Q&A with Peter Guralnick: Cooking with Sam
How do you follow two bestselling bios of Elvis? Author Peter Guralnick's new magnum opus on music is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, checking in at 651 pages plus notes and index. The book was a long time coming: Guralnick spent more than 20 years (off and on) interviewing Cooke's family members and friends. The result is an ambitious, sweeping biography that re-creates the life and times of the great singer, who crossed over from gospel to pop in 1958 and crossed over from black to mainstream audiences as his fluid voice and lilting yodel graced hits like "You Send Me" and "Chain Gang." Cooke met a tragic end in 1964, shot to death by a motel clerk after a tryst with a prostitute. The book has been widely praised, though some reviewers have questioned whether Cooke has the iconic status to warrant such an in-depth bio.
Do you think Sam Cooke is a musical icon?
To deny him his place is essentially suggesting a white history of rock-and-roll. When Ray Charles talked to me about Sam Cooke, he referred to him as the one and only.
But Cooke isn't quite a household name today.
If you go out on street and ask passersby what they know about Sam Cooke, they might say, "Who?" But if you were to hum a few bars of a good number of his songs, [they would recognize them]. Cooke's songs have shown up over and over in popular culture, from movies like Ali and Witness, where Harrison Ford danced to "Wonderful World," to TV shows like West Wing, where James Taylor sang "A Change Is Gonna Come" in one scene.
So he's definitely an icon?
If people were to argue that he is not of the same iconic status [as Elvis], they should add "with a white audience." But it simply isn't true with a black audience. The difference between Sam Cooke and Elvis Presley was color.
The name of the book comes from a Langston Hughes poem.
The poem was such a great summation of the juxtaposition of the [African-American] culture and the civil rights movement. That line "the boogie-woogie rumble of a dream deferred" expressed so much about Sam Cooke. The dream deferred was the civil rights movement. But the boogie-woogie rumble was the bubbling up of this irrepressible culture, which was represented in Sam's music.
His hair was part of his stance: He stopped straightening it in 1958.
Wearing his hair natural at that time was a bold statement. James Brown didn't come around to until practically a full 10 years later.
Why did Cooke change his look?
Part of it was he told [singer] Bobby Womack, "Why do we have to be like them? Just be proud to be ourselves." He saw in having your hair conked an abject imitation of something that you were never going to be. And why should you be ashamed to be yourself?
You also write that he told his brother that too much "slick stuff" in your hair might make the white man think you were too slick altogether!
Sam also believed, as he told his brother LC, present yourself as the all-American boy because it's the white father who isn't going to allow you inside the home. You want to get your records inside; you want to get your foot in the door.
Cooke wrote many of his hits, from "Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha" to "A Change Is Gonna Come."
A song like "A Change Is Gonna Come," despite the fact that it is linked specifically to the movement, has never lost its currency because of Sam's theory of songwriting: Start with a phrase or a saying that's almost timeless, and retain a kind of simplicity of approach, and make it open-ended enough so it isn't limited to a certain time period. "A Change Is Gonna Come" has turned up in every age. In the wake of Katrina, it has been sung over and over again. In our own age, we don't think a change is gonna come, we think a change has got to come.
Cooke was a womanizer, and that was his undoing. Was he self-destructive?
If he was self-destructive, so was everybody else. I don't think this was uncharacteristic behavior in terms of virtually everyone I've ever met who lived their life on the road, black or white, singing sacred or secular music.
There are many conspiracy theories about his death.
They all revolve around the idea that a strong black man was brought down by the white establishment, which didn't want to see him get any higher. I don't think anyone has ever advanced any evidence to support that, but that belief can certainly be understood in terms of the prejudice so prevalent at the time and that continues to this day.
Why did he rush the motel clerk whom he thought was harboring the prostitute, who had stolen his wallet and pants? Why didn't he just walk away?
More than anything [his reaction] showed a cast of character that had been ingrained in him from childhood on: Never let yourself be disrespected, never let yourself be played. Sam felt himself being played. That [anger] was uncharacteristic of the great majority of his behavior — Sam was the smoothest, most sophisticated of people, a true intellectual.
He also flashed that side when a Holiday Inn in Shreveport refused to let him stay there even though he had a reservation. The prudent thing to do would have been to leave, yet he stayed and demanded to see the manager.
His wife is saying, "They're going to kill you," and he said, "They ain't gonna kill me, because I'm Sam Cooke." And she said, "Honey, down here they'd just as soon lynch you as look at you."