Sam Cooke was blessed with a mellifluous voice and matinee idol looks, but he began his career as a gospel singer. His sides as leader of the Soul Stirrers in the 1950's are brilliant and raw (compared, at least, to his smoother pop style), and Specialty's Sam Cooke With The Soul Stirrers: His Earliest Recordings (1992) is a must-have for appreciating his later music; gospel fans, however, will appreciate the exhaustive, 3-CD set The Complete Recordings Of Sam Cooke With The Soul Stirrers (2002). (There are many Soul Stirrers recordings, only some of which feature Cooke.) After a brief tenure recording for Keen under the pseudonym Dale Cooke (his switch to pop was to cause a great furor in the gospel community), Sam began pursuing stardom in earnest with RCA Records in 1957.

Sam Cooke became a major attraction for RCA, treading the line between pop and rhythm & blues with an amazing dexterity. Most of his hits - from the teen-oriented "Only Sixteen" to the anthemic "A Change Is Gonna Come" (a self-penned civil rights ballad inspired by Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In The Wind) - have stood the test of time, despite the fact that some suffer from too much sweetening. Even when singing dreck, though, Cooke's voice was an formidable instrument; drenched in strings and lily white choruses, his smooth-but passionate tenor and his deft, melismatic embellishments cut through the clutter, making every song his own. In 1964, Sam Cooke died a premature, ignominious death entirely out-of-character with the grace of his art (the details of which are best left to other sources), but his music remains as a high-water mark of the era and an important bridge between the worlds of gospel, pop, and rhythm & blues.

Over the years, RCA has fitfully attacked Sam Cooke's legacy, often with less-than-satisying results. The Man And His Music (1986) was the first-ever collection to touch upon all of his work from the Soul Stirrers to the end. Containing virtually all of his hits, including "A Change Is Gonna Come" (a song often omitted from collections before and hence), it was soon deleted. Portrait Of A Legend 1951-1964 (2003) is the first disc since to improve upon Man And His Music, boasting 30 tracks in spectacular sound and rendering all previously available compilations obsolete. Chock full of songs like "You Send Me," "Sad Mood," and "Wonderful World," the music presented on Portrait Of A Legend transcends mere genre, possessing the immediacy of pop, the timelessness of folk, and the urgency of the blues.

Soul music diehards, on first listen, may think Sam Cooke a lightweight. His vocal technique was admittedly smooth and his stage presentation impeccably suave. And, while collections like Portrait Of A Legend usually contain some gritty soul like "Shake" and "Bring It On Home" (featuring a young Lou Rawls), most of Sam's hits skew rather mainstream. Puff pieces like "Everybody Likes To Cha Cha Cha" and "Twistin' The Night Away" were not his finest hour and, in retrospect, are quaint at best and embarrassing at worst. But, raised in the church and proud of his heritage, Sam Cooke was a soul man; when he made a concerted effort to go "down home" (as on Night Beat from 1963), the results were spectacular.

I cite three compelling pieces of evidence. First, I present The Rhythm & The Blues (1995), a compilation of Sam's most soulful sides, including a lion's share of tracks from Night Beat. For Cooke fans weaned on sugary fare like "You Send Me" and "For Sentimental Reasons," the salty music on The Rhythm & The Blues will deliver quite a jolt. Whether proudly declaiming in "Get Yourself Another Fool," strutting like a cock in "Little Red Rooster," or moaning the blues on his masterful rendition of "Cry Me A River," this is a Sam Cooke that the general public rarely glimpsed. Like many of his peers, Cooke was more than willing to compromise in order to crossover to the pop (read, white) audience. That's where the money was, and success was the best revenge in those days for a black man (still is, actually). But, Cooke never forgot his roots, a fact clearly audible in the grooves of The Rhythm & The Blues.

Secondly, we have Keep Movin' On (2003), an examination of the music Sam Cooke recorded toward the end of his life. Cooke was at the height of his career, having scored over 30 pop hits from 1957 to 1963 and establishing his own record label, SAR. In addition, he had signed a new contract with RCA that afforded him more creative control, and that freedom enriched his music both in form and content. This was a Sam Cooke clearly moving beyond the trivialities of stardom (musical and otherwise), coming to grips with his own mortality (his infant son had recently died) and accepting his responsibilities to his community. Keep Movin' On is both a testament to Cooke's expanding talent and a heartbreaking reminder of what might have been had he lived.

Thirdly, and most importantly, we examine the live recordings of Sam Cooke - Live At The Copa (1990) and Live At The Harlem Square Club 1963 (1988). Cooke was a charismatic performer, capable of reducing young girls to pudding, but the respective records proffer two strikingly dissimilar approaches to his craft. The former disc, recorded in 1964 at New York City's famed Copacabana, presents Sam Cooke in a full court press for respectability. Killing at Copa (where he had previously bombed) was a mark of mainstream success nonpareil, and Sam performed a slick set (with aplomb, I should add) cherry-picked for his lily white audience. Contrast that with Harlem Square Club, recorded a year earlier in a Florida nightclub. Playing to "his folks," as it were, Cooke goes back to church and down to the alley, sounding more like Otis Redding than Nat Cole. Harlem Square Club is a remarkable document, one that reveals the soul of the man more than any other.

Sam Cooke's varied career - and the piecemeal approach RCA has taken to reissuing his music on CD - has long made collecting his records a frustrating experience. This condition was alleviated to a large degree by the magnificent boxed set, The Man Who Invented Soul (2000), though record company politics at the time prevented it from being the definitive statement it should have been. None of his early material for Keen or Specialty is included, and his final recordings (the ones featured on Keep Movin' On, most notably "Shake" and "A Change Is Gonna Come") were omitted. Imperfect though it is, The Man Who Invented Soul is one box that all true lovers of soul should own. The RCA material is mined in great depth, and the label showed great wisdom by including Night Beat and Live At The Harlem Square Club in their entirety.

Lastly, Sam Cooke's SAR Records Story 1959-1965 is also a must for serious collectors, the last piece of the puzzle when painting the complete picture of Cooke's all-too-brief career. SAR Records Story compiles many sides - including a few by Sam himself - recorded for his custom label. Much of the 2-CD set is devoted to gospel music by the Soul Stirrers (with Jimmie Outler replacing Sam on lead vocals), R.L. Harris, and the Womack Brothers, featuring a young Bobby Womack. The secular portion of the package includes early sides from Johnnie Taylor and Billy Preston, as well as one bona fide classic, "It's All Over Now" by the Valentinos (in reality, the Womack Brothers going pop) - later recorded by dozens of artists including the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, Charlie Rich, Molly Hatchet, and, believe it or not, the Grateful Dead.