I am in a Sam Cooke frame of mind, singing and playing a range of his songs that I have learnt over the last 25 years. Some of them reached #1 in various countries. He only had one UK #1, as a songwriter: “Only 16”, recorded by Craig Douglas (1959). He wrote and recorded “You Send Me”, his only US #1 (1957). Two of his compositions reached #1 in Canada: “Wonderful World” (Herman’s Hermits, 1965) and “Another Saturday Night” (Cat Stevens, 1974). I have played all of these songs in public in recent months. Last week I performed, in public for the first time, my favourite Sam Cooke recording: “Nothing Can Change This Love”.

It’s a song that I have only heard once on the radio. Joe Wicks chose it as one of his “Desert Island Discs”. The first person I heard sing it was Terence Trent d’Arby in an early edition of Jonathan Ross’s Channel 4 chat show “The Last Resort”. That would have been around 1987, a medley of “Wonderful World” and “Nothing Can Change This Love”.

20 years ago this month I was also in a Sam Cooke frame of mind. The double CD collection “Portrait of a Legend” was on my car stereo for most of the spring, and I would take it into the house to play it on my return home. I find that I have not written about this before but memories of that time have prompted me to revisit the 30 songs on the collection, and the sleeve notes written by Peter Guralnick.

I have written about miscarriage more than once on these pages, a Word of the Week piece here from 2019, and the longest single item on this Blog, here. In May 2004 my wife was pregnant for the fifth time. The four previous pregnancies had all ended within the first three months. We had gone further with this one, past the third month, when she started bleeding again, never a good sign in pregnancy. We spent time at St Mary’s Hospital, where she was under the care of the Recurrent Miscarriage Unit. I took a few days off work. There was nothing we could do except wait and take it easy.

During one of those uncertain afternoons in May 2004 I dug out the Sam Cooke “Portrait of a Legend” double CD set. We were in the room where my computer was set up. In those days we only had one Desktop PC used for day-to-day things, unlike the collection of laptops and tablets we have in various rooms these days. My wife was lying on the bed in the corner of the room, dozing off occasionally. That’s the best way to take it easy. I was at the desk, playing the CDs through the computer speakers, reading the sleeve notes while the songs played in the background. The most important song was CD1 Track 1, “Touch the Hem of His Garment”. I returned to it more than any other track.

The sleeve notes explain the origins of the song (129 words quoted here):

This is Sam telling a Bible story, as he had learned to do from his preacher father, and as he would do all his life … In the case of this 1956 song the Stirrers’ new A&R man, Bumps Blackwell, saw evidence of Sam’s creative gift and storytelling abilities at first hand. He was riding to the session with the group in their car when it became evident that Sam, at this point the Stirrers’ principal composer, was not fully prepared. “Well, hand me the Bible,” Sam said, when Stirrers’ manager S.R. Crain expressed his concern. “He was skipping over it and skimming through it,” Bumps said, “and then he said, ‘I got one. Here it is right here.” And right there, before Bumps’ eyes, he composed this song.

The Bible story he found features in the three synoptic Gospels: Matthew 9: 18-26, Mark 5: 22-43 and Luke 8: 41-56. It concerns a woman who had suffered from a haemorrhage for 12 years. She hears about Jesus passing by. She believes that if she can touch the hem of his garment she will be made whole. Although the cause of the woman’s sickness is not mentioned in the song or the sleeve notes I knew what it was about. For the rest of that spring I played the song constantly, you might almost say religiously, every time I got into the car. Most days I was working in Redhill Surrey, and drove there and back from West London. I attached an excessive importance to the song. If it played through (all 2 minutes 4 seconds), without any Travel Announcements kicking in, I would feel relieved. Everything was going to be fine. If a Travel Announcement interrupted the song I would wait until it ended and then play the song again, all the way through. When summer arrived my wife was still pregnant. There were no more emergency visits to St Mary’s Hospital. I continued to play “Touch the Hem of His Garment” every time I got in the car. Our son was born healthy in November.

This morning I finally learnt to play the song. I’d never looked up the chord sequence before. Next time I’m performing in public I’ll give it a go. It was the Number One song in my life 20 years ago this month.