Apr 23

Sam Cooke - Portrait Of A Legend 1951 - 1964

Posted by nikos1109

In my opinion, he is the best soul artist of the first period of soul.
Otis, Marvin and Stevie wouldn’t be the same without him.
Sam Cooke was the most important soul singer in history — he was also the inventor of soul music, and its most popular and beloved performer in both the black and white communities. Equally important, he was among the first modern black performers and composers to attend to the business side of the music business, and founded both a record label and a publishing company as an extension of his careers as a singer and composer (All Music)
The Reviews
1
It took over 30 years, but there is finally an Sam Cooke anthology that presents a well rounded potrait of this amazing artist’s many talents. “Potrait of a Legend” trumps all of it’s predecessors by including a great deal of Sam’s lesser known work that proves him to be able to “testify” with best singers of his generation including Otis Redding, Ray Charles, and James Brown. Previous anthologies were competent collections of Sam Cooke “lite”, his lilting crossover hits with RCA hits. The crossover Cooke was one of the first black entertainers to acheive huge success in selling records in the previous impenetrable white pop music market in the early sixties. Cooke’s genius was that he understood the type of music needed to break through and acheive crossover success. The calyso influenced rythyms of his early hits and the winesome quality of his voice was his port of entry into mainstream. These irresistable songs like “Chain Gang”, “You Send Me” and “Cupid” are flat-out American classics that paved the way for a generation of country boy singers who embraced the raw testimonial style of blues and gospel singers.

2
Some 46 years after his first pop hit, and 39 years after his death, comes only the second attempt at a comprehensive Sam Cooke collection. Portrait of a Legend 1951-1964 eclipses RCA’s early-’80s The Man and His Music, going it better in running time but losing some important recordings — “That’s Heaven to Me” and “Soothe Me,” arguably one of Cooke’s most important songs — in the process of summing up his career. From 1951’s Soul Stirrers’ gospel classic “Touch the Hem of His Garment” through to 1964’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” and “Shake,” we get highlights of Cooke’s career presented in state-of-the-art digital audio; superior in every way possible to the audio quality of The Man and His Music. What’s more, this is a hybrid disc with SACD capability, and the sound on that layer is almost as much of a jump above the quality on the CD layer as this remastering is from the old The Man and His Music disc; and either the standard CD or the SACD playback makes that 1980s-issued compilation sound faint and anemic. There’s also annotation here — which was totally lacking on the earlier CD — by Peter Guralnick, which delves very effectively into the background of each song. And the producers have taken the trouble to be a little inventive in the programming — it would have been easy enough to follow a strict chronological approach, but instead the disc opens and closes with tracks that reveal Cooke’s gospel roots, which is pretty much where his music started and where it ended up, bookending his first hit with songs from his first session ever.

Download Links
Part 1

Part 2

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Date April 23rd, 2008

One Response to “Sam Cooke - Portrait Of A Legend 1951 - 1964”

  1. David Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 7:39 am

    Part 2 needs for re-upload!

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