Sam Moore had put out a Christmas album in 1998, but it wasn’t until 2006 that he released his debut solo album proper. There was clearly something tongue-in-cheek about its title. Overnight Sensational arrived a quarter of a century after the duo he had formed with Dave Prater had finally broken up after decades of acrimony: before the split, Sam & Dave had not actually spoken to each other for 13 years, Moore horrified by a domestic incident in which Prater had shot and wounded his wife.
That it took so long for one of the most lauded figures in 60s soul to release an album under his own name says something about the difficulties Moore faced in establishing himself as a solo artist. Part of the problem was that Sam & Dave’s career had been on the commercial skids ever since they stopped recording at Stax Records’ Memphis studio and working with the songwriting and production duo of Isaac Hayes and David Porter in 1969: fatally, when Stax’s deal with Atlantic Records had ended, the pair stayed on Atlantic, rather than moving to Stax. Moore was also dogged by heroin and cocaine addiction in the years after the duo’s split, claimed that someone had been spreading a rumour that he was suffering from throat cancer in an attempt to harm his career, and had spent most of the 80s still competing with Sam & Dave, Prater having responded to their break-up by simply recruiting another singer called Sam and carrying on as before.
