Sam Moore, one half of beloved soul duo Sam and Dave, died Friday morning at the age of 89. Moore’s wife and manager, Joyce Moore, confirmed the singer’s death to Rolling Stone, adding that the cause had yet to be determined.
As one half of Stax Records’ preeminent vocal duo, Moore and Dave Prater helped propel Stax Records to its status as one of the greatest soul music labels of all time. On singles like “Soul Man,” “Hold On! I’m Comin’” and “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby,” or deep cuts like “I Take What I Want,” their voices, both rooted in gospel music, joined together into ebullient, ecstatic harmonies. “Sam and Dave were gigantic in my musical development,” Bruce Springsteen told Seth Meyers in 2022, adding that Moore was “our greatest living soul singer.”
Samuel David Moore was born in Miami on Oct. 12, 1935. The son of a preacher, he began singing in his family’s backyard. But he also later confessed that his early life wasn’t so pure, claiming he’d earned something of a living from pimping. “I was a local hero, not a big star. Women like you? Let them pay you. That’s how things were done on my side of the street. I was surrounded by that kind of behavior; it was accepted. But I didn’t make much money from it.”
He and Prater, who hailed from Georgia, met at Miami’s King of Hearts club in 1961 and were initially signed to Roulette Records. After a few middling singles, they switched to Atlantic, but producer Jerry Wexler thought they would be a better fit for the Memphis-based Stax, which Atlantic was distributing.
The notion paid off. That label released its first Sam and Dave single, “You Don’t Know Like I Know,” in the fall of 1965, and their string of hits began. Working with songwriters Isaac Hayes and David Porter and often with Booker T. and the MG’s as their backup band, Sam and Dave soon became one of Stax’s powerhouses; Moore was the gregarious showman, while Prater took a secondary, low-key role. (It was Moore who was heard shouting out “Play it, Steve!” to guitarist Steve Cropper in “Soul Man.”) In 1968, “Soul Man” won the Grammy for Best Rhythm & Blues Group Performance; Rolling Stone later included it on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
The duo’s ride, though, was never easy. In 1968, Prater shot his wife during an argument, which soured his and Moore’s partnership. “After the incident with the gun, I said to Dave, ‘Look, I’ll sing with you, but I’ll never talk to you again, ever,’” Moore told the Independent in 2002. The duo broke up in 1970, but after Moore’s first solo album was shelved after producer King Curtis died, he and Prater reunited.
Moore himself grappled with cocaine and heroin issues. As he told SFGate in 2002, “The record company told me nobody wanted to hear me without Dave. You’ve got to understand all the money that I had was going into my arms. I didn’t have any money to actually sit back on and say, ‘Well, I don’t have to go back with Dave.’ I had to do it.” The two worked together on and off throughout the Seventies, but their relationship remained frosty: “So for 12 years we worked together, but our lives were completely separate.”
Moore had another shot in the limelight in 1978, when John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd remade “Soul Man” as part of their Blues Brothers project. Moore admitted that he had mixed feelings about the remake. “On one hand, ‘Soul Man’ was good for us,” Moore told RS in 2024. “On the other hand, it’s an albatross around Sam Moore’s neck. Hopefully, one day I can hear somebody say, ‘It was Sam and Dave singing, not John and Danny.’ I don’t know.”
Thanks to the Blues Brothers, though, Sam and Dave reunited and continued working until 1981, when they again disbanded. Moore announced he was drug-free in 1983, but Prater, whose substance abuse issues only deepened, died in a car crash in 1988. In light of Prater recruiting another “Sam” for a “Sam and Dave” act in the Eighties, Moore’s wife, Joyce, founded a nonprofit group, Artists & Others Against Imposters, to monitor those bookings.
As Moore told SFGate in 2002, “When I left [Prater] in 1981, I told him I wanted to get off this shit and then we could play some specials or something like that. But he was so hurt he went and got an impostor and called it Sam & Dave. Word got out that I was dead or had throat cancer or that I had retired. All kinds of stuff. So from that time until Dave died in 1988, I hadn’t spoke to him.”
Moore worked regularly in subsequent decades, touring as part of R&B revues, and in 1992, he and Prater were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; that same year, Moore sang backup on several cuts on Springsteen’s Human Touch.
In 2002, Moore was featured in D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ soul documentary, Only the Strong Survive, which triggered another round of interest in Moore. His 2006 album, Overnight Sensational, included contributions from Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, Wynonna Judd, Mariah Carey, Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton and Diane Warren. That same year, Springsteen, Moore and Irma Thomas sang “In the Midnight Hour” at the Grammys to honor New Orleans. Springsteen later recruited Moore to sing backup on Only the Song Survive, his album of R&B and soul covers.
In 1988, Moore cut a remake of “Soul Man,” called “Dole Man,” to support Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole. He also briefly protested Barack Obama’s use of “Hold On! I’m Comin’” during the 2012 campaign, and also sang “America the Beautiful” at Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration. To Tucker Carlson on Fox News, Moore, who replaced Jennifer Holiday, explained his reaction to those who took him to task for the decision: “This is mind-boggling … You don’t know the man. The man hasn’t taken office. He hasn’t said his name yet to say, ‘Yes, I’ll be president.’”
Throughout it all, Moore had a singular definition of soul music that drove his music and career. “They call Keith Sweat and Al B. Sure! and they even say Freddie Jackson is soul,” he said in 1991. “And I’m going, ‘No gentlemen. You’re wrong.’ … Soul is what James Brown used to do when he’d do ‘Please Please Me’ and fall to his knees. .. It’s like in church. That’s soul music.”
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