The book I could read over and over again is You Send Me, by Daniel Wolff, his 1995 biography about the late RnB singer Sam Cooke, who was born in Mississippi in January 1931 and came with his family to Chicago during the Great Migration of the 1930’s and settled there to make better life for the family just to escape the evil and racist stares and actions of the Jim Crow system in the South. I remember reading this book for the first time at Kelly Library, that’s in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood back in October 1995, shortly after it came out. Whenever I didn’t have time to finish reading it, I would go back to the library and read it until I finished it, and lo and behold, I actually went to a bookstore and bought it and I still got it, after so many years after reading it!
The book was actually pretty good, it dealt with Cooke’s upbringing, his gospel roots that was inspired by his father, who was a stern, but fair man of the cloth (a preacher of course), how Cooke sung with his siblings as a family gospel group, how he joined the Soul Stirrers back in the early 1950’s as a young lead singer, then going solo in 1957 to perform such hits as “You Send Me”, “Only Sixteen”, Lonely Island”, and “Made For Me”, a few of his EARLIER hits, THEN making it big in the RnB world with songs such as “Chain Gang”, “Having a Party”, “Twistin the Night Away”, and many more, but on a Friday night in December 1964 he was tragically taken away from us after being shot and since then his murder has been an unsolved case. A great man left us with his charm, charisma, talent and style of performance that can never be matched or imitated whatsover. Get this book and read it, and trust me, it’s definetely well worth reading.
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