darlin' you send me........honest you do honest you do

i just coincidentally came across this book review in the nation today. it's on a new biography of sam cooke

sam is one of my favorite artists. his voice is velvet and gets right into your soul. a friend sent me a bootleg recording of sam live in a club with an audience made up of people of color. what a difference in that recording and sam's studio recordings or his tv appearances. he seemed to feel more comfortable and was looser. he seemed to let you get a glimpse of the inside of him rather than just a surface look. he wasn't 'performing' the songs on this live recording, he was LIVING them.


In Search of Sam Cooke
Robert Christgau

Peter Guralnick's Dream Boogie follows You Send Me, Daniel Wolff's serious and authoritative Sam Cooke biography, by ten years. It's nearly twice as long--too long, like so many doorstops before it, including Careless Love, the second volume of Guralnick's life of Elvis. But it draws on research that would have justified an even more monumental book. Guralnick doesn't add much to Wolff's thesis. Both argue that though the soul singer who predated soul music made many records that fell short of his artistic potential, he was nevertheless a heroic figure, topping a voice that for those who loved it was liquid magic--cool, relaxed, infinitely inviting--with a questing intelligence and cultural ambition startling in a teen idol whose most important compositions included "You Send Me" and "Twistin' the Night Away." As Cooke strove for pop success, he funded one of the most resolutely black labels the record business has known. He supported the civil rights movement in word and deed. He studied black history. At the time of his death in December 1964, he really was a hero, cut down in his prime at 33, and Guralnick's sense of this man, and of the lesser men and women who surrounded him, is vastly more complex and vivid than his predecessor's.
That Wolff is no hack hardly puts him in a league with Guralnick, who alongside the more eccentric and intellectually ambitious Greil Marcus is the prestige brand in rock authordom. By 1986 Guralnick had published two major profile collections and Sweet Soul Music, which remains the go-to history of the style. Yet only with the 1994 publication of Elvis I, Last Train to Memphis, did many outside the specialist audience recognize his gift. Even in the intermittently clumsy 1971 Feel Like Going Home, where five of the eight subjects are bluesmen, Guralnick's self-effacing eye lent a cinéma vérité authority lacking in, for instance, Michael Lydon's hipper and slicker collection Rock Folk. By 1979's Lost Highway, which focuses on country and rockabilly, he was a master of the journalistic portrait. Yet for Guralnick, who until the 1990s made his living running a summer camp he'd inherited, journalism was only a means to literature. Despite a few shortcomings, Last Train to Memphis justified his ambitions--it is a book that grows in the mind. I can't see how any reader could come away unmoved by Elvis Presley's intelligence, musicality and sense of spiritual adventure, or still crediting the character assassinations of Albert Goldman's Elvis, which Marcus once predicted would be conventional wisdom in perpetuity. ..................

here is another informative sam cooke site