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Sam Moore, the tenor half of the scorching soul duo Sam & Dave — known for indelible hits like “Soul Man,” “Hold On, I’m Comin’” and “I Thank You” — died on Friday in Coral Gables, Fla. He was 89.
His death, in a hospital after surgery, was confirmed by his wife and longtime manager, Joyce Moore. She said the exact cause was unclear.
At their peak in the 1960s, Sam & Dave churned out rhythm-and-blues hits with a regularity rivaled by few other performers. When “Soul Man” topped the R&B charts and crossed over to No. 2 on the pop charts in 1967 (it also won a Grammy), its success helped open doors for other Black acts to connect with white audiences.
Sam & Dave’s live shows were so kinetic — they were known as the Sultans of Sweat and Double Dynamite — that even as charismatic a performer as Otis Redding was hesitant to be on the bill with them, for fear of being upstaged. Mr. Moore once spoke of his need to “liquefy” the audience before he considered a show a success.
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“The strength of Sam & Dave,” he said, “was that we would do anything to please the audience.”

Mr. Moore and Dave Prater, a baritone, met at an amateur night at the King of Hearts, a nightclub in Miami, in the early 1960s. The two unpolished young singers wound up together onstage by accident — Mr. Prater was having trouble remembering the lyrics to a song, and Mr. Moore fed them to him — but they clicked instantly with the audience.
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Both men had started out singing in church, and they developed a stirring gospel-tinged call-and-response style that became their trademark. They signed with a local record label, Marlin, and then moved on to Roulette Records in New York. But their early records failed to chart, and they retreated to the King of Hearts.
One night in 1964, Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd of Atlantic Records came to see them perform. Impressed, they offered the duo a contract. The company put the Memphis soul label Stax Records in charge of the production of their records, which would then be released and distributed by Atlantic.
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In his autobiography, “Rhythm and the Blues,” Mr. Wexler wrote, “I put Sam in the sweet tradition of Sam Cooke or Solomon Burke, while Dave had the ominous Four Tops’ Levi Stubbs-sounding voice, the preacher promising hellfire.”
Lending them to Stax proved to be an inspired move. In Memphis, Sam & Dave became part of a remarkable musical family that was a grittier counterpoint to Berry Gordy’s humming hit factory at Motown.

Working with the producers and songwriters Isaac Hayes and David Porter, the house band Booker T. & the M.G.’s and the crisp horns of the Mar-Keys, Sam & Dave were soon enjoying the benefits of stardom, including their own tour bus and plane, plus an entourage of women and hangers-on. They also both became addicted to heroin.
Samuel David Moore’s life can be divided into three almost implausibly tidy acts. Act I began with his birth in Miami on Oct. 12, 1935. His mother, Louise Robinson, was a teacher, and he described his father, John Richard Hicks, as “a street hustler,” a tireless womanizer whose son was soon following in his footsteps. (When his mother married a man named Charlie Moore, the boy took his stepfather’s surname.)
While still in high school, Sam was shot in the leg by the jealous husband of a married woman he was seeing. He later served 18 months in prison for procuring prostitutes. But music lifted him. He sang in a Miami Baptist church, then with an a cappella group called the Majestics and a gospel group called the Mellonaires, before teaming up with Mr. Prater.

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Act II began with Sam & Dave’s first breakup in 1970, as their popularity waned. When their solo careers failed to take flight, they reunited and broke up several times. The two were never personally close.
“It was a duo,” Mr. Moore said in the 1998 book “Sam and Dave: An Oral History,” edited by Dave Marsh. “But it wasn’t a partnership.”
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Sam & Dave toured in the United States, Europe and Turkey, but their drug abuse had begun to take its toll. Their downward spiral was briefly slowed when John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, as the Blues Brothers, recorded a hit version of “Soul Man” in 1978, bringing new attention to the original.
Sam Moore and Dave Prater performed together for the last time on New Year’s Eve 1981 in San Francisco. After walking offstage, they never spoke to each other again.
Mr. Prater recruited a new partner, Sam Daniels, and they worked together, billed as Sam & Dave or the New Sam & Dave Revue — over Mr. Moore’s objections — until Mr. Prater died in a car accident in 1988.
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Act III opened the year after that final show, when Mr. Moore married Joyce McRae, a self-described “upper-middle-class Jewish girl from Chicago” who had first seen him perform in 1967. She helped him get sober, took over managing his career and guided him through a productive professional twilight.
Sam & Dave were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and received a lifetime achievement Grammy Award in 2019.
Information on survivors in addition to his wife was not immediately available.
Mr. Moore’s solo album “Plenty Good Lovin’,” which he recorded in 1970 but Atlantic, for a variety of reasons, had declined to release, finally arrived to glowing reviews in 2002. He performed for presidents and recorded with Bruce Springsteen, Conway Twitty, Lou Reed and other singers. He also worked to help secure other performers’ and songwriters’ long-overdue copyrights and royalties.
“It’s been a roller-coaster ride, but mostly a good one,” Joyce Moore said in an interview in 2014. “The single most painful part has been realizing how abused and mistreated Sam and his peers were — and still are. Most of them have never gotten their due. But we’ve been blessed.”

She continued, “As a mother, I want to help build a world where our children are judged on their character and their actions not on their labels. As a proud Jewish woman, I have been increasingly troubled by the Democratic Party’s failure to unequivocally support Israel and its willingness to tolerate extreme progressive voices that justify or condone acts of terrorism.

You don’t wanna mess with those Pella boys!
In this months edition, the Epitaph runs an article about how the Earp boys (Wyatt and brothers) took on the Gaass boys in a feud/fight back in Pella back in the day…. Apparently things dis not go well for the Earps and they got their collective asses handed to them!
The Wyatt’s lived in Pella as youths before moving…the Gaass family is one of the “founders” of Pella, Iowa. There is a pic of the Earp household in the Epitaph article (a row house east of the square) and there is a record of a Earp property north of the town.
I’ll have to try and get ahold of this edition if the Epitaph. Pella has advertised itself as the “childhood home of Wyatt Earp” for decades.
The Epitaph is a monthly that publishes stories of the characters and events of “the Old West.”

Not like.. pepper flakes or ranch. Something you can share that most of us will go "huh.. never thought of that before."

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The total number of immigrant noncitizens in the U.S. who have murder convictions is likely "tens of thousands" more than the 13,400 listed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) national docket, given the criminal records of border-hoppers in their native countries are not baked into the data, a data expert tells Fox News Digital.

The bombshell figures released last week via ICE’s national docket show that 277 noncitizens are currently being held by ICE, while 13,099 noncitizens are on the non-detained docket with homicide convictions. ICE’s non-detained docket includes noncitizens who have final orders of removal or are going through removal proceedings but are not detained in ICE custody.

Of the 13,099 convicted murderers not being detained by ICE, it is unclear how many are incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement, or roaming the streets. There are an additional 1,845 on the non-detained docket with pending homicide charges.

In total, 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories are on ICE’s national docket, which stretches back decades.

The figures underline the serious threat illegal immigration and not vetting immigrants thoroughly poses to law-abiding people living in the U.S. The figures sparked an outcry from border security advocates.

Sean Kennedy, who specializes in law enforcement and crime data analysis, said the numbers of noncitizens in the U.S. who have murder convictions — as well as convictions for other crimes like assault and rape — is much higher than the 13,376 on ICE’s detained and non-detained dockets because those convictions only apply to crimes committed in the U.S. and not murders committed in migrants’ home countries.

"We don't know how many people have come into the United States over the last decades, let alone in the last few years, who have criminal convictions or offenses overseas," Kennedy said. "Very few of the migrants who crossed the border who have criminal records will ever be properly vetted because the criminal records in their home countries are insufficient, they're not compatible with, or they're just plain not shared with the United States. And we've seen this over and over again."

Kennedy cited the case of a Peruvian gang leader, Gianfranco Torres-Navarro, who was wanted for nearly two dozen murders in his home country and entered the U.S. illegally at the Texas-Mexico border on May 16, as an example of how the vetting process is letting violent criminals into the U.S.

He was arrested by U.S. Border Patrol near Roma, Texas, before being released into the U.S. with a notice to appear for immigration proceedings, Fox News learned. It took almost two months before federal authorities learned Torres-Navarro was wanted in Peru for 23 killings, including the slaying of a retired police officer.

"He was a drug gang lord, and we didn't know that because Peru didn't tell us, or he wasn't listed in a database that we had access to because our databases are very limited," Kennedy said.

Kennedy said that the federal database includes a list of people with mostly offenses that were committed in the U.S. and by people who are considered security threats, but there are lots of those who are security threats who are not identifiable, or their biometric data — such as fingerprints — is not being collected.

"So if you're living in the mountains of Afghanistan and you go by a pseudonym, we have no idea [that] when you scan your fingerprints, you're that guy," Kennedy said, noting governments aren't forthcoming with the data. "The Taliban government isn't sharing that. The Venezuelans aren't telling us who their gangsters or mobsters are. The Chinese aren't telling us who their spies are, let alone the Russians or the Tajiks or anyone else."

Kennedy said that added into the mix is the roughly 2 million so-called "gotaways" who crossed the border over the last three years but never encountered Border Patrol.

"We have no idea who they are," he added.

Kennedy noted that when Border Patrol encounters migrants at the border, the agency asks for basic information such as their name, place of birth and also collects biometric information and registers it with the National Crime Information Center, a national database of all state and local crime information. It also processes the data through the National Vetting Center list, which co-ordinates with various federal agencies like TSA and co-ordinates with other countries.


"But that data is very limited, too, because that's completely voluntary as to what countries submit … And worse than that, very few countries participate in agreements where they will share full and freely information about their criminal context," Kennedy said.

"So we get very little information about foreigners crossing the border, and very little of it can be verified [and] many of the people who cross the border have no serious government documentation and sometimes none at all."

The ICE data from last week shows that among those on the non-detained docket, 62,231 were convicted of assault, 14,301 convicted of burglary, 56,533 had drug convictions and 13,099 convicted of homicide. An additional 2,521 have kidnapping convictions and 15,811 have sexual assault convictions.

It is not known how many of the noncitizens on the national docket entered the U.S. illegally or legally. For instance, a permanent resident Green Card holder who is convicted of a crime is subject to deportation once convicted and would therefore end up on the national docket.


Kennedy, who is the executive director of the Coalition for Law Order and Safety, a nonprofit research group which studies and advocates for effective public safety policies, said the lion’s share of the near 13,400 noncitizens convicted of homicide, carried out those killings while in the U.S., and that even if they have served their time they are not necessarily deported as their home countries can refuse to take them back.

That is because in 2001's Zadvydas v. Davis, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to indefinitely detain people who would otherwise be deported if they cannot be deported.

Kennedy said there is no exact figure of the actual homicide crime convictions rate of noncitizens, but it can be gauged by extrapolating the numbers from a Texas investigation into noncitizen crimes and then applying them to the national rate.


That investigation, by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), found that since June 2011, illegal immigrants have been charged with over 1,100 homicides, more than 3,500 sexual assaults and 3,700 other sex offenses.

It meant that the overall Texas homicide conviction rate in that period was 2.88 per 100,000 residents, while the illegal immigrant rate was 3.25 per 100,000 residents, or 13% higher. Legal immigrants, by contrast, were convicted of homicide at significantly lower rates than illegal immigrants and the overall Texas population.

"So if we extrapolate that across the United States, there would be tens of thousands of people in addition to these 13,000 who've committed a homicide here," Kennedy explained.

"There is a large number of people who are committing crimes in the United States who are here illegally that we know about. And there is a large number of people who are committing crimes in the United States who we don't know about. They could be gotaways or somehow slipped through the cracks in another way and that population is a wild card for US law enforcement because we can't deport them."


"When you're importing hundreds of thousands of young El Salvadorian men, or Venezuelan men, which for decades were homicide capitals of the world, it's likely that many of them have committed murder or have been accomplices to murder because their homicide rates were 20 times the U.S. rate," Kennedy added.

The Texas DPS investigation found that more than 20% of its incarcerated illegal immigrant killers were unknown to DHS, Kennedy said, adding this is likely replicated across other states as well – bringing the figures even higher again.

"These are all preventable crimes. If these people hadn't come here, they wouldn't have committed these crimes," Kennedy explained. "So when we know someone has a criminal history, we have an obligation to protect our citizens first, not import the world whom some of them are criminals and offenders and violent and terrorists and other threats to U.S. public safety."

The U.S. government has less than three weeks to raise its debt limit before it will need to take “extraordinary measures” to sustain federal operations, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said Friday.

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In a letter to members of Congress, Yellen said the government is beginning to run out of money to finance its debt obligations, reflecting one of the challenges facing the incoming Trump administration.

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Yellen’s letter stated that “extraordinary measures” are expected to be needed starting between Jan. 14 and Jan. 23, which is actually somewhat later than originally anticipated. Those measures would probably give Congress several months to act before hitting the borrowing limit.

“I respectfully urge Congress to act to protect the full faith and credit of the United States,” Yellen wrote.
Congress tells the Treasury Department how much it can borrow, a limit known as the “debt ceiling.” Failing to lift the debt limit could have catastrophic consequences for the global economy, as the U.S. government has never before defaulted on its debt obligations.

President-elect Donald Trump tried to get congressional Republicans to suspend the debt limit for two years — or abolish it altogether — in negotiations over funding the government this month. That effort failed, however, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) approved legislation to fund the government without changes to the debt limit.

President Joe Biden and former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) agreed to suspend the debt limit for two years in a bipartisan deal in the spring of 2023.
Johnson could face a difficult time retaining his speakership while lifting the debt ceiling. If GOP leaders try to approve an increase without Democratic support, they would have the narrowest of margins in the House to do so without defections among their right flank. But cutting a deal with Democrats to lift or suspend the debt limit could infuriate the right, whose support Johnson needs to remain speaker.

Caught up w/ 2026 OL Landen Von Seggern this morning about receiving an offer from Iowa after a stellar camp showing. A big fan of OL coach George Barnett, Von Seggern is looking forward to getting back on campus in just over a week.

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