Tragedies revealed in Cooke widow’s death
Their story started out as if lifted from one of his love songs.
Sam Cooke was 18 and Barbara Campbell was only 13 when they met on the South Side of Chicago.
Fifteen years later, Cooke, by then a pop superstar, was dead, murdered in a motel tryst gone awry. And only three months after his death, Barbara Campbell Cooke, his widow, married her husband’s protege, Bobby Womack, the gravelly voiced soul singer and guitarist.
Their union made them pariahs in their families, to much of the music community, and to Sam Cooke’s adoring fans.
In her later years, Barbara Cooke lived in relative obscurity, and when she died in April at 85, no public announcement was made, at her and her family’s wish. The death recently was confirmed by David Washington, a Detroit radio host who’s close to the Cooke and Womack families. No cause was given.
The Cookes’ life together and its aftermath were the stuff of Greek tragedy. Sam Cooke, once a teenage gospel singer, was music royalty, a movie-star-handsome crooner of hits like “You Send Me” and “Wonderful World” as well as the wrenching “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which would become a civil rights anthem.
The son of a preacher, he took a firm stand on playing the South, refusing to perform for segregated audiences. He was a canny businessman who retained the rights to his work and built a publishing and recording company to promote the work of others.
He was a voracious reader, of everything from James Baldwin to William L. Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” (Aretha Franklin, who as a young singer was often on tour with him, remembered buying the book just because he had it.)
He was also a voracious womanizer. Sam Cooke was 33 when he was shot by the manager of a $3-a-night motel in Los Angeles in December 1964 while chasing a prostitute who had stolen his clothes and money. Conspiracy theories still surround the death.
Barbara Campbell was his teenage sweetheart but only one of many girlfriends. She had their daughter Linda when she was 17; three other women also had daughters by Sam Cooke.
The two had married and divorced other people before marrying each other in Chicago in 1959, with Sam Cooke’s disapproving father, the Rev. Charles Cook, performing the ceremony. (Sam Cooke had added an “e” to his name at the start of his career.) The couple settled down in Los Angeles in a vine-covered Cape in the Hollywood area.
The marriage was a hard bargain. Sam Cooke, steely in his ambition and chronically unfaithful, went about his life while Barbara Cooke fended for herself.
In his exhaustive biography “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke” (2005), Peter Guralnick noted how Barbara Cooke had tried to keep her end up, trying to read Baldwin at her husband’s prompting and joining a group of philanthropic African American women known as the Regalettes. And she had her own affairs, she told Guralnick.
In 1963, their third child, Vincent, drowned in their pool when he was 18 months old. A year later, Sam Cooke was dead.
When Sam Cooke died, Barbara Cooke was still numb from grief over her son’s death and humiliated by the tawdry circumstances of her husband’s murder, she told Guralnick. She said she had welcomed the 19-yearold Womack into the house as a kind of protector. She was 29 at the time. At her urging, they married in early 1965.
In his own memoir, “Bobby Womack: My Story” (2006), Womack likened Barbara Cooke’s proposal to a scene out of the “The Graduate,” the 1967 film in which a dazed and disillusioned young man is seduced by a friend of his parents.
“If you promise to give me five years,” Barbara Cooke told Womack, by his account, “I will give you a lifetime. You know, whatever you need to do. I just need you to walk with me here.”
Womack wrote of his new wife, “She could, and did, take a lot. She could endure.” He added, “She and Sam were a pair. They loved each other. They really did.”
But it upset many people to see Womack, sometimes in Sam Cooke’s clothes, squiring Sam Cooke’s widow about. The couple got hate mail, including a package containing a baby doll in a coffin.
At a Nancy Wilson concert, when Wilson introduced the couple sitting in the audience, the crowd booed. In his telling, Womack, goaded by his new wife, took to cocaine. He also began a sexual relationship with the Cookes’ daughter Linda, by then a teenager.
When Barbara Cooke found them in bed, she shot Womack, the bullet grazing his temple. Barbara Cooke wasn’t charged in the shooting.
They divorced in 1970. Years later, Linda Cooke married Womack’s brother Cecil, and the couple became a recording duo, Womack & Womack. Linda Cooke now goes by the name Zeriiya Zekkariyas, a nod to her African heritage.
Barbara Cooke and Bobby Womack had a son, whom they named Vincent, after the Cookes’ drowned baby. Vincent Womack struggled with drugs and alcohol, his father wrote, and he committed suicide in 1986 when he was 21.
Bobby Womack experienced fame early on when the Rolling Stones covered his 1964 song “It’s All Over Now,” their first No. 1 hit. He died in 2014 at 70, but not before suffering other tragedies. Another son of his, Truth, died when he was a baby, and Womack’s brother Harry was killed by a girlfriend.
“I don’t speak to Barbara no more,” Bobby Womack wrote in his memoir. “Linda doesn’t speak to her. Haven’t spoken to Cecil for years. No one speaks to no one.”
Other family members declined to speak about Barbara Cooke’s life and death, citing her wish for privacy.