He sang melodic gospel-tinged songs for black audiences and for them he was a hero just as daunting and just as real as Elvis was for the whites. His hit songs - "You Send Me", "Wonderful World", "Cupid" to name just three - perfected the style of commercial soul music. The fact that it worked spectacularly must have been a decisive factor in Berry Gordy crank- starting the Motown operation. Later singers, including Otis Redding, testified to Cooke's influence and his singles still send a lucrative shiver down the public's spine even today.
The sheer enormity of this influence suggested that his death might not have been an accident. The bizarre circumstances which led to it would seem to lend support to this argument. There are so many unanswered questions regarding the Cooke shooting that a conspiracy theory is almost inevitable.
Cooke had married his childhood sweetheart and was known as a clean-living family man. So it was almost incredible to hear of his being shot while trying to rape a girl he had picked up at a party. Evidently he had persuaded this girl, Elisa Boyer, to get into his car, saying that he would give her a lift home. Instead he drove to a Los Angeles motel and, although she says she was forced into going, she seems to have stood silently by his side while he signed the register, 'Mr. and Mrs. Cooke'. She says that she then demanded to be taken home but, after Cooke assured her that he merely wanted to talk for a while, she followed him to the room. There he tried to undress her and she resisted. Fears that he would try to rape her made her snatch up her clothes as well as Cooke's and dash across to the motel office. Once inside she found a phone and called the police.
Cooke followed her to the office and began pounding on the door, demanding to talk to her. The motel manageress, a certain Mrs. Franklin, told him that Elisa Boyer was not there. Cooke appeared to believe her and got in his car to drive away. But then he returned and resumed pounding Mrs. Franklin testified that Cooke then broke down the office door in a state of rage and proceeded to attack her. She managed to fight him off and get hold of a pistol, with which she shot him three times in the chest and abdomen. He did not die at once. Instead he leapt at her in a even greater rage whereupon she struck him with a stick. The stick broke but she kept hitting until he lay still.When the police eventually arrived he was dead.
Hearing this evidence, the inquest court ruled that the killing was justifiable homicide. Nevertheless the questions will not answer themselves. In an effort to find out what really happened that might Cooke's Manager later hired a private detective to work it all out. He never came up with any satisfactory conclusions.
Sam Cooke's funeral was a tempestuous affair, with almost 200,000 people turning up to pay their respects. Many of them were hysterical, most were crying. Hundreds were crushed in the desperate attempt to take a look at his body for the last time and the local Chicago press ran stories on the pandemonium.
A week later another 5,000 people attended a funeral service for the dead singer in Los Angeles.
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