Little Joe Cook: The Back Story

Here's our second installment of the Little Joe Cook article written by Camille Dodero for the Boston Phoenix in 2005.

Part 2: ‘This I Know’ 

No birth record exists for Joseph Cook, the only child of Annie Bell, a blues vocalist who once toured with jazz singer Ethel Waters and Bessie “Empress of the Blues" Smith. Cook’s grandmother, a mother of 13 who found time to be a preacher and a midwife, helped deliver him at home on December 29, 1922, in South Philadelphia. 

Though he’s used his paternal cognomen throughout his life, Cook never knew his father. Performing and preaching were both in Cook’s blood, so at around 11, he and three cousins started singing spirituals together. "I was a natural, "Cook recalls." My mother was an entertainer and my grandmother was a preacher, so I was just gifted. " Cook also danced throughout his adolescence, winning Philly-area dance competitions and earning the nickname " Jitterbug Joe. "

After dropping out of high school to work full-time, 18-year-old Cook married his first wife, Lilly, who would later be the muse for "Lilly Lou," the love song on the B-side of "Peanuts." Over the next few years, Cook earned a living working for the Navy, helping to construct the USS Wisconsin, toiling as a jitney driver for Campbell’s Soup, and sorting coins at the US Mint for 85 cents an hour. With Lilly, he also fathered three children: two daughters (who would later be two-thirds of the Cook-managed ’60s girl group the Sherrys, along with Cook’s niece) and a son, who died at a year old.

Meanwhile, Cook sang. He’d grown up listening to Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong. But his mother forbade him to sing secular music, even though she herself had spent many years crooning the blues. "She came off the road and got religious," Cook writes in the liner notes of Blast from the Past, a nearly complete collection of his late-’50s and early-’60s recordings. " That’s when she didn’t want me to do what she was doing as long as she was living. "

So instead of singing rock and roll, Cook taught it. "He loved gospel," recalls Joseph " JoJo " Wallace, a long-time friend and a tenor for the 60-year-old gospel quintet the Sensational Nightingales. " But that wasn’t all that he wanted. "

While performing with the spiritual group Evening Star Quartet, Cook managed a doo-wop group of seven male vocalists. "I taught them guys how to sing, how to walk on stage," Cook remembers. " I wrote all the songs and everything. "Some of them had to be fired — a few kept skipping daily rehearsals to shoot hoops — but there were always replacements waiting in the wings." Back then, I had a good ear, " Cook reasons. " Everybody used to come to me. "

"Word got around that Joe had this band," says fellow Philly native Reggie Grant, 62, the Thrillers’ saxophonist who’s known Cook for nearly 50 years. "I would be riding by this church and hear this group rehearsing down in the basement. I would sit at the window and watch them perform. But they weren’t singing spirituals in the basement of that church, "he says, pausing for dramatic effect." They were singing rock ’n’ roll."

"My wife’s sister used to make fun of us," Cook recalls. " She’d say, ‘You guys sound like frogs.’ We said, ‘People’ll pay us to sing like this.’ She said, ‘I wouldn’t pay no money to hear you guys.’ "

But eventually, people did: Cook convinced the owner of the local club Diamond Horseshoe that his "nice-looking" boys would attract girls to the venue if his group sang there weekly. "We’ll pack this place clean, "Cook remembers telling the owner. They did. And it was at the Horseshoe where Cook’s band got its name. "One girl said, ‘You guys thrill me,’ "says Cook." I said, ‘I like that name, I’m going to name you guys the Thrillers."

Soon after, Columbia Records heard the buzz about the Thrillers and sent a talent scout to a rehearsal. The way Cook tells it, Farris Hill, the Thrillers’ lead at the time, screwed up in front of the scout. "I would say, ‘Faz, do it like this’ when he’d mess up, "Cook explains. " And I’d sing it. So the Columbia guy says to me, ‘I like your voice. Why don’t you sing it?’ I said, ‘No, this is the group the Thrillers. I’m singing spirituals.’ He said, ‘You could do the record and let him learn off the record.’ Faz said, ‘Yeah Joe, I can’t sing it like you do.’ "Cook pauses." My mother didn’t want me singing no rock ’n’ roll. But she’d been passed away. "

So Cook sang. "I didn’t want to stop them from making money," he rationalizes. When Cook & the Thrillers were offered a deal with Columbia subsidiary OKeh Records, they didn’t have the money to get to New York. So Cook pawned either his first wife’s jewels or her sewing machine — the recollections vary — and paid for the boys to go to New York. "The rest, "he says, " is history. "