The marker was unveiled Monday in Yazoo City.
During the 1930s, Arthus Dwight "Gatemouth" Moore was one of the better-known blues singers in the country. But, in the 1950s he abandoned this kind of music to take up vestments in the Baptist Church. He underwent a very personal journey from being one of the preeminent blues singers in the 1930s and 1940s to becoming a minister in the 1950s.
Moore, known as one of the most elegant and charismatic blues singers experienced a dramatic conversion when he went onstage at the Club DeLisa in Chicago in 1948. No blues came from his mouth, only the spiritual “Shine on Me.” Moore soon became not only an ordained minister but also one of America’s top gospel radio announcers on WDIA in Memphis. He did not miss a beat in transferring his flair for showmanship from the blues to the church, and remained one of the country’s most colorful personalities. He once delivered a sermon from a cross and gave his own eulogy from a casket. Although he devoted himself to church and community work, he still enjoyed singing the blues on occasion, and kept in touch with B.B. King and other bluesmen he had inspired. In the 1992 documentary on Moore’s life entitled “Saturday Night, Sunday Morning,” King described the lyrics to Moore’s hit “Did You Ever Love a Woman”: “No blues gets any stronger than that.”
Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1913, Moore grew up in an impoverished environment. By the time he was nine, he was singing soprano at church but abandoned that at 16 to tour the country with Ma Rainey, performing in tent shows. Beginning nightclub work in Chicago, he ultimately reached the pinnacle of fame on Beale Street in Memphis. This mecca for black singers and musicians was a college for entertainers who could learn anything desired: showmanship, musical presentation, public relations, and much, much more. In the heart of the black community, the Beale Street area supported a separate black culture of nightclubs, churches, social organizations, schools, and businesses. Outside of this enclave, Moore and his colleagues performed in "white man's land." But they entertained well, and, as one cohort said, we "roll with the punches and take the money."
He served as pastor of several churches in Mississippi and Louisiana.
He died in Yazoo City in 2004.
