The son of a preacher, Cooke was born in Clarksdale, Miss., in 1931, and raised on Chicago's South Side when it was home to one of America's most vibrant black communities and music scenes. Gifted and ambitious from an early age, "few doubted that he would get where he was going" when Cooke boasted, "I'm gonna sing, and I'm going to make me a lot of money."

Unlike his fellow Clarksdale transplant Muddy Waters, however, success lay in the less profane and seemingly more limited musical path of gospel. Primarily a niche market when Cooke launched his career in the 1940s and '50s, gospel did have a few crossover acts and offered a level of fame within the community that was a welcome escape from the grim day-to-day reality facing most black Americans.

A musical prodigy already known around Chicago for his soft and alluring tenor voice, Cooke was tapped to replace R.H. Harris in 1950 as leader of the innovative and popular gospel quartet, The Soul Stirrers. Through his youth and laid-back crooning style -- packing his delivery with the now trademark melisma, the yodel of elongated vowels "Whoa-oh-oh and oh-oh-oh-oh" -- Cooke lent the aging Stirrers a newfound sex appeal.

Sex and gospel, as Guralnick imparts with relish, were hardly mutually exclusive, and he paints a fascinating and unsaintly picture of the "brotherhood of disaccommodation" that was road life for the Stirrers and other groups. Watching his female, and Christian, fans faint (only to be revived by church "nurses") during his performances, Cooke yielded not just to temptation, but also to the clear commercial potential of gospel's sound. Alcohol and sex pervaded behind the scenes since "no one was married on the road"; and in one year, as Cooke piously sang "Nearer My God to Thee," three different women in as many cities carried his children to term.

In 1957, disenchanted by the limits of his gospel career, Cooke broke with the Stirrers and set out as a solo pop artist-crossing over in spectacular fashion. Released on fledgling label Keen, "You Send Me" would sell 1.7 million copies and establish Cooke as a Nat King Cole for the teenage set. His twist on spiritual tunes (literally transposing "God" with "girl" for example) was initially greeted by his gospel fanbase with outrage, foreshadowing Bob Dylan's split with folkies a few years later. Like Dylan, Cooke never looked back, and his extension of gospel's "naked show of passion, pride, exaltation, humility, invincibility, and joyful celebration" into R&B allowed "soul" to finally come into its own.

Cooke, suspicious by nature, surrounded himself with only the shrewdest advisers, and in J.W. "Alex" Alexander he found his Col. Tom Parker -- without the rapaciousness that ultimately plagued Elvis. Heeding Alexander's advice, he branched out into music publishing and recording, founding the label SAR Records in 1959. Ever the quick learner, Cooke forced unprecedented concessions on his performing rights with BMI and in his own recording contract with RCA. When he suspected RCA of withholding royalties, he became one of the first singers to hire an accountant -- the infamous business manager Allen Klein, who later oversaw the dissolution of the Beatles -- to aggressively win them back.

From 1957 to 1964, Cooke released a string of hits that ranged from fizzy pop tunes like "Wonderful World (Don't Know Much)" (whose lyrics belied Cooke's own intelligence and love for books) to the anthemic "A Change Is Gonna Come." When he wasn't creating his own music, Cooke generously counseled the next generation of soul singers, including the young Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick and Otis Redding.

But his songs, as Guralnick brilliantly shows, are Cooke's true legacy: "so simple, both lyrically and melodically, as to defy analysis -- but so carefully put together at the same time, so perfectly matched in meter, melody, and rhyme as to be instantly memorable and, once heard, virtually unforgettable."

No discussion of Cooke is complete without a word about his sordid and mysterious end -- shot naked and drunk at a fleabag motel after a night of carousing around Los Angeles. But rather than crescendo with that incident like a bad episode of "Behind the Music," "Dream Boogie" wisely looks beyond it to ask the bigger question: What direction did he plan his career to take? To "make it" with the white audiences of the Copacabana, like Sammy Davis or Nat King Cole? Or retreat behind the studio glass, to produce Bobby Womack and Billy Preston, advise Otis and mentor Aretha: to be "the black counterpoint to Irving Berlin or Cole Porter"?

"Dream Boogie" never quite answers that question or uncovers Cooke's real motives, and one can't help projecting onto the exceptionally attractive man with the infectious smile, perfect diction and mesmerizing stage presence, as so many of his friends and family did throughout his life. Like Cooke's collegiate wardrobe, Guralnick's book is a bit restrained and can't quite crack Cooke's "elusive quality," the "side he didn't want you or anyone else to see: if there were worries, he wasn't going to show them; if there were conflicts, they weren't going to come up."

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