Hold On, He’s Comin’…
by Doug Bradley
I shed more than one tear when I heard the news of the passing of Sam Moore earlier this month. When I’d booked Sam and Dave to perform at my tiny, off-the grid-college in West Virginia in 1968, I had no idea that the evening was going to be more like “Dueling Daltons” than synchronicity. That’s because Sam and Dave had decided to have a one-on-one faceoff in front of a live audience, each trying to outdo the other with soaring vocals, rhythmic dance steps, and abundant perspiration.
That was one of many astonishments that hot September evening. Another occurred during the walk around with Sam and the leader of the Stax Volt band that accompanied them as I pointed out our lighting and sound systems. Their affirming nods were music to my ears. But when I pointed to the twelve chairs we had placed on the stage for members of the Stax band, the leader turned to me and said emphatically, “Man, we don’t sit down.”
And he was right. They never did. And neither did Sam or Dave. Experienced in gospel music and newly grounded in the Stax stye of “gritty funk,” Sam and Dave sang more about segregation, subjugation, and liberation than merely having a good time. They delivered that message and meant it, even though my 21-year-old ears barely comprehended it…
Only to pick up on their message years later when my co-author Craig Werner and I were interviewing Vietnam vets for We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War. We talked with Tom Stern, a Vietnam vet who grew up in rural Wisconsin before serving 15 months as a field baker in the Central Highlands in 1968–69. He had little contact with Blacks before entering the Army, although he’d heard soul music on the radio and considered himself a fan.
Stern’s education in soul music began at Fort Lee, Virginia and continued into Vietnam. “I was a naïve white guy,” he confessed to us. Near the end of his ’Nam tour, Stern and a friend jumped at the opportunity to see a Korean band perform at their local Enlisted Men’s Club. While the seating was mostly segregated, most of the night passed without tension.
“The band played everyone’s favorites,” Stern recalled. “Charlie Pride and country tunes for the rednecks and country boys. ‘In the Midnight Hour,’ ‘Hold On I’m Comin,’ and ‘Soul Man’ for the brothers and the white guys that dug those grooves. ‘Goin’ Out of My Head,’ ‘Hey Jude.’ By the end of the night, there weren’t many white guys in the place, so the band started to play all the Stax tunes…’
But then things began to fall apart, as they often did in the rear in Vietnam. “A drunk white soldier started complaining about the playlist,” Stern remembers, “and he’s using the N word all over the place. Fucking gooks, all they can play is this fucking N-music!”
Stern and a couple of other soldiers did their best to quiet him down, but it was too little too late, and several white soldiers, Stern among them, found themselves on the losing end of a beating.
“I’m saying to my buddy, ‘You better shut up or we ain’t gonna get out of here.’ We just barely did…”
Maybe some of the African American soldiers in their midst saved their ass. Maybe they understood the deeper message Sam and Dave were delivering in “Soul Man” and other tunes. Or maybe they all were just trying, for one night, to get some relief from the grind of Vietnam. Or hoping to simply get to higher ground…
Sam Moore knew that. And now he’s up there somewhere, leading a chorus of voices, reminding his brothers and sisters in the struggle for equality to “Just grab the rope, and I’ll pull you in.”
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Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley is the author of Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America, co-author with Craig Werner of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, which was named best music book of 2015 by Rolling Stone magazine, and DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle, now available as an audiobook. His music-based memoir, The Tracks of My Years, will be released by Legacy Book Press in 2025.
Image: Courtesy of Doug Bradley
