Represented here is his foray into a New Orleans sound, on 'Basin Street Blues' etc., which he'd never explored before (and which he shaped his own way) as well as his poignant recording of 'The Riddle Song', which was a way of his coming to terms musically with the death of his son and 'Good Times', the somber-toned party song of Cooke's that the Rolling Stones chose to cover, and the equally pensive and compelling 'Another Saturday Night', a relic of the first half of 1963 that fits equally well with this later material. Cooke was inactive in the studio for a significant chunk of 1963, following the drowning death of his infant son, and when he resumed work late in the year it was under a new contract that was to ultimately give control and ownership of his recordings to him (or, as events worked out, his manager, Allen Klein). here, a result of the split control of his catalog between RCA and ABKCO, but they will find his most important and influential songs. Listeners won't find his most popular songs - 'You Send Me', 'Chain Gang', 'Only Sixteen', etc. This was a period in which he explored several promising musical directions and broke through both to an extraordinarily sophisticated synthesis of his gospel roots with topical songwriting within a pop context. This 23-song rarities compilation stands in Sam Cooke's output roughly where the four posthumous LPs released by Otis Redding stand in his catalog, with the major difference that Cooke's work included far fewer leftovers and sides that were justified simply by being available - he seemed to throw a special effort into almost everything that ever recorded, and that goes double for this disc's content, which encompasses the final year of his recording career.

Keep it moven