Bobby Purify

When connoisseurs of soul music hear the names Dan Penn, Spooner Oldham, David Hood, Jimmie Johnson, Reggie Young, Wayne Jackson and Carson Whitsett, they perk up, because those names are all over the credits of some of their most treasured records. It isn’t every day that these legends of Memphis and Muscle Shoals lore come together, but the entire magnificent seven eagerly converged on Penn’s Dandy Studio in Nashville recently when they heard the news: Bobby Purify had returned.

Of the great soul singers from R&B’s golden age in the 1960s and ’70s, Purify is perhaps the most underappreciated. Although he’s the contemporary—and equal—of such southern soul legends as Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge and Solomon Burke, his stature has been obscured by a twisted career path and some basic confusion. The singer/guitarist’s real name is Ben Moore, and he worked with and behind the likes of Otis, James Carr, James Brown and the Tams before becoming half of Ben & Spence, who cut a number of sides for Atlantic in the ’60s before hooking up with James Purify in 1971. Adding to the confusion is the fact that Moore was the third individual to take the name Bobby Purify, although he’s answered to that moniker for close to 35 years. These and other circumstances conspired to deny him the fame he deserved, and he’s had some hard times, especially in recent years—but one thing that couldn’t be taken away from Bobby Purify was his gift. And that makes his unexpected and triumphant return a joyous event for all of those who care about rhythm & blues in the original, uncorrupted sense.

After glaucoma caused him to go blind in 1998, Purify was thrown into the depths of despair, frightened and alone. Then one day the phone rang, and Bobby found himself talking with Ray Charles. “I had met him awhile ago out there on the road,” he explains, “and a friend of mine told him that I had went blind. So Ray called and told me, ‘You don’t need no eyes to have soul. If you got soul, keep on goin’. Just use that thing in there as a crutch for bein’ blind, to keep your mind occupied.’ So I started goin’ back out on the road, blind, but without Ray, I’d still be sittin’ back there in that room.”

So he resumed eking out a living on the chitlin circuit, as before, still well under the radar, aside from a 2002 appearance in a made-for-PBS soul special featuring Aretha Franklin, Jerry Butler, Lou Rawls and other fellow veterans. One night, back home in Pensacola, Florida, Bobby was invited to a party at another friend’s condo. He brought his guitar and started singing for the guests, one of whom was songwriter Hoy “Bucky” Lindsey. According to Purify, when Lindsey realized who was singing, “He said, ‘Man, I thought you were dead.’ I said, ‘No, man, I went blind and I come off the circuit for a while. And he said, ‘I gotta get somebody down here to listen to you, ’cause you sing better now than you sang 30 years ago!’”

That somebody was Lindsey’s writing partner, Dan Penn. Since co-writing the title song for Solomon Burke’s critically lauded 2002 comeback album, Don’t Give Up on Me, with Whitsett and Lindsey, the legendary writer/producer had been wanting to cut an album of pure soul, and the three longtime collaborators had continued writing with that idea in mind. There was just one problem—a dearth of pure soul singers.

So it was with some excitement that Lindsey called Penn in Nashville to tell him about his surprising discovery. “I went on down there,” Penn recalls, “and when Bobby started singin’ and playin’ the guitar, right away, it stood all my hairs up on my arm. He was singin’ R&B like they did in the ’60s, which is the only kind of R&B I know, and you just don’t hear that no more. What they call R&B these days, that ain’t the real thing.”

Blown away by what he’d just heard, Penn told Purify, “I’m gonna get in touch with some people, see if I can get you a record deal.” Sure enough, several months later, he called Bobby to tell him the news, “I got some guys in from London and they’re comin’ down to hear you sing.” The visitors were Proper Records founder Malcolm Mills and his business partner, Paul Riley. “They come in and listen to me,” says Bobby, “and after I got through singin’ four or five songs, they said, ‘Man, shoot, we gonna do a deal on you.’ And I thought they were just talkin’, you know. But three or four weeks after, the contracts came in. They had already hired Dan to do a CD on me.”

Now, Purify and Penn have a little bit of history together, dating back to the ’60s, when Penn was engineering records at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where he recorded and wrote songs for Ben & Spence, including the R&B hit “You’re the One for Me.” Penn, of course, went on to become a renowned songwriter and producer, working primarily out of Memphis’ American Studios accumulating a thick resume as producer on such hits as “The Letter” and “Cry Like a Baby” for the Box Tops, and as a co-writer on such cla