Author tells Sam Cooke’s story from ’the inside out’

By JOE MILICIA

CLEVELAND - When Peter Guralnick first started writing about soul music he did it for the purest of reasons — to tell others about an art form he revered.

The fact that he’s an award-winning biographer of some of the biggest names in American popular music hasn’t changed his basic motive.

Guralnick was lauded by everyone from book critics to Bob Dylan for his two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, “Last Train to Memphis” and “Careless Love,” which told the story of the man and musician behind the bloated caricature that Presley has become known as.

Guralnick sought to do the same in “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke,” released this fall by Little, Brown and Company.

“My ambition always was to go so deep into the material that essentially to the best of your ability you’re writing the story from the inside out,” he says. “I’m not claiming accomplishment. That’s what I tried to do.”

With Cooke, Guralnick explores an icon who was a part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s inaugural induction class in 1986 along with Presley, Chuck Berry and Ray Charles. But unlike those performers, Cooke is not as well known beyond the smooth voice that Rosa Parks once said was the only thing that soothed her after she learned Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.

Cooke hit the pop music scene in the late ’50s with a string of hits that included “You Send Me,” “Chain Gang” and “Twistin’ the Night Away.” Many major artists have covered his songs and his music has influenced generations of musicians.

Guralnick believes that Cooke, like many other black artists, has not gotten his due. His book paints a portrait of the son of a preacher who crossed over from gospel music to help lay the foundation for soul music.

“Sam was not content with any limitations,” Guralnick says. “He believed that he could appeal to everyone — black, white, rich, poor, male, female — and he did.”

Guralnick shows Cooke as youth wiser than his years, a handsome fellow who could win over anyone he met and a savvy businessman who controlled his music. Cooke had a quiet, laid-back side and could make up a song — a good one — on the spot. But he was also a man with a temper and a lust for women, a combination that would lead to his demise.

There are a few scoops in the book, including an exclusive interview with Cooke’s widow, Barbara. Guralnick waited six years before she would talk to him and when she finally did — in four-hour interview sessions, two a day over five days — she shared stories about her troubled marriage.

“She said, ’All right, what do you want to know?”’ Guralnick recalls. “You could call it brutal honesty. It’s an unvarnished truth which shows her in just as harsh a light.”

Guralnick estimates he did nearly 300 interviews for the book, interviewing everyone who was close to the singer.

“The concept was that I couldn’t write about Sam and wasn’t interested in writing about him if I couldn’t write from an intimate point of view,” he says. “I was trying to show intimate scenes from a public life. That’s what I tried to do with Elvis.”

Cooke’s brother, L.C., said the insight Guralnick gained from those interviews amounts to a more thorough account of Cooke’s life than Daniel Wolff’s 1995 biography, “You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke.”

“This is more accurate because Peter spoke to all the members of my family, including my father,” L.C. Cooke said.

Cooke’s family did the interviews with hopes that the book will become the material for a movie that does for Sam Cooke what “Ray” did for Ray Charles, L.C. Cooke said.

“I don’t think people realize how great Sam was,” he said.

One reason may be his brutal death on Dec. 11, 1964, at age 33. Cooke was shot and killed by a motel manager after he broke into her apartment, believing she was hiding the woman who had taken off with his pants and wallet from one of the motel rooms.

Guralnick details the report of an investigator hired by Cooke’s manager to look into the singer’s death. The findings don’t support the conspiracy theories that he was murdered because he was too powerful as a black singer or because of his involvement in the civil rights movement. (Cooke contributed “A Change Is Gonna Come” to a King tribute album just months before his death and seemed poised to take a greater role in the movement.)

That he was killed after being scammed by a prostitute just didn’t make sense to many people. It’s an end that his sister, Agnes Cooke-Hoskins, still discounts.

“My brother was first class all the way. He would not check into a $3 a night motel; that wasn’t his style,” she said while attending a recent tribute to Cooke at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

Guralnick, 61, could have been mistaken for a tourist at the tribute, peering through glass cases at a sweater Cooke wore while a member of the Soul Stirrers and other memorabilia. He jotted a date listed on a concert poster into a little notebook, still recording details of Cooke’s life after seven years after he started writing his biography.

Guralnick’s thoroughness is what has separated his work from other authors. It’s something that comes natural to a man who combined two passions — writing and soul music.

“Writing isn’t easy,” he says. “It’s not that every moment is blissful. But every moment that I’ve done this is something for which I feel grateful.”

———

Excerpts from Peter Guralnick’s “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke”:

“There were other little boys just as good-looking, and there were undoubtedly others just as bright — but there was something about him, all of his siblings agreed, whether it was the infectiousness of his grin, or his unquenchable enthusiasm, or the insatiable nature of his curiosity, he possessed a spark that just seemed to light a fire under everyone he was around.”

———

“And Sam just sang his song, weaving endless romantic curlicues around words so simple and repetitive (“You send me” must have been repeated two dozen times) that the mere variation of “You thrill me” carried a disproportionate weight of its own, and when he got to the release that led into the bridge (“Honest, you do”), it was like an ice floe letting go.”

———

“She was biting and scratching, and when she finally got out from under him, she went for the gun. He must have realized immediately how desperate the situation was, but how many times had he been in situations no less desperate and emerged unscathed by dint of luck, pluck, or simply because he was Sam Cooke? ... The third bullet tore through both lungs, the heart and lodged near his right shoulder blade, as blood splattered all over the woman’s dress. “Lady, you shot me,” he said with a combination of astonishment, bewilderment, and disbelief.

11/22/05

Source: AP

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