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Cooke's Triumph: Peter Guralnick signs new biography at Stax

By Mike Lollar
lollar@commercialappeal.com

Cooke’s Triumph
In a short span, charismatic pop star lived it all


Sam Cooke and Memphis were no strangers.

The city was part of the training ground for the gospel music career that put Cooke on the road to pop music super-stardom. Memphis was just north of his birthplace in Clarksdale, Miss., and it was the scene of one of his angriest moments during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Cooke backed out of a 1961 performance at Ellis Auditorium when NAACP president Jesse Turner sent him a telegram warning that seating would be segregated during his Memphis performance. Only two hours before the show was to go on, Cooke canceled his performance because blacks were to be seated only on the left side of the first, second and third balconies and limited to no more than 1,000 of the auditorium’s 4,000 seats.

Those details are part of the encyclopedic new biography, "Dream Boogie," a 748-page exploration by Peter Guralnick of a music legend whose short life was devoted to music and filled with drama to the last moments when he was murdered in a Los Angeles motel.

Guralnick will be in Memphis to sign the book 7-10 p.m. Friday at Stax Museum of American Soul Music, with performances by students of the Stax Music Academy on hand to sing a selection of Cooke’s hits suggested by Guralnick. The songs include his pop hit, "The Chain Gang." Cooke did not record at Stax, but staging the book signing there is a symbolic gesture, says Guralnick, paying homage not only to Cooke’s talent but to his civil rights legacy and Stax’s role in advancing music to a new generation.

Guralnick, also no stranger to Memphis, is author of the two-part Elvis Presley biography "Last Train to Memphis" and "Careless Love" and the triology of American roots music, "Sweet Soul Music," "Lost Highway" and "Feel Like Going Home."

It was while working on "Sweet Soul Music" that Guralnick decided he would do a biography of Sam Cooke. He was already a fan. "I’ve never written about anything that I didn’t love," the Boston-area author said this week.

He finished the Elvis biographies first, then devoted himself to Cooke, whose career invites comparison to Elvis’s. Both were born in small Mississippi towns and grew up with a love of gospel music. Cooke (born Cook) was the son of a Church of Christ Holiness minister who formed a singing group with his eight children and took them on tour when they moved to Chicago two years after Sam’s birth.

"Both Sam and Elvis were so magnetic, so charismatic. In Sam Cooke’s, case there was no one he met whose life he didn’t change in some way," says Guralnick. Both sang in church, but Cooke was on stage from childhood on, competing in a gospel hotbed that comes across in the book as a rough and tumble gauntlet for aspiring musicians.

Both Cooke and Elvis went out on their own at 19, says Guralnick. Elvis, like Cooke, had performed briefly in high school, but had barely performed in public before he became a national icon. Cooke grew up with the moral strictures of a disciplinarian father, but was a veteran performer when he went on tour as part of a celebrated young gospel group, the Highway QCs.

While Elvis came under the control of his Svengali-like manager, Col. Tom Parker, Guralnick meticulously develops the more calculated approach of Cooke, a studious, quiet man who was a voracious reader and observer of everything around him. "He was his own Svengali. He worked with many forceful people, but, essentially, he absorbed the lessons they could impart to him and then moved on," says Guralnick.

In the book he illustrates Cooke’s quiet control through rare interviews with members of Cooke’s family, including a brother who remembers Sam’s entrepreneurial spirit as a child. His favorite book was "Huckleberry Finn," but he may have taken a lesson from "Tom Sawyer" when he formed a "corporation" with neighborhood children. They tore boards from the fences of their Chicago neighbors, chopped up the wood, then sold it back as firewood to the same neighbors at 20 cents a basket. Sam, who did little of the actual work, was "CEO" of the corporation and collected half the profits from his friends.

He was tenor and lead singer, as well as the biggest draw, for the Highway QCs, but he left the group to join the older Soul Stirrers, an established gospel group with a recording contract. He warned them he was going to become as popular as Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte and other major stars, but just when they too came to depend on him, he left them to begin his pop music career.

Guralnick says he opened his book "Sweet Soul Music" with Ray Charles and Sam Cooke because, "I saw them as the basis for this gospel-based rhythm and blues that became soul music."

The book carefully chronicles every nuance of Cooke’s style, including his careful attention to diction and phrasing to appeal to crossover audiences, his signature "yodel"-like method of bending high notes to his tenor range and the magnetism that drew swooning women to his concerts. At one point in his 20s, he learned in a single week that three women were pregnant by him.

It was his womanizing that finally did him in. Cooke, drinking heavily, had picked up a young woman in a Los Angeles bar in 1964. According to the book, he took her to a cheap motel on the outskirts of the city and was treating her roughly when she fled their motel room. Cooke thought she had fled to the motel office and stormed in, grabbing and shaking the female motel manager. In the struggle, she shot him through the heart, ending his storied career, but barely denting his legacy.

"It’s an epic landscape, a vast landscape, a generation’s experience," says Guralnick of Cooke’s rise to stardom, his role in shaping music and his role as civil rights advocate in a volatile era.

In the introduction, Guralnick says it was important to him to quote James Baldwin on growing up in a divided culture. In spite of that division, Baldwin wrote, there existed "a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster." It was a dynamic that allowed one "to respect and rejoice in life itself and to be present in all that one does . . ."

"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," says Guralnick.

Guralnick sightings

Memphis

What: Peter Guralnick will sign "Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke"

Where: Stax Museum of American Soul Music, 926 E. McLemore

When: 7-10 p.m. Friday

Admission: Free to members; $9 for adults, $8 for students and the elderly, $6.50 for children. Call 261-6342.

Mississippi

What: Guralnick will appear on Thacker Mountain Radio (with poet Richard Beban)

Where: Off Square Books in Oxford, Miss.

When: Thursday, from 5:25 to 6:30 p.m.

Information: Call (662) 236-2262.

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