"The Fact That One Singer Possessed Such Versatility Is, in No Small Degree, the Crux of His Significance"

"But it also speaks to a long-standing tendency to consider Black music in reductive terms of racial authenticity and obligation, the idea that certain types of artistic and commercial ambition equate to 'selling out' in any number of senses. (Ironically, many of the most vocal proponents of this view have been white.) It's a syllogistic and subtly reactionary view that views Black artistry solely in terms of a narrowly prescribed binary of purity vs. dilution."

Jack Hamilton at Slate criticizes some critics of Sam Cooke.

And Andrew Loog Oldham at Variety remembers Cooke on Cooke's ninetieth birthday.

The Greatest Live Album of All Time

"You know, Sam was what we've come to call a crossover artist. You know, he crossed over from gospel to pop, which was controversial enough in its day. But once he became a pop artist, he had a certain mainstream image to protect. And the fact is that, you know, when he was out on the road, he was playing to a predominantly, almost exclusively black audience. And he was doing a different kind of show. You know, a much more down home, down to earth, gut bucket kind of show than what he would do for his pop audience."

In 2013, Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition talks with Gregg Geller about Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963.

Do You Like Good Music

"Otis decided it was time to manage Conley himself and met him for the first time early in 1967. A couple of weeks later, they were in the FAME Studios in Alabama, updated a Sam Cooke classic, called 'Yeah Man' and 'Sweet Soul Music' was born. The song, on Atlantic Records Atco subsidiary, quickly rose to number two on both the pop and soul charts. The follow-up, a misguided remake of Big Joe Turner's 'Shake, Rattle And Roll' didn't do as well. Then, at the end of 1967, Otis Redding was killed in a plane crash in Wisconsin, and Arthur lost his producer, mentor and guide."

Ed Ward on NPR's Fresh Air explores the life of Arthur Conley.

But Now I Think I'm Able to Carry On

"'It was less work than any song he'd ever written,' Guralnick says. 'It almost scared him that the song — it was almost as if the song were intended for somebody else. He grabbed it out of the air and it came to him whole, despite the fact that in many ways it's probably the most complex song that he wrote. It was both singular — in the sense that you started out, "I was born by the river" — but it also told the story both of a generation and of a people.'"


Arun Rath at NPR marks the fiftieth anniversary of Sam Cooke's greatest song.

Now I Think I'm Able to Carry On

"It is a lesser misfortune of Cooke’s abbreviated life to have been born ten years earlier than the rock stars of the 1960s. Neither a raucous rock ‘n’ roll originator like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, nor an overtly cerebral counter-culture figure like Dylan or Lennon, Cooke was a highly original artist whose story falls outside the standard narrative of rock history."

David Hadju at The New Republic salutes Sam Cooke on the eve of what would have been Cooke's eightieth birthday.

A Change Is Gonna Come

"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."

In The Nation, Robert Christgau reviews Peter Guralnick's new biography of Sam Cooke.