In the mid-sixties Lou’s career took wing and this write up features the two early giant steps that thrust Lou through the doorway of stardom: Lou Rawls Live (1966) and Soulin’ (1967). You would’ve thought he was brought up in a barroom. But after Cooke went secular and Rawls returned from a brief stint as a paratrooper in the army (sergeant, Screaming Eagles), Rawls started his own seriously secular career. See if you can pick out Rawls in the above picture of the famous Pilgrim Travelers (that’s him bottom, left). In the fifties both Cooke and Rawls had been rising stars on the gospel circuit, Rawls even replacing Cooke in the Highway Q.C.’s. (In a 1958 automobile accident in Arkansas while touring with the Pilgrim Travelers gospel group, Cooke walked away no serious injuries the chauffeur was killed and Lou was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital but instead survived-well, you know: five days or so in a coma, three or four months of amnesia, and a year of recuperation.) Indeed, he was a classmate of Sam Cooke in high school, toured with and almost died with Cooke in their young adult years.
His early musical education was in gospel. Lou Rawls could be seen as Joe Williams part two-big baritone-voiced, blues-based singer coming up out of Chi-town. Other times, we’re talking a little red Corvette. Yeah, I know people say that all the time, but see, sometimes the thing not made anymore is an Edsel and didn’t deserve to be made in the first place. Observations from an insider shared with those who may or may not have witnessed such sights. In its own singular way, deep but always swinging, deeply swinging. LOU RAWLS / “Street Corner Hustler’s Blues, World of Trouble”
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