In their 20-year career, the duo of Sam Moore, who has died aged 89, and Dave Prater recorded several of the most memorable records in the history of soul and R&B music. Sam & Dave’s biggest hit was Soul Man (1967), which topped the US R&B chart and reached No 2 on the pop chart. Its funky, driving beat, powerful horns and vocal interplay between Moore’s high tenor voice and Prater’s gritty baritone made it a soul and gospel classic.
Its writers, Isaac Hayes and David Porter, had drawn inspiration from the US civil rights movement, seeing the song as “a story about one man’s struggle to rise above his present conditions”.
The song won a Grammy in 1968, and in 1999 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It achieved further immortality in 1978 when the version by the Blues Brothers, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, reached the charts. Moore reflected on how the song “turned out to be an anthem, sort of like Blowin’ in the Wind or one of those”.
Also unforgettable were Sam & Dave’s fiery Hold On, I’m Comin’ (1965), the Top 10 pop hit I Thank You (1968), which was covered by a list of artists including ZZ Top, Bonnie Raitt, Bon Jovi and Tom Jones, and the exquisite soul ballad When Something Is Wrong With My Baby (1967). In 1980, Elvis Costello had a No 4 hit in Britain with his version of Sam & Dave’s I Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down.
In 2022, Bruce Springsteen recalled how “Sam & Dave were gigantic in my musical development,” and described Moore as “a great guy and probably our greatest living soul singer”. He recruited Moore to sing on his album Human Touch (1992) and his album of soul cover versions, Only the Strong Survive (2022).
Sam was born in Miami, Florida, the son of Louise Robinson, a teacher, and John Richard Hicks. He described his father as a “street hustler”, and he was mostly raised by his mother in the city’s Overtown district. When his mother married, Sam took the surname of his stepfather, Charlie Moore.
He attended Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar elementary schools, and was also a pupil for a time at Dillard high school in Fort Lauderdale, where he lived with an aunt. While there, he took saxophone lessons with Cannonball Adderley, the band director at Dillard. In 1955 he graduated from Overtown’s Booker T Washington senior high. In later years, Moore and his wife, Joyce, founded music education programmes at the Wheatley and Dunbar schools.
Moore fathered his first child when he was 16. He later estimated that he had as many as 20 children, most of whom he had never met. While he was still at school, he was shot in the leg by the enraged husband of one of his partners. He also earned money as a pimp. “Women like you? Let them pay you,” he said. “That’s how things were done on my side of the street.”
Meanwhile he also sang gospel music in church, something he had in common with Prater. They first met in the early 1960s at an amateur night at a Miami nightclub, the King of Hearts, when Moore helped out a very nervous Prater who could not remember the lyrics to a Jackie Wilson song. Their impromptu call-and-response performance thrilled the audience, and became the template for the fledgling Sam & Dave stage act.
After unsuccessful signings to the Marlin and Roulette Records labels, they were spotted by the Atlantic Records crew of Ahmet Ertegun, Tom Dowd and Jerry Wexler. The duo struck a deal whereby they would record for the Memphis-based Stax label and have their records distributed by Atlantic. In Memphis, they were taken under the wing of the production and songwriting team of Hayes and Porter, and nobody could ever have wished for a finer in-house band than Booker T & the MGs, along with the horn section, the Mar-Keys.
The combination made for a tough and muscular sound, distinct from the smoother, more pop-orientated records coming out of Motown in Detroit. Acccording to the Miami Herald pop critic Leonard Pitts Jr: “It was the rawest, roughest stuff on the radio for a while in the late 60s and early 70s and Sam was the avatar of that.”
However, the Sam & Dave story proved to be a rocky ride. Moore had battled addictions to heroin and cocaine since he moved to New York in the mid-60s. In 1968, the pair’s relationship was badly damaged after Prater shot his wife during an argument, prompting Moore to say that, while he would still sing with Prater, “I’ll never talk to you again, ever.”
They split up in 1970, but Moore’s effort at a solo career stalled when his planned solo album was shelved after its producer, King Curtis, was fatally stabbed. This prompted him to reunite with Prater, largely because his drug habit meant he could not afford not to. As Moore observed: “For 12 years we worked together, but our lives were completely separate.” The solo album, Plenty Good Lovin’, was belatedly released in 2002.
Sam & Dave split again in 1981, though Prater recruited another singer, Sam Daniels, to create a new Sam & Dave. Prater was killed in a car accident in 1988.
In 1982 Moore married Joyce McRae, who became his manager and helped him find work with soul revue tours. Moore and Prater were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992.
Moore sang for six US presidents over the years – Jimmy Carter, George Bush Sr and George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. In 1996 he recorded a version of Soul Man renamed I’m a Dole Man, in support of the Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, but the publishing rights-holders prohibited its use.
In 2002, Moore featured in the Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker soul music documentary Only the Strong Survive, and in 2006 he released the solo album Overnight Sensational, on which he was joined by a host of guest stars including Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Mariah Carey, Sting and Steve Winwood.
He is survived by Joyce.
