Sam Cooke signed what he believed was the deal that would finally make him the owner of his own recordings on September 1, 1963, and within fourteen months he was dead, leaving behind a corporate structure that his manager, Allen Klein, controlled and that Cooke’s family would not fully escape for more than half a century.

The contract, presented to the 32-year-old singer as a breakthrough that would place his masters under his own control for the first time in his career, instead placed them inside a company called Tracy Limited, named after one of Cooke’s daughters but owned, according to internal paperwork later documented in Fred Goodman’s 2015 biography of Klein, by the manager himself.

Cooke, by every available account, believed he had won. He had spent a decade building the infrastructure that most artists of his era never possessed, and he understood earlier and more clearly than nearly any peer that the catalog, not the performance and not the chart position, was the asset that mattered once the show was over.

He had started as the lead voice of the Soul Stirrers through most of the 1950s, celebrated in black churches across the country before he ever made a secular record, and that gospel training taught him the difference between a performance that moves an audience and one that actually means something.

When he crossed over in 1957 with “You Send Me,” it went to number one on both the pop and R&B charts simultaneously. He was 26 years old. By 1961 he had co-founded SAR Records with his business partner J.

W. Alexander, an independent black-owned label at a time when labels of that scale essentially did not exist.

SAR’s roster included Bobby Womack, Johnny Taylor, and the Valentinos. Cooke had also co-founded Cag’s Music, his publishing company, controlling his own compositions, and his RCA deal had been negotiated through the William Morris Agency for a $100,000 advance, a figure almost unheard of for a black artist in 1960.

Allen Klein grew up in Newark, the son of a kosher butcher. His mother died when he was approximately two years old, and he and his sisters were placed in the Hebrew Shelter Orphanage before being taken in by relatives. He studied accounting at Upsala College and graduated in the mid-1950s.

He was hired by a Manhattan accounting firm and fired four months later for chronic lateness. The firm wrote to the state of New Jersey recommending his CPA certification be denied. Klein never sat the exam and was never at any point in his career a licensed CPA, something he never advertised to the clients who handed him their books.

His method was simple and, in its first stage, genuine. He would approach artists, often cold, sometimes through industry connections, and tell them their record labels owed them money. He was usually right.

He would force the label to open its books, recover the unpaid royalties, and charge 25 percent of whatever he found.

In 1963, after a Philadelphia DJ named Jocko Henderson introduced him to Cooke’s circle, Klein flew to Tampa where Cooke was performing and made the pitch. He wanted to audit RCA. Cooke told him to go after them.

Klein’s audit recovered $110,000 in back-owed royalties, and his finder’s fee came to roughly $27,500.

The audit was legitimate, the money was real, and Klein now had exactly what he needed: a client who trusted him with the finances. The deal Klein negotiated with RCA that September was, on its face, genuinely unusual for the era. RCA would cover all recording costs.

Cooke would receive a 10 percent royalty rate, double the industry standard.

RCA’s distribution rights would expire after 30 years, at which point the masters would revert. The annual advances would total approximately $450,000 if the full five-year term ran to completion. Under the structure Klein built, RCA was not signing Sam Cooke.

RCA was entering a distribution agreement with Tracy, which manufactured the records and sold them to RCA.

Tracy collected the gross, then paid Cooke his royalties and advances from there. Klein described this to Cooke as a mechanism that put the artist in control, with the label now merely a distributor. What it actually was, in the assessment of the reporting that followed decades later, was something closer to being told you own your house while the deed sits in your manager’s name.

The payments Cooke received were not cash but shares in a company Klein controlled. He could not sell. He could not act independently.

He held paper in someone else’s structure. That was Tracy Limited. Goodman’s biography documents what the internal paperwork actually showed: Klein had listed himself as Tracy’s owner and Cooke as an employee of the company.

One advance of $100,000 was not paid to Cooke in cash. It was paid in Tracy preferred stock, a financial instrument in a company Klein controlled, not cash, not outright ownership, not anything Cooke could act on independently. And the 30-year reversion clause, the provision Cooke understood would eventually return his masters to him, was written to revert them to Tracy, the company Sam Cooke did not own.

Cooke signed on September 1, 1963. On December 11, 1964, Sam Cooke was shot and killed at the Hacienda Motel on South Figueroa Street in Los Angeles. He was 33 years old.

The coroner ruled justifiable homicide, a finding that generated immediate skepticism and that has remained disputed for six decades.

Witness accounts were inconsistent. Evidence collection at the scene was criticized, and no formal inquest was ever conducted. The full story of what happened at that motel remains its own unresolved chapter.

What the official record shows is a ruling, a body, and a corporate structure that remained intact.

He left no will. In California in 1964, dying without a will meant state succession laws governed the estate. What those laws could not easily do was pierce the corporate structure of a company the deceased did not own.

Klein held his position through Tracy’s incorporation. Cooke’s death did not threaten that position. It removed the one person with standing, knowledge, and motivation to challenge it.

Klein’s public account of the four years that followed is that he counseled Cooke’s widow, Barbara Campbell, not to sell the assets hastily, that he was protecting her from grief-driven decisions she would regret. He positioned himself as the steady hand. By 1968, he had bought everyone out.

Barbara Campbell, J. W. Alexander, Cooke’s heirs, and remaining associates.

Klein paid a total of approximately $350,000 for their remaining claims. Allen Klein acquired Cag’s Music and 152 Cooke compositions, including “You Send Me,” “A Change Is Gonna Come,” “Chain Gang,” and “Wonderful World.”

He acquired SAR Records, which he dissolved. He acquired the Tracy masters. He folded everything into ABKCO Music and Records.

The songs Cooke wrote, the records Cooke made, the label Cooke built, all of it, for $350,000. Sam Cooke wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come” in 1963 after hearing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and deciding he should be saying something that direct, that plainly, in his own voice.

He recorded it in January 1964. People who knew him said he believed it was the most important thing he had ever made. RCA released it as a B-side after his death.

The Cooke estate was valued at over $100 million by 2015. Klein had paid $350,000 for its core assets 47 years earlier, buying them from a widow and her late husband’s associates and negotiating against a man who had held corporate control of those assets since before Cooke died.

His granddaughter, Andrea, eventually became the family’s primary remaining claimant on his work. Around 2008, a small trust was established to route royalty payments to her from a portion of the family’s remaining claims. In August of 2016, the label halted all payments to the trust.

The label said there was competing litigation it had not resolved.

At the time the payments stopped, Andrea Cook was unemployed and subsisting on SNAP benefits. Sam Cooke built a publishing company, an independent label, and a negotiating structure designed specifically so that his family would not end up here. The man he trusted to operate that structure made sure they did.

Klein ran the same architecture again with the next artist who trusted him. In 1965, Klein negotiated $1,250,000 from Decca Records for the Rolling Stones and deposited it into a Klein-controlled company structured as Tracy had been, so that the fine print did not require him to release it to the band for 20 years.

In 1971, the Stones filed a lawsuit for $7,500,000. They alleged Klein had stolen their publishing rights, withheld royalties, and failed to pay their taxes for five years, forcing the band to relocate to France to escape a British tax liability they had not known they were accumulating. “It’s pretty pathetic,” Mick Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine in 1975, describing what the litigation was actually recovering.

It took the Rolling Stones 17 years to reach a final settlement with ABKCO. In 1979, Klein was convicted in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, in United States versus Klein, of making a false statement on his 1972 tax return. He served two months in jail in 1980.

In 1997, ABKCO sued The Verve over their use of a Rolling Stones orchestral arrangement in “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” The Verve settled. They surrendered every songwriting credit on the song and every penny of publishing royalties going forward to ABKCO.

Jagger and Richards returned the credits to The Verve in 2019, two decades later, as a voluntary gesture. The royalty position was not part of that gesture.

Klein died on July 4, 2009. His son, Jody Klein, is currently president of ABKCO. The company continues to hold, license, and commercially release Sam Cooke’s catalog, including remastered editions, streaming placements, and Dolby Atmos releases in 2024.

“Live at the Harlem Square Club” was recorded on January 12, 1963, in Miami, while Cooke was alive. ABKCO held it unreleased for 22 years, through Klein’s federal conviction, through his two months in jail, through a full decade after his release. It came out in 1985.

Barbara Campbell Cooke died in 2021.

In September of 1963, Cooke signed a document naming Tracy Limited as the vehicle that would hold everything he had built. The masters he made that fall, the last recordings of his career, were delivered to a company he did not own. They are still being delivered.

ABKCO issued an Atmos remaster of his catalog in 2024, 60 years after his death.

The recordings were made inside a corporate structure his manager designed and his manager controlled. The $350,000 Klein paid in 1968 bought the right to keep doing exactly that, indefinitely and without the artist. The story of Sam Cooke’s catalog is not a cautionary tale about a bad contract.

It is a case study in how a structure, once built and once signed, can outlast the man who built it and the family he built it for.