Again, we see the singer more than the man

January 11, 2010|Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

The ultimate artistic destination of Sam Cooke is one of the all-time might-have-beens in the history of popular music. He was only 33 when he died, in 1964, shot by a motel night clerk under circumstances that remain disputed. Yet Cooke had already proven himself a great gospel singer, a great pop singer, and a great R&B singer.

Hit songs don’t come much better than “You Send Me,’’ “Only Sixteen,’’ “Chain Gang,’’ “Wonderful World,’’ “Twistin’ the Night Away,’’ “Bring It on Home to Me,’’ or “Another Saturday Night.’’ Look at those titles and a sort of synesthesia ensues for anyone familiar with them: You instantly hear the tune - and Cooke’s relaxed, utterly assured vocal. But as the posthumously released “A Change Is Gonna Come’’ suggests, Cooke was an artist capable of a depth and breadth not previously known in popular music.

The man we see in archival footage on tonight’s “American Masters’’ broadcast, “Sam Cooke: Crossing Over,’’ isn’t just pop-star handsome and ladies-man smooth. He’s also polished, articulate, and phenomenally self-possessed. It’s easy to understand why all the famed performers we see talking about Cooke - Smokey Robinson, James Brown, Bobby Womack, Sam Moore (of Sam & Dave) - do so with a touch of awe. Cooke had his own record label, wrote his own songs and owned their publishing rights, and was able to woo (and win) the audiences of both “American Bandstand’’ and New York’s Copacabana nightclub. On the game board that was Top 40, Sam Cooke was playing chess while everyone else was playing checkers.

Whatever game he played, Cooke had a poker face. He gave little away about himself. Had he lived, you can easily imagine him flourishing artistically right up to the present. What you can’t imagine is his embracing the culture of celebrity he would have had to function in. The control Cooke had on stage and in the recording studio extended to the rest of his life, too. He was far from an open book.

It’s easy to see - and even easier to hear - why Cooke was so successful so fast. But the man behind that success eludes the documentary’s attempt to capture him. For that, one needs to read Peter Guralnick’s remarkable biography of the singer, “Dream Boogie.’’