Sam Cooke's Leukemia Mystery

From the desk of Ned P. Rauch:

Riding the L train a few days ago and listening to a recording of Sam Cooke playing the Harlem Square Club, in Miami, I noticed a curious adlib. “Somebody have mercy, I want to know what’s wrong with me,” Cooke sang, adding, “It ain’t that leukemia. That ain’t it.” Weird, right? I typed “sam cooke leukemia” into my Googlator and found an answer from, of all places, Answers.com. According to them, Cooke spent the summer of 1962 trying to quell a rumor that he was suffering from leukemia. He wasn’t, and it bothered him that the rumor persisted. By 1963, when this show was recorded, he was apparently able to make light of it. Sadly, he didn’t have too much longer to make light of anything. In December of 1964, Cooke met a most ignominious end that involved a hooker, missing cash, a gun, a knife, a trench coat, a seedy L.A. hotel ($3/night) and its night manager, Bertha Lee Franklin. But while he was living, he sang like a dream.

ps: That's King Curtis on sax at the Harlem Square Club.

(Photo cribbed from somewhere on the Interweb.)