Cooke Sam - Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke

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Copyright 2005 by Peter Guralnick

Cover design by Susan Marsh; cover photograph by Jess Rand Michael Ochs Archives.com. Copyright 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

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First e-book edition: December 2008

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ISBN 978-0-316-05515-4

The splendors of [Guralnicks] bookits percolating narrative, meticulous research, and profound identification with its subjectmake it a worthy successor indeed to the Presley twofer. Guralnicks 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 subjects 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 affecting 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 Cookes 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 cultures most passionate, rigorous and eloquent biographer, chronicles Cookes 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 Sams 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 Cookes 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 Prizewinning 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

Guralnicks writing is like Cookes 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 Cookes 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.

Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Theres no real substitute for the sound of Sam Cookes 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 Cookes enthralling charm, intelligence, talent, and ambition. From the richness of his research, he captures an extraordinary, flawed life thatlike the music and the era that produced itis uplifting and suffused 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