Sam cooke biography book

How bout it for SAM COOKE! How bout it!

I like how Peter Guralnick calls Sam Cooke's life/career a "triumph," which emphasizes his incalculable influence on music and his impressive (if sadly limited...

more on this later) body of work. I wonder though if Guralnick's first drafts didn't have a different title-- something like "Dream Boogie: the Enigma of Sam Cooke." Even by the end of this unfathomably well-sourced, hyper-detailed 700-page biography, it's hard to say just who exactly Sam Cooke IS.

More curiously, the mysteries of his life and death don't take the form of a Rashomon-style "different people saw different things" deal. Almost everyone Guralnick interviewed (and he interviewed EVERYBODY, from close musical associates to distant family members to random fans who got Sam's autograph in Cleveland in 1958) says the same stuff about Sam: that he was smooth, confident but not cocky, incredibly brilliant, occasionally tempe