Dave Prater was born to a pair of sharecroppers in 1937, the seventh of ten children. When Dave was seven, his father died in a fire, leaving his mother, Mary Pressley, to raise the children. As a boy, Dave took to singing, both at the Mt. Olive A.M.E. Church that his family attended each Sunday, and at work, picking tobacco with his siblings in the fields after school. “He never took lessons,” said Dave’s older sister Bertha McMath, shortly after Dave passed away. “It was just a talent given to him by the Good Master.”
One of Dave’s first public performances was at his high school graduation, where he sang a rendition of the Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” During his thirty years as a professional singer, Dave Prater took the song’s title quite literally. He preferred, always, to sing with others. After graduation, he fled to Miami to sing with the Sensational Hummingbirds, his older brother J.T.’s gospel group. Then he had a chance meeting at a nightclub talent show with Sam Moore, the angel-voiced tenor with whom Dave would perform on and off for the better part of twenty years. Finally, when Prater’s relationship with Moore became strained beyond repair, he sang with Sam Daniels, a high school English teacher from Miami whom Prater enlisted to tour with him in the eighties, much to Moore’s chagrin, as “The New Sam & Dave Revue.”
Despite all of the pain and disappointment it caused him throughout his life, Prater remained eternally committed to singing as one half of a pair, wed to the notion that one can achieve something making music with a partner that cannot be achieved alone. “When you’re by yourself,” Prater said in the early seventies, after his brief attempt at going solo, “sometimes you look up in the sky for that other voice, and it ain’t there.”
Music’s inexplicable alchemy is a frightening thing, and we tend to make sense of it by rewarding individual stardom whenever possible. We lionize the auteurs, those who appear to have absolute authority over their own music: Jimi, Joni, Woody, Nina. But what does it mean to be famous not for the sound of your own voice, but for the sound of your voice blended with another’s?
“A lot of these duos have problems with each other over the years,” said John Regna, a Florida-based artist manager who served as Dave Prater’s agent in the eighties. “They’re so friendly onstage, and then the next time they talk to each other is on the next stage. They have different dressing rooms; they get to the gig in different vehicles. It’s very interesting, from a sociological point of view.”