Soul man

In a vast new biography, Peter Guralnick takes on the late, great, silky-smooth crooner Sam Cooke.

By Charles Taylor

Oct 27, 2005 | How does an American artist aim for a broad audience without being accused of selling out? Trying to maintain your distinctiveness while entering the mainstream is particularly fraught for black performers, who can find their desire to generate a widespread following dismissed as a bid to join the white world.

The most overt, dramatic and controversial example of this struggle was Ray Charles' switch from the R&B he recorded at Atlantic Records to the orchestrated pop, country music, show tunes and Beatles covers he recorded when he made the lucrative move to ABC Records in 1959. Though, if you have the ears to hear, what comes through is consistency. There is just as much soul in Charles' string-laden "Moonlight in Vermont" as in the guttural exhortations of "I Got a Woman." Which is not to say everything he did was equally great, but that Charles' career exposed the narrow ways in which we decide what constitutes "authenticity." It was inevitable that Charles, who truly deserves the overworked appellation "genius," wouldn't be content with one color on the musical palette and would try to encompass as much of American popular music as he could.

If the tension between pop and soul doesn't seem so overt in the case of Sam Cooke, it may be because many people never assumed it was there. While a large portion of the black audience already knew Cooke from his tenure with the gospel group the Soul Stirrers, when his first hit single -- that sweet summer breeze of a song "You Send Me" -- brought him to national attention, he was seen by a much larger audience as just about the silkiest singer imaginable.

But if the tension seemed less present in the music, it was there in Cooke's psyche, and the conflict between assimilation and individualism is the strongest overarching theme in Peter Guralnick's new biography, "Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke."

Guralnick had wanted to write a Cooke biography ever since meeting Cooke's business partner, J.W. Alexander, in 1982. Other books intervened, none more time-consuming than his two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, "Last Train to Memphis" and "Careless Love." Anyone who's read the Elvis books knows that Guralnick is a scrupulous and thorough interviewer. The common thread running through all of Guralnick's work is a commitment to decency. In every interview he does, he allows his subjects the space to present themselves, and trusts his readers to use their intelligence and instincts to make their own judgments.

Still, there's one problem with "Dream Boogie." While Guralnick the meticulous researcher and compassionate interviewer is present, the part of him that synthesizes and brings a critic's eye to the story is absent here. This is particularly disappointing in the long section that comes about a third of the way into the book that covers the time between Cooke's leaving the Soul Stirrers and his finding his feet in the pop world, alternating great singles like "Twistin' the Night Away" with brassy albums of standards, and his establishing himself as both a star and a businessman. There's no denying that business is key to the Sam Cooke story. But there are times when you wish Guralnick would cut through the details of the meetings and negotiations and simply tell us what it meant for Cooke to set up a publishing company, what it meant for him, along with Alexander, to found the SAR record label. (You can get a more concise view of this from the liner notes Guralnick has contributed to the new CD reissues of the Cooke albums "One Night Stand! Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club" and "Night Beat.")

It's worth persevering, though, because "Dream Boogie" offers ample evidence that the historian-as-storyteller is still kicking around. Guralnick brings the gospel touring circuit of the '50s and the soul circuit of the '50s and '60s to life and gets at how, in the temptations available on each, the sacred held no more sway than the secular. This is where his determination to let the story tell itself really does work. Guarlnick not only calls up a vanished milieu; his vivid portrayal of that scene helps to explain Cooke's drive to move beyond it.

For all the fondness in Guralnick's stories of traveling, boozing, womanizing (at one point, three different women gave birth to a child of Cooke's at virtually the same time), for all the thumbnail vividness in the sketches of the characters and musicians Cooke met both on and off the road ("In mid-November they signed Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, a star on the L.A. R&B scene whose talent was exceeded only by his panache and by his ambivalence about whether he wanted to be a singer or a pimp"), the second-rateness of the chitlin circuit comes through. The performers are forced to stay in lousy hotels because the better ones are segregated, as are the restaurants. As far as the sight of a group of black men driving a new car in the South, forget it. At times it seems obvious that Cooke's older brother, Charles, who'd had run-ins with the law, was hired as driver as much to keep him out of trouble as for the muscle he could provide.

And there was worse. For Cooke and for every performer on this circuit, there were too many examples of the dangers both within and without. The R&B singer Jesse Belvin died in a car accident caused by slashed tires, and the damage was thought to have been inflicted by white fans angered by Belvin's refusal to play a segregated show. In the months before Cooke died in December 1964, Frankie Lymon had already been arrested for possessing heroin; he'd die a junkie four years later. The great Little Willie John would be arrested for killing a man in an argument. Ray Charles had been busted for heroin in Boston.

Next Page: Cooke admired the Beatles, and was inspired by Bob Dylan

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