Sam Cooke imagined a pop music that induced hyperventilating yet never dared remove its choral robe. It was lush, impassioned, and nestled in the palatable harmonies of 1940s and 1950s serenades and doo-wop singing. Neither hot jazz nor fiery sermon but a dozen roses, a milkshake with two straws. Cooke’s arrangements were a perfect fusion between the sacred and the secular, between robust Blackness and the American songbook’s high snuggle era. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Cooke embodied Black pop singing’s seamless transition from wailing choirboy to romantic heat source. Motown went a
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