1/14/2024 0 Comments Say anything quotes soulmanDave’s son Chris had remixed songs like “Hold on, I’m Comin’,” editing out Sam Moore’s high-tenor parts and turning the duo’s greatest hits into triumphant Prater solo records. Throughout the day, Sam & Dave played over the PA, but something was missing. Prater’s granddaughter Shalonda won the competition with her rendition of “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby.” The celebration began with a talent show, where a few locals sang George Strait and Hootie & the Blowfish. It was chilly, even for February, and food trucks sold hot cocoa and coffee for a dollar. On a Friday afternoon, several hundred people gathered downtown. In February, fifty-some-odd members of the extended Prater family traveled to Ocilla from all over the country to attend Dave Prater Day. has described as “substandard conditions.” Ocilla, which has a population just north of 3,000, is also home to the region’s largest private employer, the Irwin County Detention Center, where hundreds of undocumented immigrants are indefinitely detained in what the Georgia A.C.L.U. Residents from the surrounding area participate in cooking contests, compete in the pageant to determine the annual Miss Georgia Sweet Potato, and buy t-shirts that say Rise & Shine, It’s Tater Time. Ocilla, Dave’s hometown, is best known for its Sweet Potato Festival, held every autumn since 1961. “Can you think of any reason why everyone would be visiting now?”įive months earlier, a small town in south-central Georgia was hosting its own Dave Prater remembrance. “Was it a recent anniversary, or anything like that?” Not as far as I could tell. In the mid-sixties, Prater and his partner, Sam Moore, crafted a live act so unparalleled in its sweaty tent-revival ecstasy that Otis Redding, sick of being upstaged by his opener, once claimed: “I never want to have to follow those motherfuckers again.” Yet since his death in 1988, the man who was best known to the world simply as Dave has receded from the popular history of sixties r&b, erased from our pantheon of soul legends.Īfter I told the women that Dave had been a famous musician, they remained perplexed as to the recent surge of interest in his grave. A middle-aged woman working nearby chimed in: “Who was he, anyway?”Īs one half of Sam & Dave, Prater’s voice can be heard on some of the most enduring r&b recordings of the last half-century. “You’re like the fourth person in the last couple days to ask about him.” It was a humid Thursday afternoon in early July, and I was looking for Dave Prater’s grave. “Seriously?” said the teenage girl working behind the desk at the office of the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Totowa, New Jersey.
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