Cooke, Concupiscent

DREAM BOOGIE By Peter Guralnick

For all his talent, Sam Cooke led a confusing and, at times, schizophrenic career. This charismatic, immensely likable performer, whose gospel-styled melisma influenced two generations of pop and R&B vocalists, was hard to pin down as an artist and man, caught between the blandishments of pop music and a deeper sense of social, musical, and religious dedication. A pioneer in the increased acceptance of black artists by the cultural mainstream, Cooke became everything to everybody while committing himself to no one-a walking paradox who charmed all with his handsome face and extraordinarily beautiful voice.

Cooke's inscrutability-not to mention the tragically short duration of his life-makes him an especially challenging subject for a biography. Daniel Wolff's You Send Me was one worthy attempt, a straightforward account that seemed content to leave the many holes in Cooke's life (not to mention the skeletons in his closet) unexplored. Peter Guralnick is a much different sort of biographer. Notable for his remarkable books on soul, blues and country music, as well as a Pulitzer-winning Elvis Presley biography, Last Train to Memphis, he takes a highly literate approach to the lives of his subjects, painting their diverse worlds with a novelist's attention to structure and detail. His Elvis book (the first of two volumes) was a groundbreaking work in music journalism, capturing a sense of discovery and youthful expectation that made readers feel as if their own hopes were rising and falling with each step Presley took toward stardom.

Unlike the rube Elvis, Sam Cooke was a sophisticated musician from his earliest years, singing with the Highway QC's as a teenager before taking over as lead for the Soul Stirrers, one of the most venerable groups in all of gospel. By the late 1950s he was a pop star, writing, producing, and recording a string of hits ("You Send Me," "Cupid," "Chain Gang") distinguished by their melodic inventiveness and depth of feeling. Cooke was as worldly as Elvis was naïve, developing from the beginning a fondness for street life-the pimps, gamblers, prostitutes and stage-door Janes who made no distinction between gospel and pop artists when granting their favors. With girlfriends in every town, fathering children across the U.S., Cooke was first and foremost a product of show biz, his heart permanently entwined with the rough and tumble life of the road.

Guralnick is the first writer to portray the full range of Cooke's concupiscence, cataloguing his escapades but never wallowing in them. At the same time, he makes little attempt to urbanize his typically languorous tone to fit Cooke's sharp, fast-living character. Further, in his admirable desire to capture the heady world Cooke inhabited, Guralnick often provides more background detail than necessary, especially in the book's first half. We get extensive biographical information on virtually every musician, producer, or label executive Cooke worked with, and after several hundred pages, such a democratic focus tends to pull attention away from Cooke himself, demoting him at times to the role of side player. Former colleagues and fans present the same observations (many of them variants of "he drove the girls wild") over and over, and Guralnick seems to have trouble distinguishing between elements that are relevant and those that are not. This book could have benefited from serious edits.

Not until midway through the book does Guralnick tighten the strands of his narrative and display the qualities that make him, arguably, the finest living music biographer. Few writers can match him when it comes to character detail, and he's a persistent, sympathetic interviewer, giving Cooke's friends, family and acquaintances the space to fully express themselves while never letting them evade difficult questions. Perhaps his greatest achievement lies in reaching Cooke's elusive widow Barbara, who has repeatedly declined interviews to other writers in the past. Although she was widely shut out of her husband's world, both during his life and after, Barbara in many ways represents a mirror image for her husband's dreams, losses (their only son died in a swimming pool accident), and crossover ambitions. She is a sad, unschooled, and, at times, pathetic figure, but her presence comes close to embodying the soul of Guralnick's labors.

Sam Cooke was just 33 when he was shot to death in a sleazy motel by its female proprietor, who claimed self-defense. His murder, and the scandalous circumstances surrounding it, seemed to permanently efface the clean-cut, all-American image Cooke had built for himself. But the true wonder of his legacy is that his music has left its soul-nourishing imprint on our minds and hearts and, in the process, outlived the conflicted, ambiguous man who created it.