings to him (or, as events worked out, his manager, Allen Klein). Represented here is his foray into a New Orleans sound, on "Basin Street Blues" etc., which he'd never explored before -- and which he shaped his own way -- as well as his poignant recording of "The Riddle Song", which (according to Peter Guralnick's notes) was a way of his coming to terms musically with the death of his son; and "Good Times", the somber-toned party song of Cooke's that the Rolling Stones chose to cover, and the equally pensive and compelling "Another Saturday Night", a relic of the first half of 1963 that fits equally well with this later material. On any other r&b collection, all of those tracks would be perceived as extraordinarily fine records, but Cooke himself raised the bar so high during the final months of his career, that they pale next to the most important of his songs: "Shake", which embodied a harder, more visceral soul sound than Cooke had ever embraced before; and "A Change Is Gonna Come". The latter, written by Cooke in the wake of his hearing Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In The Wind", seemed to tie up his origins as a gospel singer with all that he had learned and experienced in the ensuing decade and, channeled through the topical subject of civil rights, became his greatest musical achievement -- not his biggest hit, or his best known song even today, but his most accomplished piece of composition, singing, and recording. Cooke never had a chance to follow up either, and died before he could even assess the impact of either song -- ironically, it was Otis Redding (who died almost three years later to the day) that took them into his repertory most successfully, and kept them out there, on record and, in the case of "Shake", on stage as well; so this disc not only brings usRolling Stone (2/14/02, p.62) - 4.5 stars out of 5 - "...AN indispensable collection..."
Entertainment Weekly (2/22/02, p.149) - "...A novel, ideal presentation of one of the most beautiful voices in pop history." - Rating: A
Living Blues (5-6/02, p.80) - "...This essential purchase...gathers the soul crooner's last smashes alongside the lesser-known..."
Mojo (Publisher) (9/03, p.120) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...KEEP MOVIN' ON contains several understated gems..."