Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Read online

  Copyright © 2005 by Peter Guralnick

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, October 2005

  First eBook Edition: October 2006

  PAGE I: Courtesy of Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum/Hatch Show Prints

  TITLE PAGE: Photograph by Jess Rand, © Michael Ochs Archives.com

  PAGE XII: George McCurn (Oopie), probably Jesse Whitaker (also of the Pilgrim Travelers), Sam Cooke, ca. 1957. Courtesy of Carol Ann Woods

  PAGE 1: Sam Cook. Courtesy of ABKCO

  THE AUTHOR IS GRATEFUL for permission to include the following previously copyrighted material:

  “Dream Boogie,” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Excerpts from The Fire Next Time, © 1963, 1962 by James Baldwin. Copyright renewed. Published by Vintage Books. Reprinted by arrangement with the James Baldwin Estate.

  “I Too Hear America Singing,” © 1960 by Julian Bond. Copyright renewed. Used by permission.

  Lyrics from “Another Saturday Night” written by Sam Cooke. © 1963, renewed 1991, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Bring It On Home To Me” written by Sam Cooke. © 1962, renewed 1990, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Chain Gang” written by Sam Cooke. © 1959, renewed 1987, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “A Change Is Gonna Come” written by Sam Cooke. © 1964, renewed 1992, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Cupid” written by Sam Cooke. © 1961, renewed 1989, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha” written by Sam Cooke. © 1959, renewed 1987, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Havin’ a Party” written by Sam Cooke. © 1962, renewed 1990, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Jesus Be a Fence Around Me” written by Sam Cooke. © 1960, renewed 1988, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Keep Movin’ On” written by Sam Cooke. © 2000 ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Laughin’ and Clownin’” written by Sam Cooke. © 1963, renewed 1991, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Lost and Lookin’” written by J.W. Alexander, Lowell Jordan. © 1966, renewed 1994, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Meet Me at the Twistin’ Place” written by Sam Cooke. © 1962, renewed 1990, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Nearer to Thee” written by Sam Cooke. © 1955, renewed 1983, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Nothing Can Change This Love” written by Sam Cooke. © 1962, renewed 1990, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “The Piper” written by Sam Cooke. © 1964, renewed 1992, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day” written by Sam Cooke, Betty Prudhomme, Beverly Prudhomme. © 1962, renewed 1990, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Stand By Me Father” written by Sam Cooke, J.W. Alexander. © 1959, renewed 1987, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “That’s Heaven to Me” written by Sam Cooke. © 1959, renewed 1987, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “That’s Where It’s At” written by Sam Cooke, J.W. Alexander. © 1963, renewed 1991, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Twistin’ the Night Away” written by Sam Cooke. © 1962, renewed 1990, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “(What a) Wonderful World” written by Sam Cooke, Herb Alpert, Lou Adler. © 1959, renewed 1987, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Yeah Man” written by Sam Cooke. © 1964, renewed 1992, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “You Send Me” written by Sam Cooke. © 1965, renewed 1993, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “You Were Made for Me” written by Sam Cooke. © 1957, renewed 1985, ABKCO Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Lyrics from “Lead Me On” by Deadric Malone. © 1960, 1988 by Universal-Duchess Music Corporation/BMI. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Excerpt from the Amsterdam News. Copyright © 1964 by the Amsterdam News. Used by permission.

  Excerpt from the Atlantic City Press reprinted with permission of The Press of Atlantic City.

  All photographs are copyrighted by the photographer and/or owner cited, all rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-05515-4

  Designed by Susan Marsh

  The “Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company” name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: “The QCs Are in the House”

  The Singing Children

  “The Teen Age Highway Que Cees, Radio and Concert Artists”

  Soul Stirring

  The Further Education of Sam Cook

  “Lovable”

  How He Crossed Over

  The Biggest Show of Stars for 1958

  Sam, Barbara, and Linda

  Having Fun in the Record Business

  Another Country

  Boogie-Woogie Rumble

  Another Saturday Night

  Scenes from Life

  Independence Day

  Long Time Coming

  The Piper

  Uncloudy Day

  Aftermath

  Notes

  Bibliography

  A Brief Discographical Note

  Acknowledgments

  Praise for Peter Guralnick’s

  Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke

  “The splendors of [Guralnick’s] book—its percolating narrative, meticulous research, and profound identification with its subject—make it a worthy successor indeed to the Presley twofer. . . . Guralnick’s got more empathy in his pinky than most writers have in their entire bodies and has always displayed an amazing gift for putting himself in the subject’s shoes.”

  — James Marcus, Newsday

  “Guralnick writes prose like Cooke wrote songs, with a minimum of outward fuss belying a fanatical attention to detail. Both singer and biographer, in short, make it look easy.”

  — Matt Konrad, Ruminator Review

  “Unsurpassable. . . . The writing is as
relaxed, graceful, and a¤ecting as a superior Sam Cooke performance. . . . The author is equally at home with the fine points of the gospel road, the machinations of the record industry, and the sweeping political and racial tumult that was a backdrop to Cooke’s meteoric career. . . . To use a gospel-music term Guralnick turns the house out.”

  — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “A masterpiece of research and writing, Dream Boogie gives us a Sam Cooke [who is] glorious, flawed, but remarkable in his capacity to keep going back into a creative space, no matter what loss hovers around him. In that space, he becomes an alchemist of the most remarkable type, turning even his anguish into art.”

  — Warren Zanes, San Diego Union Tribune

  “Guralnick casts a penetrating eye into the darkness. . . . He makes all other music historians look like skimmers.”

  — Michael Corcoran, Austin American-Statesman

  “Guralnick, as in his biography of Elvis Presley, displays a feel for the culture that gave rise to the musician, and his account is a revelatory portrait of the rough-and-tumble yet familial world of black show business before and during the civil rights era.”

  — The New Yorker

  “This is simply the best music book of the year.”

  — Greg Haymes, Albany Times-Union

  “Guralnick, American popular culture’s most passionate, rigorous and eloquent biographer, chronicles Cooke’s life and career . . . with the grace and consideration that his subject so richly deserves.”

  — Laura Miller and Hillary Frey, Salon.com

  “Engrossing. . . . A respectful, vibrantly human picture of a widely influential, multilayered man. . . . The book really crackles in the chapters that detail Sam’s time with the famed Soul Stirrers and his crossover into the secular field. [Guralnick] pulls you onstage and backstage during the chitlin-circuit tours. . . . You feel the energy of the shows, inhale the funk.”

  — Roshod Ollison, Baltimore Sun

  “Rich in detail, deeply insightful, sensitive to the complexity of both Cooke’s triumphs and tribulations. Peter Guralnick has illuminated the spiritual and cultural world of gospel and soul in which Sam Cooke thrived and pioneered.”

  —Leon Litwack, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery

  “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. [At his death] he had built an empire on myth, pride, and suspended antagonisms, and without Sam it was all gone. All but the music.”

  — 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
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  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

  SAM 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.