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• Q & A with Mr. Guralnick
• Article on Dream Boogie
• About Dream Boogie

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Tavis: Peter Guralnick is a best-selling music biographer who has penned a number of notable books including two on Elvis Presley. Now he's turned his attention to soul singer, Sam Cooke. "Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke" is not only the story of one of America's great singing talents, but it explores the connection between music and the civil rights movement. Peter Guralnick, nice to have you on the program.

Peter Guralnick: Well, good to be here.

Tavis: I want to get to Sam Cooke in just a moment. I want to ask your opinion, but I think he probably has the most pristine voice that I have ever heard. We'll talk about how great Sam Cooke was in a moment -- and perfect diction on top of that.

Guralnick: That's right.

Tavis: Before we get to that, though, let me start by asking about two other persons who made their own contribution, one with a specific connection to Sam Cooke who has passed away recently. We'll start with Wilson Pickett. Your thoughts?

Guralnick: Well, you know, Wilson Pickett came along with Solomon Burke really in the wake of Sam Cooke and of Ray Charles. Sam and Ray had established the template for this gospel-based soul music and Wilson and Solomon came riding in on that, and in particular, Joe Tex. I mean, a whole range of singers.

But what Wilson brought right into the mainstream was the gospel sound of June Cheeks from the Sensational Nightingales and of Archie Brownlee, the great lead singer for The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. It's that rough, that hoarse, that preacher's kind of style where Sam and Solomon took Brother Joe Mays' style, another style, and he could really preach too. Sam had the smoothest style, but Wilson really brought some of that ferocity of the Pentecostal church right into the mainstream of pop music. I think that's really what made his mark.

Tavis: I grew up in and still belong to and attend a Pentecostal church. I know the experience very well that you speak of. Before I get to this other person, I want to ask you about -- since you mentioned that Wilson just very aggressively took that Pentecostal preacher sound and put it in his music, what kind of -- pardon the phrase -- hell did these guys catch for taking that sound? Thinking now like Ray Charles. I just saw the movie "Ray" again for the hundredth time the other night. What kind of price did they have to pay for taking that sacred sound and putting it in this kind of music?

Guralnick: I think Ray took the most criticism. I mean, because it came as a greatest shock. But he also had the greatest success because it was really the success of "I Got a Woman" that woke people up to the fact that there's money in that sound. I mean, Sam was the first of the gospel singers to cross over, but after him, I mean, just the whole world changed. The criticism came primarily from church, from the preachers.

But I think, in terms of the audience, some of Sam's audience was not going to cross over with him. Obviously, they were going to stay with the gospel, but so many of them did. I mean, so many of them heard in the music the same sounds. The sounds were familiar to them and they saw the voice as the expression. It was a voice that was given by God.

I don't think Wilson Pickett who sang, I think, with The Violinaires early on, I don't think he ran into all that much criticism. And Solomon, who was an ordained preacher himself, never saw much of a division. He continues to preach and he continues to sing. Early on, all of them sang songs that had a kind of, you could call, uplifting songs in many ways. They had not only the sound, but they had the message. But I'd say that really it was Ray Charles who caught the most hell.

Tavis: You're right. Solomon and Al Green still do both.

Guralnick: That's right, yeah.

Tavis: The second person I want to get to before I get specifically to Sam Cooke was a dear friend of Sam Cooke, friends for many, many years. Lou Rawls passed away recently.

Guralnick: Right.

Tavis: Talk to me about Lou.

Guralnick: Well, Lou absolutely idolized Sam. I mean, he came up under him. He said, you know, you always wanted to be around Sam because, you know, you just couldn't miss him. There was just so much followed. All kinds of following, musical, social, every kind. Lou was a couple of years younger than Sam. He actually sang with Sam's brother, L.C., in a group called The Holy Wonders. He sang in a group called The Teenage Kings of Harmony, but he was singing in these groups as a teenager in Chicago while Sam was singing in the Highway Q.C.s who ruled Chicago. None of them recorded, but, I mean, this was the time when teenage gospel, 1948, 1949 and 1950, looked like it was just going to take over the world.

Again, Lou's career was started by Sam's great friend, his mentor, his business partner, J.W. Alexander, who was the manager of the Pilgrim Travelers. J.W. recruited Lou into the Pilgrim Travelers in 1958 when Lou got out of the Army, he went on tour with Sam, J.W. took him to Capitol Records. I mean, he sang backup on so many of Sam's records, but Lou found his own voice. It was an uptown voice and it was a voice that was a considerable distance from the gospel. I mean, it was more sophisticated. Well, you know, it's that mellow kind, and his monologues, of course, were really what put him over. But like Sam, like Aretha, he never left the church.

I mean, at the end of his life, one of the last times I saw him, he was recording a gospel album in Muscle Shoals with a lot of Sam's songs on it. And the very last time I saw him, he was very ill just this past November, he came to Cleveland at great personal discomfort, I'm sure, to sing in an all-star gospel concert for Sam Cooke singing Sam's great song, "Jesus, Be A Fence Around Me" which was a song that always resonated with him. So he had a tremendous feeling for the music and it was a feeling that grew out of those early experiences in Chicago.

Tavis: You'll forgive my humility here. Was I right or was I right (laughter) when I said that Sam Cooke had the smoothest voice I have ever heard?

Guralnick: Oh, I think so, yeah. I mean, I think he just had a voice -- I mean, different people -- Jerry Wexler who was the vice president of Atlantic Records at the time said he was the best singer, bar none, absolutely. And Ray Charles said to me shortly before he passed, "You know, Sam Cooke, he was the one and only. Not only did he hit every note, he hit every note with feeling." Then he said, "You know, I'm not a person who gives praise lightly." And he wasn't (laughter).

Tavis: What was it about his voice, about his style, that made it the kind of instrument that could in fact cross over and be successful in both realms, secular and gospel?

Guralnick: Well, he was a crooner really. It was a seductive kind of a voice, but the thing that you could never define because so many people sounded like -- Johnny Taylor sounded just like him, but didn't quite have that quality. Jimmy Alpert who succeeded Johnnie Taylor and the Soul Stirrers sounded very much like Sam, but I don't think communicated in that way. Sam really lowered the volume in gospel music. You had shouters and screamers like Archie Brownlee with The Five Blind Boys. Great, great singers.

I mean, it's not a question of saying one is better than the other, but when Sam came in as the lead singer with the Soul Stirrers at the age of nineteen, what he had to do was to lower the volume, to bring the people to him. He was able to do that through that voice with which he was gifted, but he was also able to do it through a quality of communication that I think can't be defined.

Tavis: How did Sam and a lot of folk, from the church and from that matter from other places, who've tried to navigate their way into secular success, aside from his talent, strategically how did he navigate that journey?

Guralnick: He had a very analytic mind. I would say that, if you were looking for an intellectual in the field of music, Sam was it. I mean, he looked to improve himself. He looked to take a lesson from every experience he had and then to move on and he studied things very carefully. It took him a while. One of the few times in his life that he hesitated was over the move into secular music. The reason he hesitated was not because he saw it as a betrayal of gospel music. God had given him a voice. He wasn't going to be saved by the words that he sang. He was going to be saved by his actions. He was going to be saved by what he did in life. But what held him back was the fear that, if he crossed over and he didn't make it, could he ever go back?

Once he made up his mind, though, that he was going to do it and he made that commitment, I would say he wanted to reach everybody to the end of his life. He wanted to reach everybody. Rich, poor, black, white, it didn't make any difference. But at the beginning of his career when he recorded "You Send Me" and a number of other hits, he deliberately bleached out his sound. Even though it was recognizably Sam Cooke, anybody who knew Sam Cooke from the Soul Stirrers would recognize that voice and they would recognize the mannerisms. But he created a framework for it that really was able to attract not just the white audience because all of his songs were top R&B hits, but it could attract a white audience as well.

Tavis: My time with you is limited. We could spend a whole show just talking about the connection between gospel music and the civil rights movement, or certainly soul music and the civil rights movement. You talk about that in this book. Make the connection for me.

Guralnick: The connection was -- and it's particularly true for the rhythm and blues singers and soul singers who are out there -- that in essence they were soldiers on the front line of a battle. It wasn't a question of their choosing it. It came to them. They were drawing mixed audiences at a time when this was the battle cry of the segregationists. You know, that the races should be separate. And over and over again, whether it was Ray Charles or it was Sam Cooke or even if it was Fats Domino, who was totally apolitical, the issue would arise. What are we going to do in this situation? Because the conflict would come to them and people like Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Clyde McPhatter, took stands which put them in danger over and over again.

Tavis: They say finally that only the good die young. Sam died awfully violently.

Guralnick: He did die violently. He died, in some ways, the way that he lived in the sense that he was a person who had been taught by his father. All of the Cookes had been taught by their father, Reverend Cooke, to never allow yourself to be disrespected. Never allow yourself to be played. Sam thought that the woman that he had gone to the motel with ran off with his clothes and his money. He wasn't going to abide by that and, in the end, he ended up being killed in the struggle over that issue.

Tavis: The book is "The Triumph of Sam Cooke", specifically "Dream Boogie" the title there. The author is Peter Guralnick. It is a wonderful read about the life and times of a guy named Sam Cooke. In ten seconds, tell me what you think Sam's legacy is musically.

Guralnick: Sam's legacy is a range of songs that people out on the street, even if they don't know the name Sam Cooke, are going to recognize those songs because they communicate so directly in the way that Sam had worked out. He believed you had to communicate simply, directly and in a way that people can just pick up on right away and that's what he did.

Tavis: And he did. Peter, nice to have you on the program.

Guralnick: Good to be here.

Tavis: Up next, Tony Award-winning Broadway star, Heather Headley. Stay with us.