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Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke.

Article Excerpt
Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. By Peter Guralnick. New York: Little Brown, 2005. [xv, 750 p. ISBN 0-316-37794-5. $27.95.] Illustrations, notes, bibliography, discography, index.

Peter Guralnick has been one of the most deservedly praised chroniclers of American vernacular music for over thirty years. His first three non-fiction books, Feel Like Going Home (New York: Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1971), Lost Highway (Boston: D. R. Godine, 1979), and Sweet Soul Music (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), are often described as a blues, country, and soul music trilogy. However, the first two books are compilations of individual portraits of musicians loosely connected by musical genre; the third is a history of soul music that cohesively integrates the portraits into a historical narrative. With Guralnick's magnificent two-volume biography of Elvis Presley--Last Train to Memphis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994) and Careless Love (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999)--his portraiture style is used to its best effect, sifting through hundreds of interviews and documents to create something that one would have thought impossible: a fresh look at Presley and his career through the people who knew him. With Dream Boogie, Guralnick takes a similar approach with a much more elusive figure; Sam Cooke may be a familiar name to many, but his story may not be. Guralnick's wonderful biography of the singer--music business entrepreneur should put Cooke back in the pantheon with Ray Charles and James Brown, as a...

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