A curious American cultural moment occurred immediately after Cassius Clay's upset TKO of heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in 1964, one that occasionally pops up in ESPN Classic rebroadcasts. Sports announcer Steve Ellis is conducting a post-match interview with Clay in the ring when the new champ starts calling over a friend to appear on camera with him. "Let Sam in!" Clay demands, as a handsome, beaming soul crooner is thrust onto the screen. "This is Sam Cooke -- the world's greatest rock and roll singer!" One can hardly expect Ellis to have been aware of the significance, but at that moment Sam Cooke and soon-to-be Muhammad Ali symbolized one of the key cultural developments accompanying the civil rights movement's full flowering -- a new kind of black presence in American public life that carried with it an assertion of unapologetic force and confidence. The dapper pop star and the fast-talking champ cut public figures that were witty, caustic, sexy, dangerously charming, and fearlessly intelligent. And both were determinedly staking out cultural ground at the very center of American life.
Sam Cooke's music hasn't always commanded quite the respect it deserves, but the arc of the man's career -- from virtuoso gospel star to trailblazing crossover pop crooner to 1960s martyr for African-American dreams -- is a dazzling American story, and Peter Guralnick's mammoth and long-awaited biography, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, finds more depth and resonance in it than one could have imagined. Guralnick, the nonpareil chronicler of American roots music who achieved breakout fame in the 1990s with his two-part biography of Elvis Presley, spent years interviewing everyone around Cooke and poring over his published and nonpublished musical output; the resulting account is exhaustive, and only very rarely exhausting. It helps that Guralnick writes like a dream, and that the obvious affection and fascination he harbors for the milieus Cooke passed through in his abbreviated career -- the black gospel quartet circuit of the early 1950s, the churning, unruly world of rhythm and blues and early rock and roll -- prove so infectious.
Cooke was the Chicago-reared son of a pastor, blessed from the get-go with dazzling good looks, easy charm, and a preternatural singing voice. He rode the mid-20th-century renaissance of gospel quartet singing as the ladykilling young lead of The Soul Stirrers in the early and mid-1950s, leaving in his trail a couple dozen recordings of shimmering beauty and grace and many more awed reminiscences of roof-raisers in churches and festivals across the country. The light, caressing touch of Cooke's voice, his instincts as a performer, his seemingly effortless ability to send audiences into fits of distinctly unholy ecstasy -- all this made Cooke's potential as a pop artist obvious from the beginning. Cooke wasn't the first wayward religious singer to cross over into secular music when he broke through in 1957 with the surprise smash success of an airy little trifle called "You Send Me," but his apostasy was felt more acutely in the gospel world than anyone else's before him. Cooke's break with gospel was traumatic, a catalyzing cultural event. Along with Ray Charles, he laid the groundwork for the soul music eruption of the early 1960s.
Cooke's relentless, propulsive ambition took on broader resonances as he went along. He wrote songs and produced records, wrestled for control of his musical output, set up his own record company, and flaunted his erudition and intelligence while pledging support for the burgeoning civil rights movement. His recording catalogue includes plenty of dross, but also a number of ecstatic pop epiphanies that have never aged -- "Bring It on Home to Me," "Twistin' the Night Away," "Chain Gang." And in the last few years of his life Cooke's musical output was growing looser, richer; in 1963 and 1964 he released a brilliant album of Charles Brown-inspired after-hours blues and a handful of Dixieland-flavored pop sides, and he wrote and recorded the anthemic masterpiece "A Change is Gonna Come."
The tawdriness of his death in late 1964 -- shot down by the manager of a fleabag L.A. hotel, dressed only in his coat and underwear after a prostitute had fled with his clothes -- came as a nearly incomprehensible shock to a black community that had for years followed Cooke's successes like those of a favorite son. But as Guralnick shows, Cooke's death befitted the duality that had always marked his life. A man of exuberant surface charm but hidden reserves of rage and loneliness, of well-scrubbed propriety but also voracious sexual appetites, Cooke played it close to the vest his entire life. He emerges from the book a fascinating cipher.
But Cooke's enigmatic personality actually comprises only a secondary mystery in Dream Boogie (the title is borrowed from a Langston Hughes poem). More interesting is the subtle but detectable ambivalence Guralnick seems to harbor about Cooke's artistic achievements and the significance of his pop career.
There is, indeed, a fascinating tension that has run through Guralnick's output in the last 15 years. Earlier works like Feel Like Going Home and Lost Highway were mash notes to American vernacular music -- almost heartbreakingly tender profiles of blues and country singers who mainly toiled at the margins of the pop cultural landscape, making music too pure in spirit (so Guralnick implied) to garner anything more than a glancing touch from mass commerce. Even in Sweet Soul Music, his sprawling 1986 history of the genre (and still the best book he's ever written), Guralnick managed to chronicle various artists' rise to genuine pop stardom while still lending to soul something of a folkie purist's patina of organic subcultural authenticity.
But both in his bios of Elvis and now in Dream Boogie, Guralnick has tackled two careers that are undeniably yoked to the very center of mid-20th-century American mass culture. Both Presley and Cooke were products (and masterful exponents) of those southern vernacular traditions that Guralnick reveres. But both were virtually defined by a volcanic ambition to break through the strictures of those traditions and to dissolve all barriers of geographic, ethnic, and class specificity in attainment of an all-encompassing pop success -- to become, in a word Cooke is quoted using throughout the book when trying to convey his vision to others, "universal."
Both succeeded, and Guralnick, the longtime roots music romantic, has now ironically become the authoritative chronicler of that revolutionary success. But what does he really think of it? Robert Christgau rightly faults the Guralnick of these later mega-biographies for adopting a curiously nonjudgmental pose on aesthetic questions -- reading Dream Boogie, you sometimes feel like you need a decoder ring to get a sense of Guralnick's personal take on some of Cooke's music. The classic hipster rap on Cooke was that his gospel recordings were gold, his pop work sell-out crap. Guralnick would surely have been unwilling to undertake a project as massive as this had he shared that basic sentiment, but it's sometimes hard to shake the impression that he regards Cooke's pop work as something requiring some effort to redeem and legitimize.
To be sure, Cooke recorded loads of cloying pap in his pop career -- what Guralnick calls "awkward concessions to bland emulsification." Such misfires were almost an intrinsic byproduct of an aesthetic temperament that drew inspiration from Perry Como and Nat King Cole as much as from the great gospel shouters. More deeply, the danger of such mediocrity was intrinsic to the attempt to achieve the kind of airy pop delicacy that characterizes some of Cooke's most lasting secular efforts ("Cupid", "Nothing Can Change this Love", "Another Saturday Night").
It's too easy to dismiss those works as so much mass-appeal piffle. Cooke expended endless effort to create music of a wispy, dreamlike effortlessness. The whole thrust of his career and some of its most lasting musical achievements embodied the revolutionary assertion that African Americans could at last partake of American pop dreams themselves, without apology and without any added burdens placed on them. As Stephen Talty has written, "It was as if he was stealing back the right of black Americans to feel innocence." For Guralnick, a career trajectory like Cooke's poses some complications. The baggage of capital-a Authenticity sometimes weighs down his analysis of the man's work.
But this is hardly a crippling shortcoming. Guralnick has told an immensely involving and important story with this book. His greatest achievement as a writer is simply to capture the paradox of Cooke's warmth and his remoteness, and to convey that duality to the reader. The prose delivers -- through it, Cooke dazzles and disarms with his liquid grace and that impossible voice, just as he did in real life. He sends us.
Sam Rosenfeld is a Prospect staff writer.
