Heart and soul
The Guardian, December 31
Review: Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown)
If Sam Cooke had created nothing but the posthumously released “A Change Is Gonna Come”, the first masterpiece of socially conscious soul and one of the shining artistic legacies of the civil rights movement, he would still be a man to commemorate and celebrate. The poignancy of that final gift, however, stems in part from the fact that it prematurely capped a career studded with remarkable achievements. A versatile but highly individual artist, Cooke was, in turn, the country’s top male gospel star, then a crossover teen idol, a pioneering black entrepreneur in the white-dominated music industry, an upwardly mobile figure noted for his urbanity and restrained elegance who wound up shot dead in a seedy hotel on the wrong side of town in the most undignified circumstances.
Cooke was a product of the great mid-20th-century wave of black migration from the rural south to the urban north. The fifth of eight children, from his earliest years he stood out from the crowd with his relaxed self-assurance, winning smile, exceptional voice – and unapologetic ambitiousness. His father, who had brought the family from Mississippi to Chicago in the mid 1940s, was a metal-worker and professional preacher, who gave his son two contradictory pieces of advice: “Go along to get along”, and “Never take a back seat”. Cooke, like many of his generation, struggled throughout his life to resolve the conundrum.
Chicago in the late 40s was the hub of a vibrant gospel scene, and one of the strengths of Peter Guralnick’s biography is his recreation of this lost world, a subculture carved in pain and joy out of a racist environment. It was marked by exuberent competitiveness, with quartets vying in displays of technical virtuosity and emotional power. The repertoire was exclusively sacred, but the lifestyle decidedly worldly. The erotic power that shook church walls was by no means entirely sublimated.
The teenage Cooke won rapid notice for his ability to “wreck the house” and his appeal to women young and old. In 1950, age 19, he was recruited as lead vocal by the Soul Stirrers, one of the biggest acts on the circuit. After a shaky start, he emerged as a unique vocal stylist. His delivery was subdued compared to his rivals’, but the effortless fluency and sense of carefully modulated power made it all the more compelling.
Despite their pre-eminence, the Soul Stirrers never sold more than 30,000 copies of a record. For Cooke, the economics of the situation were clear. The gospel genre was confined to a black audience; to make the money he wanted and to acquire the recognition he believed he deserved, he would have to “cross over” to pop. Many in the gospel world were dismayed by Cooke’s apostasy and Cooke himself had doubts, but it paid off when the ethereal “You Send Me” sold more than a million copies in 1957.
His ambition now was to secure the all-American stature of a Sinatra or Nat King Cole. Towards this end, he recorded show-tunes and supper-club standards, teen mini-operas and novelty items. Though always exacting in his professional standards and genuinely catholic in his musical tastes, he struggled to find the right showcase for his evolving musical vision. The arrangements were sometimes banal or inappropriate, the tunes trite. None the less, he hit paydirt often enough. “Don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology,” he sang in “Wonderful World”, precisely calibrating the teenage mood, yet without condescension. As a songwriter, he was never less than a craftsman, and at his best he could tease a sense of wistful universal longing out of the most mundane observations.
Guralnick chronicles Cooke’s mounting frustration with his assigned role in the music industry and his complex relationships with white producers and agents. With his long-time confederates JW Alexander (gospel veteran turned writer-producer) and ER Crain (Sam’s mentor in the Soul Stirrers), he launched publishing and record companies and promoted new black talent in R&B, pop and gospel.
Cooke’s entire professional and personal life had been framed by racism; he had ample, bruising experience of life on the road in the apartheid south, and was profoundly affected by the rise of the new militancy among young black people. Unlike his friend Clyde McPhatter, he never made it to the picket lines, but he did back the movement in public statements and joined the wave of black entertainers refusing to perform at segregated venues. He remained cautious but grew increasingly impatient with the indignities heaped on black people. Always a voracious reader, Cooke delved into politics and James Baldwin. “We had a full black history library before black history was even talked about,” his daughter recalled. He knew and admired Malcolm X and, as a burgeoning black capitalist, sympathised with the programme of black ownership while keeping his distance from the Nation of Islam, whom he regarded as hucksters. He befriended the young Cassius Clay and was at ringside when Clay upset the supposedly unbeatable Sonny Liston to seize the heavyweight title. In his moment of triumph, the future Muhammad Ali called Cooke to his side and declared him “the world’s greatest rock’n’roll singer”.
In his last years, Cooke’s frenetic touring schedule was schizophrenic: he could wow the white people at the Copa in mid-town Manhattan with a sleek set that included “Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey” and “Tennessee Waltz”, then deliver a hard-rocking, blues-drenched performance in Harlem a few weeks later. In the studio, he was now making the records that earned him the right to be called one of the inventors of soul music. In “Bring It On Home to Me”, “Having a Party”, and “Where It’s At”, the fusion of the sacred and the secular is complete.
Spurred by Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”, Cooke set himself to compose “a civil rights song”. Without direct reference to the hot topics of voter-registration drives and violent white backlash, Cooke captured the fragile balance of hope and despair, determination and impatience that characterised this stage of the black freedom movement: “It’s been too hard living but I’m afraid to die / I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky / It’s been a long time coming but I know, yes, I know, a change is gonna come.” The elongated, dramatically suspended melodic line, each note milked by Cooke for every drop of nuance, evokes generations of suffering and waiting. The spiritual resolve of the gospel tradition is firmly relocated in a history being made in the here and now.
Finally, Cooke began to reap the financial rewards he was due. He had become one of the most famous and widely admired black males in the United States. But these last years were also marked by sadness and self-imposed isolation. He was, as everyone noted, ravishing, and from the beginning he carried on multiple sexual affairs with women in every port of call (resulting in a series of paternity actions). His belated marriage to his teenage girlfriend, Barbara, proved disastrous and turned bitterly sour after their infant son drowned in their new Hollywood swimming pool. He began drinking more heavily and finding solace in prostitutes in out-of-the-way neighbourhoods where he could hide from his fame and responsibilities. One night in December 1964, a woman left him in a cheap hotel room after stealing his clothes and money. Half-naked, drunk and enraged, Cooke berated the woman who managed the hotel. A struggle followed and Cooke was shot dead.
The news shocked the black community. Cooke had embodied a healthy, hard-working and fun-loving approach to life. As 6,000 mourners filed past his casket, many could not bring themselves to believe that their savvy, clean-cut idol had really met such a sordid end.
As Guralnick shows, Cooke was not always the untroubled genius he seemed. Guralnick admires his subject but is unblinking when it comes to his foibles and lapses. The author’s detailed knowledge of the various musical milieux through which Cooke passed enables him to chart his development with precision and sensitivity. The scale of research is dauntingly impressive, but the narrative is often overwhelmed by the minutiae of recording sessions and financial negotiations. Though clearly a labour of love, the book lacks the personal engagement and social sweep of the author’s Sweet Soul Music and his works on Presley.
None the less, this is an overdue and fitting monument to Sam Cooke, a daring soul who reshaped America’s musical landscape.
