Wayne Cochran, Influential Soul Singer, Dead at 78
He was not on the list.
WAYNE COCHRAN, THE influential singer dubbed “The White Knight of Soul” and writer of songs like “Last Kiss” and “Goin’ Back to Miami,” died November 21st in Miramar, Florida. He was 78.
Cochran’s son Christopher confirmed to the Miami Herald that the soul singer died following a battle with cancer. Cochran had resided in Florida since the mid-Eighties, when he left the music industry to become an evangelical minister in Miami.
“He was all about family,” Christopher Cochran, also a pastor, told the Miami Herald. “Over the course of his 25-year career in the music industry he employed over 300 people with different members of the band and the people at his church. He always looked after people. He ran his building like a big family.”
Known in the Sixties and Seventies for his towering platinum white pompadour, lively performances and volcanic stage presence, the Georgia-born singer penned his classic teen tragedy song “Last Kiss” at the age of 21. However, inspired by his friends and fellow Georgia singers like James Brown, Little Richard and Otis Redding – Cochran had played bass on some early Redding recordings – the crooner shifted towards blue-eyed soul and R&B as frontman of his C.C. Riders.
“I grew up with Otis and James and Little Richard, the horns and everything, I thought that was commonplace,” Cochran told Late Night With David Letterman in 1982.
“So that’s why we put together an R&B band. And I had been hanging out with them, and to me rhythm and blues was like a more intense rock… it was a little more intense than Top 40 rock, and once you ever sung it and expressed yourself, you really couldn’t just go back to Top 40 rock… So I stayed with it, and tried to learn by hanging out with my friends and the people I begin to know in the black
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