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Living histories
Howard Tate and Louisiana Red at the House of Blues

BY TED DROZDOWSKI

In 1966 Howard Tate recorded " Get It While You Can. " Written for him by the classic soul tunesmiths Jerry Ragovoy and Mort Shuman, the song is an emotional potboiler that tells — or rather, under Tate’s high-soaring pipes, cries, screams, and begs — us to respect the presence of love in our lives whenever it comes.

Love was just about all Tate got during his short five years of recording. Despite making records ripe for the cherry picking by such stellar artists as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King, and Aretha Franklin, his own career sank into the netherworld of low-rent clubs and organized crime. Tate — whose repertoire and light, supple tenor and deep bag of vocal tricks like preaching repetition and falsetto skyrockets made him a gem in the crown jewels of soul music — turned his back on the entertainment world when his manager was gunned down gangland style.

He then spent 20 years selling insurance and raising a family, until, as he recounts, God told him to form an outreach ministry. This he has done, and done well. With several locations in New Jersey, his church concentrates on combatting addiction. But Apostle Tate, as he’s known to its members, is as zealous a missionary as he was a soul vocalist. So he wants to expand his ministry and build a temple and a hospital.

Through a few twists of fate that believers like Tate would describe as acts of God, the rise of that desire has coincided with a rediscovery of his powerful soul legacy, first by an oldies DJ on an influential New Jersey radio station and now by word of mouth among fans of diehard R&B. This surge of interest prompted Tate to take the club stage (rather than the pulpit, where he’s kept his singing alive) for the first time in more than 30 years this April at New Orleans’s Circle Bar. He’s also returned to the studio, with his old ally Ragovoy and a band of crack musicians, to cut an album that should be out by year’s end.

That’s Tate’s history, but a week ago Wednesday he continued writing a new chapter with his third date in three decades. Backstage and in front of the crowd at Harvard Square’s House of Blues, he was genial and genuinely happy to be performing again — taking a second shot at getting it while he can, so he can spend it on his ministry. In a white double-breasted suit (worn open David Letterman style), with a small gold cross hanging on the front of his tie, he hit the stage hard with his old staple " Stop " and peeled back the years. He saved most of his voice, which had been slightly strained by recent recording sessions, for the songs — mostly the career signposts that the full house wanted to hear: " Part Time Love, " " Get It While You Can, " " I Learned It All the Hard Way, " and a slew more, broken up by a few of the newer tunes he’s now mixing with Ragovoy.

Unlike Wilson Pickett, whose 1999 comeback was a thrill but whose erratic presence mars his concerts, Tate was focused, his voice showing only a few small chinks in its polished marble surface. His first hit, 1966’s " Ain’t Nobody Home, " was full of lovely vocal syncopations and high wails clear as cut glass, with just a hint of foggy scratches whenever he dug for a few grains of gravel in the back of his throat. " Everyday I Have the Blues " came on sweet and swinging, riding the warm brown honey that flows through the low end of his voice, which is still higher than those of Pickett, Joe Tex, James Carr, and his other equals were in their prime. Atop a line-up of sharp local players that included guitarist Chris Brown and saxist Gordon Beadle (it was, alas, just a bit bottom-heavy), Tate kept the audience’s attention by working vocal theatrics into every song: falsetto wails sharp as horn blasts in " I Leaned It All the Hard Way, " notes deftly shaped into Southern-fried moans on " She’s a Burglar, " a testifying ramp-up on " You Don’t Know Nothing About Love. " It was unreconstructed soul music at its best and purest, lacking only the tightness a few more rehearsals or shows with this one-shot band could have provided.

Tate’s performance was music at its most human level: one person singing about his relationships with love and life, backed by live players, no sampling, and a sense of improvisation that nonetheless clung to the rules of each song. That’s been the basic text of the most profound vocal music since men and women began beating on logs and grunting out their gut emotions. It is part of our fundamental heritage as humans. That we have subverted that heritage to a wholly market-driven culture of popular music — and distanced ourselves from such sincere, organic musicmaking — is either sorry, just a fact, or a sorry fact. Whatever your take, the current climate of the music market and the listeners whose perspective has been formed by its salesmanship have made for a cynical reception for great soul artists who have taken their best shot with comeback albums in recent years, men like Pickett and Solomon Burke, who as living treasures of our culture deserve far more respect than they are given. I hope that Tate will find more success than they have.

In a way, success has never really found Louisiana Red, who succeeded Tate at the House of Blues the following night. At 69, Red is a legendary figure among lovers of old-time electric country blues. But otherwise his mix of keening, stabbing Muddy Waters–style guitar and idiosyncratic lyrics, bawled out in a voice big as the moon over Mississippi on a summer night, has not been noticed much despite a string of good recordings that extends back to the 1960s. In fact, Red, who was born Iverson Minter, was compelled to move to Europe in 1982 to find the acclaim and financial security that had eluded him in the US.

He is one of the few remaining and vital survivors of the era when the blues became electrified, and his importance as such ratcheted up a notch with the recent death of his uncle John Lee Hooker. He paid tribute to Hooker with a few numbers at the House of Blues, most notably a " Boogie Chillen " that found him spitting out dots and dashes of fractured notes while the band — also a one-off assembly of local hot-shots — churned, then slipping on a steel slide to make his custom-built Telecaster yowl.

Red’s singing possessed crying accents and slurs that seemed to sustain the echo of long-gone voices once carried by the wind over the flat Delta landscape. Whether slashing out his own variations on standards like " Rock Me Baby " or spinning lyrics about burying his grandmother that evoked both her undertaker and the Devil, Red’s smartly tanned leather throat made an ancient and primal sound that was as sure a definition of the blues as can be heard today. Nonetheless, tunes like " Red’s Dream, " a vision of the Apocalypse, and his biographical " Orphanage Home Blues " are so personal that he rarely seems imitative. Only the best performers can take such a well-defined idiom as the blues and make something all their own from it. So like Tate, Red deserves to get it while he can.

Issue Date: August 9 - 16, 2001