Sam Moore & the Life That Will Test a Man’s Soul
Over seven decades in show biz, Sam Moore stepped to a microphone thousands of times to promise he was “Comin’ to ya / On a dusty road.”
It’s the opening line of “Soul Man,” the song that embedded Moore in modern popular culture. Written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter in 1967, “Soul Man” remains a benchmark from a golden age of rhythm and blues.
That opening line also isn’t a bad capsule of Sam Moore’s life, which ran 89 years before he died Friday in Coral Gables, Florida, from complications of surgery. His road swirled with enough dust that in many ways he had to become a survivor — of a shooting by a jealous husband, of a jail term, of heroin addiction and finally of the unmapped path on which artists must get their art to the world.
Sam Moore started singing as a teenager in gospel groups and by the mid-‘60s had teamed up with David Prater. As Sam & Dave, they scored crossover hits with “Soul Man” and “Hold On! I’m A-Coming,” also written by Hayes and Porter.
Practitioners of the raw Stax sound rather than the pop polish of Motown, Sam & Dave were more popular in the R&B world than on “mainstream” pop radio stations. They had 11 top-20 hits on the black charts and just two on the pop charts.
But “Hold On” and “Soul Man” made Sam & Dave known to all and ultimately plunged Moore into the classic and ironic dilemma: how to embrace your signature record without becoming its prisoner.
“I love ‘Soul Man’ and I’m proud of it,” Moore said in 1984. “But to grow musically, you’ve got to change. You can’t just give people the same thing all the time. Look at Tina Turner. At first she didn’t even like ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It,’ she wanted to stay in the old style. But look what happened when she did it.
“I don’t just want to play wet T-shirt nights. I want to walk out on the stage with a full orchestra and sing ‘My Way.’ I want to do things people don’t expect. The one thing you should never ever do with an audience is bore them.”
That became one of Moore’s driving quests over the next four decades, and while he never became a major hitmaker again, he found ways through the dust.
He recorded the album Overnight Sensational in 2006 with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Wynona Judd, Fantasia, Sting and Steve Winwood, one of the many singers who years earlier had copped a lot of the Sam & Dave sound.
In 2017 he released An American Patriot, a fascinating album that seemed like one thing until it took a couple of turns.
Moore had supported Republican politicians for years. He re-recorded “Soul Man” as “Dole Man” for the Robert Dole candidacy in 1996. He sent a cease-and-desist order to Barack Obama for using his songs at 2008 campaign rallies. He sang at the 2016 Donald Trump inauguration while pointedly declaring that “the left side” would not intimidate him.
So it was no surprise that An American Patriot included Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” But it also included John Lennon’s “Imagine,” Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and the civil rights spiritual anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing” — suggesting, perhaps, that patriotism is not the sole possession of one side.
Moore’s own battles, in any case, were more often with his own industry. He and his wife Joyce were vocal activists in several campaigns that accused large parts of the music industry with both deceit and stupidity.
On the deceit side, they were part of the movement to recover royalties for early artists — many, but not all, black — who had been forced to sign onerous original contracts and then were often not even paid the pittance those contracts promised. This campaign lasted years and while it didn’t end in total victory, it won some valuable restitution.
The Moores also were outspoken advocates for truth-in-marketing regulations covering stage acts that did not include the original recording artists.
That one was personal for Moore. He and Prater had never been pals off-stage and after they split for the last time in 1981, Prater recruited a new partner named Sam and went out on the road as The Sam & Dave Revue. While in theory this didn’t promise the actual Sam & Dave, many ticket-buyers didn’t know that and few promoters were inclined to enlighten them.
“So what this does,” Joyce Moore said in 1984, “is deny the real Sam the right to work. Promoters would rather have the phony act, even though it’s not as good, because it’s easier to sell than ‘Sam Moore.’ “
That impasse lasted until Prater’s 1988 death in an auto accident, hindering Moore’s attempts to re-establish himself on the circuit during years when ’60s hitmakers were in demand. So it wasn’t a big surprise that he took visible pleasure in recounting an incident on a cruise ship where he was performing in the mid-‘80s.
“One of the band members,” Moore said in 1986, “comes up to me and says, ‘Hi, I’m Tio. I played behind Dave Prater and fake Sam. I spoke to Joyce and I didn’t know the guy was such bad news. He also took an hour and 45 minutes to rehearse one song.’ ”
Moore said he was a little surprised, but not as much as the musicians once he saw what the real Sam had to offer. “When they saw my charts and I opened my mouth, they all forgot what they were doing,” said Moore. “The guy comes up to me again and says, ‘Nobody ever told me Dave was that bad.’ ”
Moore didn’t go to Prater’s funeral, though he said years later that at times he missed him.
After Dave’s death, Moore said he was approached about creating a new Sam & Dave act of his own. “I said no,” he said in 1991, “even though it would have guaranteed bookings. I wanted it to be just Sam Moore.”
Toward that end, Moore whipped himself into singing shape. While the ’60s and ’70s were the years of his prime popularity, they were also the years of his heroin addiction, and looking back, he said in 1986, that kicked up a lot of dust.
Proud as he was of the hits, he said, “There were more bad times over those 20 years than good times.”
Meeting Joyce, whom he married in 1982, turned it around. She had spent years trying to rescue Jackie Wilson from what she saw as neglect and abandonment by the music world after he collapsed on stage, and she succeeded in getting Moore to quit drugs. Once that happened, he said, he also whipped himself into musical shape — doing vocal scales, tailoring his diet, minding his health.
“I used to do a 40-minute show,” he said in 1984. “Now I do 60. I’ll get up to two hours.” Musically, it worked. His vocals on a song like “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby” were as powerful when he was 60 as when he was 25.
Still, finding a place to showcase those vocals remained a challenge. “It’s hard to get work,” he said in 1991. “It’s an industry that forgets you. A promoter who will lose $100,000 on a Julio Iglesias show won’t risk $5,000 on Sam Moore.
“And it’s not just me. Eddie Floyd should be working. Carla Thomas. Little Eva. Maxine Brown. The Mad Lads. Chuck Jackson. Edwin Starr. We’re not asking to headline over Janet Jackson. But there should be a place for us.”
Equally frustrating, he added, was the lack of respect for the work of earlier artists. This too was personal.
“Soul Man” became a cornerstone song for The Blues Brothers, who were created by Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi of Saturday Night Live and became a lucative pop phenomenon that expanded into albums, tours, a stage musical and movies.
Their live shows sometimes featured guest performers, and at one point, Moore said, he was invited to appear.
“One member told me,” he said, “that ‘Soul Man’ was now their song, and I’d have to sing the kind of songs that fit their songs.”
He declined. “It was one of the things,” he said, “that really woke me up.”
He didn’t sing “Soul Man” with the Blues Brothers until 35 years later, in 2017.
Moore eventually got some respect. Sam & Dave were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. Rolling Stone called Moore one of the 100 great voices of the music. He played for five presidents. “Soul Man” — the Sam & Dave version, not the Blues Brothers version — remains in the culture today, almost 60 years after Sam Moore first promised he was comin’ to ya on that dusty road.
If he never brought the industry around to fully valuing the artists on whose backs it was built, he didn’t entirely blame the industry. “So many times,” he mused in 1991, “artists are our own worst enemy.”
But he kept moving forward. And if nothing else, he said with a laugh in 2006, “The world now knows I have a last name.”
