ABKCO Music & Records (series)

Ain't That Good News [SACD Hybird]

by Sam Cooke

Product Description:

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Personnel includes: Sam Cooke (vocals); Rene Hall, Joseph Hooven (arranger, conductor); The Soul Stirrers.

Recorded at RCA Studio, Hollywood, California in 1964-65.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

This album, which was sadly to be Sam Cooke's last, found him exercising a hard-won creative freedom to fine effect. You can hear it most clearly in the moving, socially relevant ballad "A Change Is Gonna Come." But it doesn't stop there. Cooke dips into the well of country music for a version of the classic "Tennessee Waltz" that is startling in its transformative ability, as he accomplishes a feat that no one but Ray Charles himself was capable of at the time--turning country seamlessly into soul. The lighthearted "Another Saturday Night" paints a detailed portrait of loneliness that's fully charged with humor rather than desperation, showing how Cooke could straddle several emotions at once within the same song. AIN'T THAT GOOD NEWS is the sound of a man at the peak of his powers, flexing all of his musical muscles. It's just a shame that this was to be the soul legend's swan song.