January 10

Another ReMastered documentary on Netflix was today’s entry in the Genre-ary. This time, the ReMastered doc is focused on musician Sam Cooke.

Sam Cooke was a black musician who was gaining a lot of power during the 1960s through his amazing music and his desire to help bring about civil rights. Cooke was forming friendships with other powerful black men of the period including Cassius Clay, Malcom X and Jim Brown.

Sam Cooke’s murder was a mess. The story that was in 1964, Cooke picked up a woman and went crazy. She believed that she was about to be raped. Her story was that she grabbed his pants and took off. Cooke went after her and wound up being shot by the hotel manager. The trial was determined to be justifiable homicide.

Most of the people who had been interviewed in the documentary could not believe that this was truth. There was some speculation that there was a conspiracy behind this event as Sam Cooke was becoming a very powerful man and he had created a recoding studio that threatened the industry. The end certainly did not mesh with the the picture that we had been shown about Cooke.

We heard interviews from Smokey Robinson, Quincy Jones, Jim Brown, Dionne Warwick, Lou Adler, and Billy Davis.

The doc was interesting and engaging. It featured a person that I did not know much about and had a amazing, though way too short life.