Sam Cooke, Saint and Sinner / Singer's life had a tragic end

You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke By Daniel Wolff with S.R. Crain, Clifton White and G. David Tenenbaum William Morrow; 424 pages; $23

"Sam, baby," he said, "this is for you."

One of the most beloved singers of his time and one of the greatest talents of his generation, Sam Cooke lived a life rife with contradictions. In "You Send Me," Daniel Wolff's penetrating new biography of the brilliant soul singer, Cooke is portrayed as a man with one foot planted in the heavens and another firmly on the earth.

How else can you explain this handsome, wealthy 33-year-old family man getting shot to death in a seedy Watts motel after an apparent prostitute claimed he tried to rape her? How does this Baptist preacher's son, one of the great gospel singers of his time, wind up playing footsie with the angry Black Muslims? What drove this determinedly proud black man who created some of the greatest rhythm- and-blues records ever to want to croon ballads for white people in Las Vegas?

THE SOUL STIRRERS

In unraveling the fascinating story of Sam Cooke, Wolff relied on considerable help from two of Cooke's closest associates. S.R. Crain not only belonged to the gospel group the Soul Stirrers with Cooke, but after Cooke left the gospel field to pursue a career in pop, Crain went with him as road manager. Cliff White played guitar on Cooke's 1957 You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke By Daniel Wolff with S.R. Crain, Clifton White and G. David Tenenbaum

William Morrow; 424 pages; $23 No. 1 record, "You Send Me," the product of only Cooke's second pop recording session, and stayed by Cooke's side the rest of his career.

Given the unprecedented entry into the netherworld of gospel and soul these two provided, Wolff -- and music researcher David Tenenbaum -- unearthed a mountain of details, shedding light on one of the most important figures in the development of the music.

Many important sources are heard from: Cooke's first manager and record producer, the late Bumps Blackwell; his business associate and gospel singing brother, J.W. Alexander; his peers and fellow travelers on the gospel highway and from the pop field. Conspicuously absent, however, are Cooke's widow Barbara Campbell, who remarried four months after his killing, and Allen Klein, his last manager who continues to control Cooke's business affairs.

What does emerge, in Wolff's skillful hands, especially impressive given this is his first book, is a portrait of an ambitious man who rose to the pinnacle of the gospel world in the early '50s as lead vocalist of the Soul Stirrers, and made the unprecedented changeover to popular music with instant success. Wolff scrupulously details Cooke's ground- breaking fight for artistic self- determination in a racist recording industry.

FIRST RECORDING SESSION

After his initial popular breakthrough -- there's a a wonderful scene in the book during Cooke's first Los Angeles recording session where he and the producer change record labels midsession -- Cooke found himself enmeshed in an insensitive, ignorant record-business machine that handed him idiotic pablum such as "Teenage Sonata" to record when he was writing powerful songs such as "Chain Gang," "Bring It On Home To Me" and "A Change Is Gonna Come." Only Charles has brought the power and majesty of gospel as fully into the secular realm.

Wolff tells the story of Cooke's troubling death in 1964 as fully as it is ever likely to be told. A coroner's jury saw the case at the time as open and shut, but doubts at the examination were ignored and questions went unanswered. "Sam's death revealed how various his life had been," Wolff writes. "That's part of why people saw it -- and continue to see it -- as mysterious."

But, mostly, this is the story of a prideful, driven man who broke through previously inviolate barriers -- from gospel to pop, from rock and roll to the stage of New York's tony niterie, the Copa. Cooke, Wolff tells us, was a man with the gifts and the character to breach these impossible gulfs.