Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (2 page)

— John Leland,
New York Times Book Review

“Peter Guralnick tells the story like it really is.
Dream Boogie
is the truth.”

— L. C. Cooke

“Guralnick’s writing is like Cooke’s music. You want to follow him down the highways and byways of American music just to see . . . where he leads you. Like his landmark biography of Elvis,
Dream Boogie
illuminates and explicates our culture and history and sets our toes to tapping.”

— Susan Larson,
New Orleans Times-Picayune

“Guralnick makes clear throughout the book [that] in the end Sam Cooke’s life, unlike the lives of many of his peers, was not about weakness, hedonistic surrender, or merely being a co-opted victim but about a certain kind of moral and artistic strength built on a sense of pride that was simultaneously sinful and glorious. . . . Someone has finally written a book worthy of him.”

— Gerald Early,
Chicago Tribune

“Scintillating. . . . You will not be able to put
Dream Boogie
down.”

— Je¤ Guinn,
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“There’s no real substitute for the sound of Sam Cooke’s music, but the detailed descriptions of his recordings throughout this masterful biography are the next best thing to wearing headphones while you read.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“Meticulous, thoughtful, driving; Guralnick has done it again, perfectly conveying the essence of American popular culture by immersing us in the irresistible story of this remarkable artist.”

— Ken Burns, producer-director of
The Civil War, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson,
and
Jazz

“Guralnick brilliantly describes the music [and] plumbs the mystery of Cooke’s enthralling charm, intelligence, talent, and ambition. . . . From the richness of his research, he captures an extraordinary, flawed life that—like the music and the era that produced it—is uplifting and su¤used with heartbreak.”

— John Holman,
Paste

“Dense, detailed, and utterly captivating.”

— David Kirby,
Boston Phoenix

“Eloquently written and brilliantly researched,
Dream Boogie
is a landmark study of the electrical connection between soul music and the civil rights movement. A stunning achievement.”

— Douglas Brinkley, author of
The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast;
editor of
Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac

“
Dream Boogie
highlights the author’s diligent attention to the small details that made his Elvis biographies so impressive [and] in some respects even improves upon those achievements. . . . A model of good biography.”

— David Cantwell,
Nashville Scene

“Guralnick writes like a dream. . . . 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,
American Prospect

“One can almost taste the fried chicken and poundcake his mother makes for [the family’s] summer trips back to Mississippi. . . . The reader is with Cooke at every step as he follows his dream.”

— Gail Mitchell,
Billboard

“Guralnick’s storytelling skills are up to the task of tracking a figure as charming, lustful, ambitious, and ultimately inscrutable as Cooke. . . . [
Dream Boogie
] also serves as an illuminating look at America as it reluctantly embraced soul power.”

— K. Leander Williams,
Time Out New York

“Too much pop criticism no longer seems even interested in talking to an audience beyond the small one that will already know what the writer is talking about. . . . I can’t imagine how exhausting it must be to work on the scale that Guralnick does, [but] our past needs the love and respect he continues to show it.”

— Charles Taylor, Salon.com

“No doubt about it, Guralnick’s mammoth, meticulously researched bio of the late gospel-cum-pop singer Sam Cooke is an awesome achievement.”

— Tom Sinclair,
Entertainment Weekly

“An All-American dream set to sweet soul music. . . . The book succeeds thanks to Guralnick’s magnificent storytelling powers, which dance right to the edge of a biographer’s bailiwick and occasionally shimmy over.”

— John Freeman,
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Guralnick describes live shows with such clarity you’ll feel you were in the audience. . . . A thorough portrait of a man who, whenever obstacles arose in his path, never faltered in keeping his eyes on the prize.”

— Gillian Gaar,
Harp

“The book is first and foremost the story of a phenomenal individual whose majestic voice and innovative personality helped fuel the rise of a new era. . . . Guralnick doesn’t sanitize Cooke’s life nor excuse his relationship failures or occasional career missteps. Most important, he links Cooke’s stylistic evolution to other major changes within the community, providing a vivid and rich portrait of African American life and culture.”

— Ron Wynn,
Book Page

“Cooke emerges here as a force of nature, extraordinary in his musical ability but even more in the breadth of his ambition and the energy he spent fulfilling it.”

— Merrell Noden,
Mojo

“Guralnick . . . is that rare critic whose writing is as compelling as the music he raves about.”

—
Details

For J.W. Alexander and Doc Pomus, mentors in music and life

Good morning, daddy!

Ain’t you heard

The boogie-woogie rumble

Of a dream deferred?

Listen closely:

You’ll hear their feet

Beating out and beating out a —

    
You think

    
It's a happy beat?

Listen to it closely;

Ain’t you heard

something underneath

like a —

    
What did I say?

Sure

I’m happy!

Take it away!

    
Hey, pop!

    
Re-bop!

    
Mop!

    
Y-e-a-h!

— Langston Hughes, “Dream Boogie”

Author’s Note

S
AM COOKE
was born into a world defined, but not limited, by its separateness, a world of “twoness,” as W. E. B. DuBois wrote in
The Souls of Black Folk,
in which it was impossible to avoid “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a [predominantly white society] that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” It was a world, as DuBois also recognized, so rich, so vibrant, so colorful that, thrown back on its own resources, it created a culture that has in many respects, both with and without acknowledgment,
defined
the American cultural mainstream. This was a community in which imagination and self-invention trumped pedigree, in which, as James Baldwin wrote, there existed “a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster . . . very moving and very rare. Perhaps we were, all of us,” Baldwin reflected in
The Fire Next Time,
“pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children—bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run.” If so, it was that inescapably shared heritage, Baldwin went on, that helped create the dynamic that allowed one “to respect and rejoice in . . . life itself, and to be
present
in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.” It was that freedom, that “presentness,” that vitality which Sam Cooke sought to celebrate. It was that experience which he sought both to embody and transcend.

I have tried to portray a little bit of that world, the world of Dorothy Love Coates and the Gospel Harmonettes and Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington and Zora Neale Hurston, a community whose closeness was reinforced, as Baldwin underscores, not simply by a cultural legacy but by a cruel and systematic exclusion that led nearly all African-Americans to find refuge in the same neighborhoods, the same schools, the same eating establishments and hotel accommodations. That is one of the reasons that Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and James Baldwin, Louis Armstrong, Martin Luther King Jr., Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, and Fidel Castro all play greater or lesser roles in this story. My aim, my hope, is to suggest some of the richness and diversity of this proudly self-contained society, some of the sense of self-delight and self-discovery that Sam Cooke’s own life and work continue to embody, even set against a bitter backdrop of prejudice and discrimination. At the heart of the story is a man who, while creating some of the most memorable pop songs of a generation, in addition to a universally recognized civil rights anthem, was himself as complex, uncategorizable, and sometimes unreadable as his work was transparent. Exploring this hidden side of Sam Cooke was as much of a challenge, and as rewarding in its own way, as seeking out some of the vanished touchstones of a world all but lost to mainstream history.

“There is one terrible thing,” said the filmmaker Jean Renoir, speaking ironically of the imperative of art in
The Rules of the Game,
“and that is that everyone has his reasons.” But that, of course, is the one glorious thing, too. It is the human comedy (the human
drama
) that continues to fascinate both in life and in art. The Sam Cooke that I discovered was a constant surprise, as charismatic, as charming and adroit as the man that I had imagined but no more without flaws than anyone you might happen to meet. People sometimes ask: don’t the flaws bother you? But I had no interest in whitewashing either Sam Cooke or his surroundings. In the words of Lithofayne Pridgon, a friend of Sam’s who was later celebrated for her relationship with Jimi Hendrix, I wasn’t looking for any “wonderful white picket fence” or picture-postcard view. I don’t think real life, or real art, stems from that. I wanted to be true to a world that celebrated life in all its variegated glory, to a community that never failed to acknowledge that without sin there is no salvation, that if we deny human nature we deny the only truth to which we have access.

What was most extraordinary about Sam Cooke was his capacity for learning, his capacity for imagination and intellectual growth. With his friend J.W. Alexander he started his own record label and publishing company, probably the first such enterprise fully controlled by a black artist. Toward the end of his life he set out to develop young African-American talent in South Central L.A. with what was intended to be a series of rehearsal studios, the first of which he dubbed Soul Station #1. His success was predicated on what his brother L.C. called “second sight,” which might be another way of describing his ability to read people and situations with both an empathetic instinct and an analytic cast of mind. He absorbed every lesson that was put in front of him, but his pride in where he came from would not permit him to be defined in anyone’s terms but his own.

“I don’t even know why I do what I do,” Sam said to the young singer Bobby Womack. “When I do it, it just comes.” And that’s the way his music still sounds: as fresh, as elegant, as full of mirth, sadness, and surprise as when it first emerged, translating somehow across the ages in ways that have little to do with calculation or fashion and everything to do with spontaneity of feeling, with a kind of purity of soul. That’s the Sam Cooke I’ve sought to describe: that rare individual whose horizons kept expanding right up till the day he died. He was always moving on to the next thing. He was always looking forward to the next chapter. And he was always looking to take anyone with him who was ready to go.