One good thing about growing up Black in Miami during the 1950s was that everybody knew everybody. I thought about that when I learned of the death of Sam Moore.
Friends called; they wanted to know if I’d heard. I had. And while the news made me sad, it brought back a flood of delightful memories from my teenage years, years that included Samuel Moore.
While my colleague and friend Howard Cohen wrote a beautiful obituary of Sam as an entertainer — he was born in Miami’s Overtown neighborhood on Oct. 12, 1935 — my memories of him go back before he was famous. Back to a tiny Triumph Holiness Church in Overtown, where Sister Wells was the junior choir director. It was time for the junior choirs of that denomination to compete, and Sister Wells recruited all of us who could halfway carry a tune, to sing in her choir…