Chicago Sun-Times: Veteran musician perfects his own Moore better blues

NEW ORLEANS--Arnold Dwight "Gatemouth" Moore has a choice for breakfast. The blues singer and country preacher can eat at the luxury hotel where he is staying for a rare appearance at the Ponderosa Stomp roots music series.

Or he can walk down St. Charles Avenue to a dive diner.

Moore, 88, picks the Hummingbird Hotel & Grill. The upstairs hotel used to be one of the most notorious whorehouses in New Orleans. Like a carnival barker, a neon sign flashes "Hotel." "Hotel."

The grill is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and it looks like it. Breakfast plates have stubble. Clouds of cigarette smoke float through the diner. Pasty-faced characters wander about the grill, and it is impossible to tell if they are coming or going.

"Its been 20 years since I've been in this cafe!," Moore tells his walking partner Calvin Newborn, the last of the Memphis-based Newborn family jazz dynasty. There is a sparkle in Moore's eye and a tone of delight in his voice. But his spirit carries a paradox. Moore has hardly lived his life like a hummingbird:

He was nicknamed "Gatemouth" for his loud vocals. He began singing before the amplifier was invented, which accounts for his piercing projection.

He is the last surviving member of F.L. Wolcott's Rabbit Foot Minstrels (the same troupe that employed the late Rufus Thomas).

He was one of the few survivors of the 1940 Rhythm Club fire in Natchez, Miss. that killed more than 200 people. Moore lost his band in the nightclub fire. Howlin' Wolf immortalized the tragedy in his 1956 song "The Natchez Burnin'."

Moore's biggest hit was "Have You Ever Loved a Woman," popularized by B.B. King and covered by Rufus Thomas. In the award-winning 1996 documentary "Saturday Night Sunday Morning (The Travels of Gatemouth Moore)," King called Moore "One of the greatest blues singers ever."

Moore was the first blues singer to appear at the Civic Opera House in Chicago. In the mid-1940s he appeared on a package bill with boogie woogie pianist Albert Ammons and his Rhythm Kings, the Golden Gate Quartet gospel group and child prodigy Sugar Child Robinson.

Moore had a religious conversion in 1949 while performing at the legendary Club DeLisa, 5521 S. State. (The original Club DeLisa had burned down in 1941 in a tragedy that was compared to the Natchez fire). Moore became a bishop in the Church of God In Christ. In January 1955, Moore delivered the sermon before 4,000 mourners at the Memphis funeral of rhythm and blues singer Johnny Ace, who killed himself in a game of Russian roulette.

Finally, Moore will be traveling from his home in Yazoo City, Miss., to preach in Chicago at 8 a.m. June 16 at The Life Center Church of God In Christ, 5500 S. Indiana, and at 11 a.m. June 16 at Union Baptist Church, 940 N. Orleans. Moore preaches in Chicago every Father's Day. His home base is the Lintonia Chapel A.M.E. Church in Yazoo City.

Moore found religion on a Friday night at the Club DeLisa, where he was appearing on the strength of his jump blues hit "I Ain't Mad At You (Don't Be Mad At Me)." Moore was gambling in the basement. "It was payday," says Moore, whose mind is as sharp as a full house. "I had won $700, $800. My valet called me and told me it was time to go on. I ran out to the stage and got a big ovation."

Moore tried to sing. Nothing came out. He asked the bandleader to start over. Moore opened his mouth and still couldn't sing. "Folks started giggling," Moore says. "I could hear them talk. 'Is he drunk?' I didn't drink. 'Did he lose his mind?' I'll never forget, I looked at the piano player. And then I started singing a gospel song I learned as a little boy...

"Shine on me......"

The club manager was floored. He brought down the curtain. As Moore was departing the club he ran into Rev. Clarence Cobbs, pastor of the First Church of Deliverance in Chicago. Moore recalls, "He said, 'Gate, I've been waiting for you.' He took me home. By the next week I was studying at the Moody Bible Institute. And now I'm celebrating 53 years preaching."

Moore became bishop and minister of the Wesley Chapel church in Woodland Hills, Calif., and his church was included in the hit film "Uptown Saturday Night." During the early 1970s he was pastor of the Wesley Community Holiness Church in Chicago.

His style of preaching is humble and direct with a dash of humor. "No one has ever called me a great preacher," Moore explains. "People enjoy me. I'm emotional. Most preachers say I'm the greatest religious entertainer in the world."

On Easter Sunday, 1951, Moore preached from a casket at an auditorium in Birmingham, Ala. He also had a popular gospel radio show on WEDR-AM, which is how he spread the word of his "conversion" throughout Birmingham.

"It was Easter," he says. "I was coming from death to life. An undertaker made a 6-feet wood casket for me. I still have it in my basement. I got into the casket at four in the afternoon and stayed in there until midnight. I was laying down and I had my hands folded. My eyes were closed. People were walking in line, dropping the $10 love offering. More than 1,000 people came by. When I got out of the casket, it was time for me to preach."

Moore delivered his sermon with a hand microphone. He wore one of his old stage tuxedos. "I reached into my pocket, pulled out a pair of dice and threw them in the casket," he says. "A beer can--threw it in the casket. Cards--threw 'em in the casket. Then I hollered 'Born Again!' and you never seen such shoutin' in your life."

The next morning Moore went on the radio and announced he would lead a procession to a Birmingham bank where he planned to deposit the money. "I said I was going to the graveyard, which was the bank," Moore laughs. "I blocked traffic. I got a telephone call later in the day. It was from the police chief. You've probably heard of him. He said, 'Gate, what's wrong with you? You're tying up traffic. You were in a casket! I'm going to give you two hours to get out of town, or I am going to put you in jail.' His name was 'Bull' Connor. But he let me do anything I wanted. I was the only black man riding around Birmingham in a canary yellow convertible, saying what I wanted to say on the radio."

Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor went on to make national news in May 1963, when as public safety commissioner of Birmingham, he turned helmeted policemen and barking dogs onto groups of black children who were singing Civil Rights freedom songs.

***

Arnold Dwight Moore was born Nov. 8, 1913, in Topeka, Kan. He never knew his father, his mother was a "wash woman" for wealthy white families in Topeka. Moore was reared by a white family in Kansas. "I didn't know I was black until I was 7 years old," Moore says. "My mother didn't get me until I was 12. They were talking about Bar Mitzvahs and things so my mother took me away from the house."

As a teenager, Moore ran off with a traveling tent show that featured blues singer Ma Rainey (Gertrude Pridgett). That led to Moore and Rainey joining the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. Rainey appeared on stage wearing necklace made of gold coins and a headband adorned with an eagle. The headband became the show's trademark. The five- piece "Minstrels" included piano players Dave Nelson (King Oliver's nephew) and future Chicago gospel songwriter Thomas A. Dorsey. The entire troupe numbered 50.

"We traveled by train and went from town to town on a series of one nighters," Moore recalls. "By the time Rufus (Thomas) got into the minstrels, they were traveling by buses and trucks. We did a vaudeville act. I was the emcee."

Moore said he learned vocal control by listening to female singers. He reels them off; "Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith (and her Jazz Hounds), Alberta Hunter (out of Memphis), Chippie Hill (who first toured with Rainey as a dancer). Men only sang in honky- tonks when I was singing blues."

Moore left the Rabbit Foot Minstrels in 1931 during a stop in Clarksdale, Miss. "I hoboed from a grain truck to Beale Street in Memphis," he says. "They knew about me at the Palace Theater [on Beale Street] and I was trying to earn train fare to get to Chicago."

Moore's travels took him to Chicago, New Orleans and everywhere in between. In 1940 he was singing with the popular Walter Barnes Orchestra out of Chicago at the Rhythm Club in Natchez, Miss. Barnes used to play for Al Capone at the Cotton Club in Cicero.

"We had just left New Orleans," Moore says. "It was 30 minutes before intermission. I was with a young lady in our bus. We were in a parking lot. The dance hall was 200 yards from us. Suddenly she said, 'Look at the fire!' I jumped out of the bus. I saw smoke but I couldn't figure out why people weren't coming out. I later found out the door was jammed. And it was the only door out. The windows were barred. Within five minutes, the whole ceiling dropped in on them." Moore has a charred 2-by-4 from the nightclub hanging on the wall of his Yazoo City home. A marker has since been erected on the Natchez bluff commemorating those who lost their lives in the Rhythm Club fire.

Moore looks down at his Hummingbird eggs and bacon. He has been at the diner for more than two hours and has barely touched his breakfast. But he has a satisfied smile. "I was quite a character," he says, extending a hand with long and thin fingers. "I preach sermons that sound suspicious, but they're very religious. My first sermon was: 'He may be your man, but he comes to see me sometimes.' Well, that was the blues Ma Rainey sang. But the one I used to pack the houses with was in the Bible. It was, 'I asked her for some, she wouldn't give me none, but she went and told everybody in town about it." Do you know where that sermon is from? The woman at the well."

Moore stops to take a long drink from a glass of pure water. One thing has become clear on this humid morning: Gatemouth Moore's well will never run dry.

For more on Natchez, Miss., and the colorful Under The Hill district, read Dave Hoekstra's Detours in today's Travel section.