Is Sam Cooke worthy of the sort of painstaking biographical treatise that Guralnick masterfully produced about Elvis Presley, in the form of his genre-defining twin volume set, "Last Train To Memphis" and "Careless Love"?

Or is Cooke merely a pop tart with a good voice, even better looks, and a savvy businessman's eye for the penetrability of the white pop audience?

Invariably, those who view Cooke as the latter will find "Dream Boogie" tiresome and over-inflated - see critic Robert Christgau's lengthy recent piece in "The Nation" - while those who interpret Cooke as a groundbreaking artist who introduced a gospel-based take on rhythm and blues to a mainstream and at least half-white audience will find that Guralnick's investment is in keeping with the import of his subject.

The proof of Cooke's power and profundity is in his singing, his composing and his ear for musical arrangements. Guralnick writes about these with more insight, conviction and well-earned knowledge than anyone else has to date, including Daniel Wolff, in his well-respected Cooke book, "You Send Me" (Quill Publishing, 1996).

It's clear that Guralnick has fallen
Charismatic Cooke came from a musical family under Cooke's sway and has spent perhaps more time dissecting his music than anyone. But Guralnick is the undisputed master of this sort of writing, and rather wisely, he maintains a critical eye that allows him to separate Cooke's wheat from his chaff, and to present a portrait of him that is at once celebratory and dispassionate.

His style offers a blend of intensive reporting and "New Journalism," in which the reader is compelled to place him or herself directly in the historical context the writer is concerned with. Guralnick is expert at this; he makes it plain he holds his subject in high esteem, yet remains trustworthy as a tour guide, precisely because he's got the chops, has done the research, and knows what it means to have been moved by the music.

An image of Cooke as an incredibly bright, gifted, driven, charismatic and all but invariably pleasant character, is etched by Guralnick from the beginning, and then tempered as the book proceeds.

Cooke came from a musical family. Under the auspices of his preacher/laborer father, he sang lead tenor in churches with his brothers, the Singing Children, before he entered his teens.

He'd achieve notoriety with the Highway QCs as a teen, leave them for the more upwardly mobile Soul Stirrers, and become a star on the gospel circuit by the time he entered his 20s. Cooke, according to Guralnick, wrestled with the idea of "going secular," putting off what seemed like the inevitable for a number of years, before finally biting the apple and releasing his first crossover hit, the still-stirring "You Send Me," in 1958.

By the early '60s, Cooke was head of his own record label, and despite ebbs and flows in both artistic and commercial success, had forged a career that celebrated the idea that pop songs could in fact be as spiritually uplifting as gospel music was to true believers.

Still, with Cooke's success came problems, both personal and financial. Guralnick does not gloss over the fact that Cooke was a womanizer from a young age; that for him, even as a gospel star, there was no clear division between pleasures of the spirit and of the flesh. He was a lousy husband to both of his wives, a largely absentee father to his children, and a man obsessed with his music regardless of the cost to those who loved him. He was good-looking and could charm the rattle off a rattlesnake, and he knew it, employing his charms to bed countless women - one of whom, the white wife of an industry executive, he had sex with in the shower of his hotel room while her husband was passed out on the bed, according to Guralnick.

Conversely - to everyone but Cooke, apparently - he was a voracious reader, a self-taught scholar in black history, a supporter of the civil rights movement in both word and deed, and as head of his own SAR Records, a champion of both gospel and secular musicians brushed aside by countless major labels.

Cooke hung out with pimps, thieves, crooked businessmen, record company execs with mob connections, and Allen Klein - who would later make lots of money from the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, in addition to Cooke, whose catalog he'd own following the singer's murder in 1964. He was no saint, and left romantic partners and former business associates behind without remorse, but Guralnick implies that - despite a love for potentially dangerous situations that the singer felt kept him in touch with "the black street vibe" - Cooke rarely became sullied by such connections. He exploited them for what they were worth commercially, but kept his art protected and, in a sense, chaste.

Cooke would ultimately die in his underwear, shot dead in a hotel room amid still unclear circumstances that involved a prostitute. But Guralnick still considers his life a triumphant one, as his title makes clear.

And on this matter, Guralnick is tough to disagree with. Cooke was a visionary, an incredibly gifted singer able to wring ample emotion and virtuosic nuance from lyrics that, in lesser hands, might have been fluff. His was a complex talent, based on prodigious abilities, but more importantly, on a capacity to impart an otherworldly sense of sadness and loss, even when singing of less than profound concerns.

Cooke is clearly a prime progenitor of soul music. Guralnick knows this, and "Dream Boogie" celebrates it with a blend of subtle, rich and incredibly well-researched detail