America has two Faust stories, and they run in opposite directions. The first is that of the Delta bluesman, most notably Robert Johnson, who sells his soul to the Devil for otherworldly chops. The story is a twist on a West African tale in which the crossroads figure is a trickster named Eshu or Legba, who mediates between the gods and men. Only in America did he become the Devil, and only here did his beneficiary pay so dearly for his moment of bling.
The second story, no less cautionary, is that of the religious performer who brings sacral elements to the pop marketplace, like Ray Charles, or scandalously crosses over to secular music, like Sam Cooke. This story also has a long history, going back at least to Al Jolson's "Jazz Singer," in which an Orthodox Jewish boy flees his father's cantorial lessons to sing ragtime and marry a shiksa. The two stories might seem analogous, especially if you consider secular music literally the Devil's, but there is a key difference: the Johnson story is an invocation of the supernatural, and the Jolson story is a renunciation of it. Or think of it this way: Johnson, by putting himself into a Yoruba folk tale, reclaimed ethnic ties that had been severed by America; Jolson cut the ties himself, claiming full commercial membership in the ascendant New World. As Neil Diamond sang in the remake, this is the story of America. About musicians who cross the other way - Cat Stevens, Al Green or the briefly born-again Bob Dylan - we have much less to say. They have simply dropped out of this national narrative.
Peter Guralnick's exhaustive new biography of Sam Cooke documents a life spent in a constant negotiation between Robert Johnson's version of the Faust story and Al Jolson's. Cooke's general direction was clear from age 9, when he told his brother that he would never work a job, slaving just to be broke again. "I'm gonna sing, and I'm going to make me a lot of money," he said. But the meaning of his journey rested on these questions of race, commerce and faith, which he was forever recalibrating: how to love black America and still gain access to the resources held by whites?
Cooke's story has been told before, notably in Daniel Wolff's fine "You Send Me," written with two Cooke associates and a researcher. Guralnick, author of the demystifying two-volume Elvis bio, "Last Train to Memphis" and "Careless Love," adds layers of detail and context, surrounding Cooke in the overlapping worlds of gospel, the civil rights movement and rock 'n' roll, before they became separate guilds. Cooke passed through each of these worlds but, for all his imprint on them, he encamped in none. We catch sight of him mainly through the people and places he left behind: the women seduced by his gospel croon; Cassius Clay and Malcolm X in Miami, on the eve of Clay's conversion to Islam; the white and black business partners; the record company and publishing company he formed, bucking an industry that saw blacks as assets, not owners.
The road allowed Cooke to be one thing for the white swells in the Catskills, and another for the black audience at the Harlem Square Club in Miami. (If you haven't heard "Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963," do your soul a favor - now.) Guralnick resists the idea that one of these identities was the more authentic. In fact both were performances, and Cooke invested all of himself in each. Guralnick seems to have interviewed everyone who ever knew Cooke, but even to his closest friends and his widow, Sam was inscrutable, "someone who could mask everything but his ambition." When he died at 33, shot by the manager of a $3-a-night motel in Los Angeles as he chased a prostitute who had stolen his clothes, no one could reconcile the Sam they knew with this tawdry end. Guralnick lists but does not unravel the conspiracy theories that filled the vacuum.
The first journey in "Dream Boogie" belongs to Sam's father, the Rev. Charles Cook, who in 1933 hitchhiked from Clarksdale, Miss., to Chicago in search of economic opportunity. This is, of course, the same route that the blues traveled in this period, from the acoustic, premodern Delta to the electric, modernist city of the Chess brothers. Cook preached his way north, "mostly for white folks, they give me food and money." Sam, born two years earlier, showed a similar open-mindedness in his crossover from gospel to secular music, and to the white money and adulation that lay on the other side - a piece of what made America run.
The gospel world that young Sam conquered, as the smooth-voiced lead singer of the Soul Stirrers, was profane in everything but the lyrics and the paycheck. Guralnick scrupulously documents the sharp suits, luxury cars, generous women, earthy language and Olympian rivalries that drove the scene. In the 1940's and 50's, gospel was changing just like secular black music, becoming flashier and more sensual and propulsive. As Cooke's protégé Bobby Womack said, Sam epitomized this shift, crossing over first within gospel: "He started bringing young people into the church to the point where it was like a rock 'n' roll show, chicks pulling up their dresses, and he's going out in the crowd and rubbing some girl's leg while he's singing, and she jump straight up in the air! And the preachers all hated it. I mean, the preacher's sitting up there," and the preacher "has a limousine, he's got all the mothers and he's hitting on their daughters, and he's saying, 'It's disgusting.' " When Sam at 21 fathered three babies by three different women, his elder quartet-mates wrote off the experience as harmless road knocks, as long as it didn't interfere with their business.
As a business, gospel did not measure up to its art. It is to America's shame that the quartet recordings that spawned so much of our music have virtually no outlet today, despite their instant accessibility and undeniable power. But the racial roles in this economy are not straightforward. The Soul Stirrers recorded for Art Rupe (né Goldberg). No one protected gospel more religiously, and no one discouraged Cooke's interest in pop more piously. It was his counterpart, Bumps Blackwell, an African-American producer, who prodded Sam to cross over, and who urged the label's R & B songwriters to "try to write 'white' for the teenage purchaser rather than 'race' lyrics. It seems the white girls are buying the records these days." Rupe wanted raw, sanctified gospel; Blackwell and Cooke imagined Sam following Bing Crosby and Johnny Mathis. In turn, after Sam crossed over to pop, he dumped Blackwell for a white manager, Jess Rand, as a way to break into the white market.
Sam's relationship with Rand was similarly complicated. Sam liked to test his white manager, booking him in a funky South Side hotel in Chicago or summoning him to Harlem in the middle of the night just so Rand could see him in bed with five women. A rare public declaration on race, which ran as a guest column in The New York Journal-American under Sam's byline, imparted, "As a Negro I have - even in the days before I began to achieve some sort of recognition as a performer - refused jobs which I considered debasing or degrading." The article was ghostwritten by Jess Rand. Sam dumped him, too.
Cooke boycotted segregated shows, but had no quibble at catering to white audiences with albums of cornball standards, on the industry wisdom that African-Americans didn't buy albums. As in gospel, he crossed over within pop, ping-ponging between church-based soul and deracinated fluff like "Cupid." Like Elvis, he seemed unstained by his own schlock. As he told Womack: "I want to be black. I'm not going to desert my people." But in the real world, he said, if you listen to a black radio station, "when you turn the corner, that station will go off the air, and you go right to a pop station. That's how powerful it is." In the era of 50 Cent, when rappers move white masses by the equivalent of blacking up, such calculation seems quaint, but to Cooke, singing at the time Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to ignore this audience was to go off the air, to disappear.
It is a symptom of our age that most people find any piece of writing too long. So I'll say that Guralnick earns every one of his 750 pages, but in the way Peyton Manning earns his $98 million - no one could give you more, but you might have other demands on your time or money. Me, I like the full monty, but I'm geeky that way.
Guralnick is an insightful and patient listener, divining the subtleties that unite Sam's deep music with the shallow: "his delicate falsetto, the way he would ride a syllable, elongate a vowel to suggest dimensions of meaning scarcely hinted at in the lyrics, the slight roughening that he could use to suggest intensity of feeling without raising his voice; he employed all of these effects without in any way suggesting, either to the listener or himself, that they were effects, so intrinsic were they to his feeling for the music, to the feelings he wanted to express."
But like Cooke's friends and associates, we are left trying to grasp a cipher. His cool was what the art historian Robert Farris Thompson calls "the mask of mind itself." We don't know how Sam felt about the white audience he so methodically cultivated, or the women he so tirelessly took to bed; we can't measure the anger he kept hidden. Like Wolff, Guralnick occasionally tries to simplify Cooke's racial politics, undercutting the internal contradictions that are the book's strength. He commits pages to the 1963 March on Washington, yet Cooke wasn't there. While Cooke believed in the movement and lent an anthem, "A Change Is Gonna Come," he avoided alienating his white benefactors. He bet that the future lay in careful racial neutrality, but he bet wrong; while Marvin Gaye cuts a broad figure today, Cooke's voice is absent in today's bedroom jams.
To Guralnick, "what was most extraordinary about Sam Cooke was his capacity for learning, his capacity for imagination and intellectual growth," which means he was always in transition, best understood by what he had not yet become. That streak ended at the Hacienda Motel, after an argument involving a prostitute. The most tightly restrained man, he died half-naked, drunk and out of control. "Lady, you shot me" were his last words. In swift succession, his wife married Womack, his business changed hands and his brother undertook a tribute tour as "Sam's good-looking singing brother." He had built an empire on myth, pride and suspended antagonisms, and without Sam it was all gone. All but the music.