“Whatever you write,” says Peter Guralnick, “whether it’s a short story, novel, biography, or liner notes, if you don’t end up somewhere other than where you started out, you haven’t done your job.”
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In the years that followed, he wrote liner notes for various Cooke reissues (including a 1994 box set of songs released by the singer’s SAR label) and interviewed intimates like Cooke protege Bobby Womack and Cooke’s younger brother, L.C. But for a decade Guralnick was mostly busy working on the two volumes of his acclaimed Elvis bio, Last Train to Memphis (1994) and Careless Love (1998). Afterward he was free to devote himself to Cooke, but the publishing industry was initially cool to the idea. “The response I ran into from a good number of the agents I spoke to was what a bad career move it would be to write about Sam Cooke,” he says. He could’ve earned significantly more writing about bigger rock and pop figures, he says, but money wasn’t the issue. “It wasn’t a matter of choice–I knew I was going to do the Cooke biography,” he says.
He began writing Dream Boogie in 2001–“I actually started on the morning of September 11, which was rather memorable,” he says–finally finishing four years and several drafts later. It’s a complex, panoramic study that vastly improves on the only previous Cooke biography, Daniel Wolff’s workmanlike You Send Me (1995). Guralnick gained access to troves of unexamined documents and session tapes and to Cooke’s confidants and family; Cooke’s widow, Barbara, who had declined all previous interview requests, agreed to talk. In the process, Guralnick’s admiration for Cooke only increased. “Sam might do 38 takes of the same song, but the idea was to dig deeper and deeper into it,” he says. “Whereas with someone like Jerry Lee Lewis or Howlin’ Wolf it was completely different–it was a variation, a unique performance. But with Sam it was always about digging deeper for the true meaning.”
Guralnick’s taking a break from biographies for the moment–he’s currently writing his second work of fiction, a collection of short stories–but he’s promoting Dream Boogie on a 15-city tour that brings him to Chicago next month. On November 10 he’ll join DJ Herb Kent, L.C. Cooke, and journalist Dave Hoekstra at a panel discussion and reading at the DuSable Museum; the following night he’ll sign copies of the book at FitzGerald’s, where Otis Clay and others will perform Cooke’s music.
When: Thu 11/10, 7 PM
When: Fri 11/11, 10 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/David Gahr.
