Sam Cooke’s Granddaughter Explains Why She ‘Very Rarely’ Says Yes to Projects as Estate CEO: No ‘Room for Error’

The granddaughter of soul legend Sam Cooke is opening up about the responsibility she feels as head of his estate, and the lengths to which she will go to keep his legacy alive 61 years after his tragic death.

Nicole Cooke-Johnson admitted that running the “Cupid” singer’s estate “can be difficult,” as she knows just how important it is to properly convey all that Cooke stood for to a new generation.

“I tell people, ‘We say ‘yes’ very rarely,’ because we’re so tied to the spirit and the history of the legacy he left, and we don’t have any room for error, because a posthumous estate is something that you can’t make a lot of mistakes on,” she said on Syndicate X Books’ Books That Changed My Life series on Thursday, Jan. 8. “We’re held to a certain level of accountability.”

Cooke-Johnson is the CEO of Royalty Firm LLC, which she formed in 2008 with her grandmother Barbara to manage the singer’s publishing interests and amplify his brand. Barbara died in 2021.

Cooke, often called the King of Soul, was just 33 years old when he was shot and killed in a Los Angeles motel in 1964. Though his career lasted just eight years, he left quite the impact, notching 34 singles on the Billboard Hot 100.

His 1964 civil rights anthem “A Change Is Gonna Come” was ranked the best protest song of all time by Rolling Stone last year, and Cooke-Johnson adapted the song into a children’s picture book last fall.

“Something that I nurtured through these times [is] the ethos that if something is inorganic for us, if it doesn’t…. [cross] all the right X’s and dots the I’s, then it might not be for us,” she explained of choosing projects. “And we can be OK with that. So, it’s just kind of rooted in the whole idea that we’re here to do things that feel good, that make people happy, that pay homage to this legacy, and everything else may not be for us.”

She said in the video series that she chose to adapt “A Change Is Gonna Come” into a picture book because she wants her grandfather’s songs to be introduced to kids through “accessible storytelling.”

“Right now, the young generation, they know a lot more than I did at 6, 7, 8 years old: they’re asking big questions… and especially at a time when I think people are questioning history, and how do we feel about it, and what place it has — and I feel like it has an important place,” she said. “There is no future without the past, the present. So with that being said, one of my goals on my tenure at the [Cooke Family] estate was I’m gonna introduce Sam Cooke and his storytelling, his songwriting to younger ages.”

Cooke-Johnson previously spoke to PEOPLE in 2021 in celebration of her late grandfather’s 90th birthday.

“As soon as I knew about anything, I knew about music in this family. And as soon as I knew about music, my grandfather’s impact on the music business just in general has always been a part of my understanding of music,” she said. “I think what’s very important is that those before us remember to impact those that are coming after us. That’s all legacy means: making sure that what we create in our time, we pass on to those that are coming after us.”