He often worked in small clubs that had stages behind the bars. According to Rawls’s Website, these raps were born of necessity. These bits are considered by some to a precursor to rap music. They requested him to sing the anthem many times over the next 28 years.Īround this time, Rawls started incorporating spoken word segments to his songs. In 1967 Lou won his first Grammy Award for Best R&B Vocal Performance, for the single “Dead End Street” and he performed the national anthem “The Star Spangled Banner”, prior to the Earnie Shavers-Muhammad Ali title fight at Madison Square Garden. Signed to Capitol Records, he released his first album in 1962, I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water (Stormy Monday), but it wasn’t until the 1966 hit single “Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing” that he hit the top of the R&B charts and earned his first gold record. It was the first of 28 albums made with Capitol. While touring the South in 1958 with the Travelers and Sam Cooke, he was in a serious car crash and pronounced dead before arriving at the hospital, it took him nearly a year to fully recuperate. Rawls was soon recruited by the Chosen Gospel Singers and moved to Los Angeles, where he subsequently joined the Pilgrim Travelers.Īfter 3 years in the US Army as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, leaving as a sergeant, he travelled to LA with The Pilgrim Travelers. In 1951, Rawls replaced Cooke in the Highway QC’s after Cooke departed to join The Soul Stirrers in Los Angeles. He later sang with local groups through which he met future music stars Sam Cooke and Curtis Mayfield. Even though it is sometimes falsely reported as though Lou was a high school classmate of Sam Cooke – Cooke was nearly three years older than Rawls, they sang together in the Teenage Kings of Harmony, a ’50s gospel group.Īfter graduating from Chicago’s Dunbar Vocational High School, he sang briefly with Cooke in the Teenage Kings of Harmony, a local gospel group, and then with the Holy Wonders. Wells projects on the city’s South Side and began singing in the Greater Mount Olive Baptist Church choir at the age of seven. He was raised by his grandmother in the Ida B. Janu– Louis Allen “Lou” Rawls was born on December 1st 1933 in Chicago, Illinois.
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