what happened to bobby womack and his wife
Barbara Campbell Cooke, 85, Widow of the Slain Sam Cooke, Is Dead
They were teenage sweethearts, but their matrimony turned tragic, and when she married the protégé singer Bobby Womack, the publicity was intense and the boos were loud.
Their story started out every bit if lifted from one of his love songs. Sam Cooke was xviii and Barbara Campbell was only thirteen when they met on the South Side of Chicago.
Fifteen years later on, Mr. Cooke, by then a pop superstar, was dead, killed in a motel tryst gone awry. And only three months after his death, Barbara Campbell Cooke, his widow, would marry her hubby'southward protégé Bobby Womack, the gravelly-voiced soul singer and guitarist. Widely publicized, their union fabricated them pariahs in their families, to much of the music community and to Mr. Cooke'south doting fans.
In her later years Ms. Cooke lived in relative obscurity, and when she died in April at 85, no public announcement was made, at her and her family's wish. The death was recently confirmed by David Washington, a Detroit radio host who is close to the Cooke and Womack families. No cause was given.
The Cookes' life together and its backwash were the stuff of Greek tragedy. Mr. Cooke, once a teenage gospel singer, was music royalty, a picture show-star-handsome crooner of hits like "You Send Me" and "Wonderful World," as well as the wrenching "A Change Is Gonna Come," which would become a civil rights anthem.
The son of a preacher, he took a firm stand in playing the American Due south, refusing to perform for segregated audiences. He was a canny businessman who retained the rights to his work and built a publishing and recording company to promote the work of others. He was a voracious reader, of everything from James Baldwin to William 50. Shirer'southward "The Rise and Fall of the 3rd Reich." (Aretha Franklin, who as a young vocalist was frequently on tour with him, remembered buying the book just because he had it.)
He was also a voracious womanizer. Mr. Cooke was 33 when he was shot past the managing director of a $3-a-night motel in Los Angeles in December 1964 while chasing a prostitute who had stolen his wearing apparel and money. Conspiracy theories still surround the death.
Barbara was his teenage sweetheart but only one of many girlfriends. She had their daughter, Linda, when she was 17; iii other women would also have daughters by Mr. Cooke.
Barbara and Sam had married and divorced other people before marrying each other in Chicago in 1959, with Mr. Cooke's disapproving father, the Rev. Charles Cook, performing the ceremony. The couple settled down in Los Angeles in a vine-covered Cape in the Hollywood area. (Mr. Cooke had added an "eastward" to his proper name at the offset of his career.)
The spousal relationship was a difficult deal. Mr. Cooke, steely in his ambition and chronically unfaithful, went virtually his life while Ms. Cooke fended for herself. In his exhaustive biography "Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke" (2005), Peter Guralnick noted how Ms. Cooke, whom he had interviewed at length, had tried to keep her stop upwardly, attempting to read James Baldwin at her husband's prompting and joining a group of philanthropic African American women known as the Regalettes. And she had her own affairs, every bit she explained to Mr. Guralnick.
In 1963, their third kid, Vincent, drowned in their pool when he was 18 months old. A yr later, Mr. Cooke was dead.
When Mr. Cooke died, Ms. Cooke was still numb from grief over her son's decease and humiliated by the tawdry circumstances of her husband'due south, she told Mr. Guralnick. She said she had welcomed the nineteen-year-onetime Mr. Womack into the house every bit a kind of protector. She was 29 at the time. At her urging, they married in early 1965.
In his own memoir, "Bobby Womack: My Story" (2006), Mr. Womack likened Ms. Cooke'southward proposal to a scene out of "The Graduate," the 1967 picture in which a mazed and disillusioned young human being is seduced by a friend of his parents.
"If you promise to give me five years," Ms. Cooke told Mr. Womack, past his account, "I volition give you a lifetime. You know, whatever you need to do. I but need you to walk with me here."
Mr. Womack wrote of his new wife: "She could, and did, take a lot. She could endure." He added: "She and Sam were a pair. They lived each other. They really did."
Prototype
Just information technology upset many people to encounter Mr. Womack, sometimes in Mr. Cooke'southward clothes, squiring Mr. Cooke's widow about. The couple received hate mail service, including a package containing a infant doll in a coffin. At a Nancy Wilson concert, when Ms. Wilson introduced the couple sitting in the audience, the crowd booed. In his telling, Mr. Womack, goaded past his new wife, took to cocaine. He as well began a sexual relationship with the Cookes' girl, Linda, past then a teenager. When Barbara institute them in bed, she shot Mr. Womack, the bullet grazing his temple. (Ms. Cooke was not charged, co-ordinate to Mr. Womack's book.) They divorced in 1970.
Years later, Linda Cooke married Mr. Womack'southward blood brother Cecil, and the couple became a recording duo, Womack & Womack. Linda at present goes by the proper noun Zeriiya Zekkariyas, a nod to her African heritage.
Ms. Cooke and Bobby Womack had a son, whom they named Vincent, after the Cookes' drowned infant. Vincent Womack struggled with drugs and booze, his male parent wrote, and committed suicide in 1986 when he was 21.
Bobby Womack experienced fame early on when the Rolling Stones covered his 1964 song "It's All Over At present," their beginning No. 1 hitting. He died in 2014 at 70, simply not earlier suffering other tragedies. Another son of his, Truth, died when he was a baby, and Mr. Womack's brother Harry was murdered by a girlfriend.
"I don't speak to Barbara no more than," Mr. Womack wrote in his memoir. "Linda doesn't speak to her. Oasis't spoken to Cecil for years. No one speaks to no one."
Barbara Campbell and her twin sister, Beverly, were born on Aug. 10, 1935, in Chicago. She attended Doolittle Elementary School. Mr. Cooke had graduated from loftier school when they met, only Barbara, a teenage female parent, worked two jobs to support herself and her child.
In 1986, when Mr. Cooke was inducted into the Stone & Roll Hall of Fame, Ms. Cooke stood by Mr. Cooke's father to accept the accolade on the singer's behalf.
"I think if Sam were able to exist here tonight, he would be thrilled but to come across me on this phase," Mr. Cooke'south father declared. (The elder Mr. Melt had not initially been thrilled with his son's transition from gospel to secular music.)
Ms. Cooke is survived by Ms. Zekkariyas and some other girl, Tracey Cooke; her twin sis, Beverley Lopez; and a granddaughter.
Family members and Mr. Guralnick declined to speak about Ms. Cooke'due south life and death, citing her wish for privacy.
Simply Ms. Cooke had the last words in Mr. Guralnick's nearly 750-page biography. The author quoted her reminiscing about falling in beloved with Mr. Cooke, and he with her, and nigh their wandering through Chicago's Ellis Park in the snow when they were teenagers.
"We'd walk effectually the park and fantasize," she told Mr. Guralnick. "Nosotros didn't have a dime between united states, just you'd have thought I was the princess and he was the prince. Every fourth dimension a Cadillac went by, I'd say, 'That'due south our chauffeur. He's coming to take us to our mansion.'"
She added: "Everybody wants a happy catastrophe. That's the mode I encounter information technology."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/arts/music/barbara-campbell-cooke-dead.html
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