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Night Beat

Certain Songs #2163: Sam Cooke – “You Gotta Move”

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Album: Night Beat
Year: 1963

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“You Gotta Move” is an old spiritual that had been kicking around for ages, usually with lyrics about how when the Lord gets ready, you gotta get the fuck out of there. The most famous version is the Rolling Stones cover of Mississippi Fred McDowell’s take on the song, though they were presumably aware of Sam Cooke’s rendition.

On his Night Beat album, though, Sam Cooke took the apocalyptic lyrics and recast the song as an end-of-a-relationship song, not the first time he’d taken a gospel lyric and recast it as a pop lyric.

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Certain Songs #2162: Sam Cooke – “Lost and Looking”

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Album: Night Beat
Year: 1963

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Recorded over three nights in February 1963, Night Beat was used a small group of musicians — including a 16-year-old Billy Preston on organ — and stands out in his discography as his quietest, most intimate album, bereft of horns, strings and complex vocal arrangements. Especially that last: the only other voices on the record are the musicians joyously shouting the title of “Shake Rattle and Roll.” But the rest of Night Beat? Just Sam Cooke singing his heart out.

And nowhere does he sing his heart out more than “Lost and Looking,” which — in my 1995 reissue called Sam Cooke’s Night Beat — opened up with just Sam singing over Clifford Hils’s bass:

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