Soul man

How Sam Cooke put the pop into gospel music

In the biographical arts, all things are not equal. Where literary bios invariably diminish their subject's works even as they offer insight into your favorite novelist's psychosis, successful music biographies do the opposite, adding a layer of depth and pathos to a guitar lick or aria that forever enhances the way you listen to a record.

Through a half-dozen books on blues, country, rockabilly and soul, Peter Guralnick has brilliantly accomplished that and more. He bestows new life on long-forgotten songs and singers, while demonstrating that such teen idols as Elvis Presley were far from just pretty faces shouting into a microphone.

But it is soul music that is truly his muse, and in his still untopped "Sweet Soul Music" (1985), Guralnick revealed how this cross-pollination of R&B and gospel ranks as one of the most enthralling American art forms, created as much out of racial partnership as racial strife, and stemming directly from the Southern quest for freedom that exploded during the civil rights era.

So it comes as no surprise that Guralnick would eventually tackle soul music's virtual progenitor and most seductive figure: Sam Cooke. In his abbreviated career, Cooke prevailed as a singer, songwriter, producer and businessman -- a stylish symbol of race pride and achievement. Yet his outward composure kept many of his closest friends and associates at a distance -- even in his most private moments he remained elusive. A study in incredible control (vocal and emotional), Cooke's internal life beyond the fanzines and the pop charts has long posed a challenge for biographers. In liner notes to one of Cooke's rare live recordings, Guralnick searched for "a different Sam Cooke" with "a disguise lifted off." "Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke" arrives with the promise of that "unbuttoned reality," yet it may remain too far out of even Guralnick's considerable reach.

The son of a preacher, Cooke was born in Clarksdale, Miss., in 1931, and raised on Chicago's South Side when it was home to one of America's most vibrant black communities and music scenes. Gifted and ambitious from an early age, "few doubted that he would get where he was going" when Cooke boasted, "I'm gonna sing, and I'm going to make me a lot of money."

Unlike his fellow Clarksdale transplant Muddy Waters, however, success lay in the less profane and seemingly more limited musical path of gospel. Primarily a niche market when Cooke launched his career in the 1940s and '50s, gospel did have a few crossover acts and offered a level of fame within the community that was a welcome escape from the grim day-to-day reality facing most black Americans.

A musical prodigy already known around Chicago for his soft and alluring tenor voice, Cooke was tapped to replace R.H. Harris in 1950 as leader of the innovative and popular gospel quartet, The Soul Stirrers. Through his youth and laid-back crooning style -- packing his delivery with the now trademark melisma, the yodel of elongated vowels "Whoa-oh-oh and oh-oh-oh-oh" -- Cooke lent the aging Stirrers a newfound sex appeal.

Sex and gospel, as Guralnick imparts with relish, were hardly mutually exclusive, and he paints a fascinating and unsaintly picture of the "brotherhood of disaccommodation" that was road life for the Stirrers and other groups. Watching his female, and Christian, fans faint (only to be revived by church "nurses") during his performances, Cooke yielded not just to temptation, but also to the clear commercial potential of gospel's sound. Alcohol and sex pervaded behind the scenes since "no one was married on the road"; and in one year, as Cooke piously sang "Nearer My God to Thee," three different women in as many cities carried his children to term.