We were prowling the intertubes last night, enjoying the music floating around there. And we were doing a little digging. We had heard the classic rock stomper "You Can't Sit Down" on the Muzak at the grocery store yesterday afternoon, and after we located it on the celestial jukebox, we started leafing through some of the other great records that came out of Philadelphia 50 years ago.

As we meandered around, we eventually popped onto the R&B great Howard Tate's Wikipedia entry, he having been discovered in Philadelphia during the "Can't Sit Down" era. One of the first entries we made on this blog was a review of Tate's appearance at the Portland Blues Festival 10 years ago. We liked the performance so much that we went back for the Sunday gospel show, where Tate, who had been working as a preacher when he was rediscovered the year before, was right at home.

Before we started staying up late at night blogging, we had spent many evenings trying to hunt down a reasonably priced copy of Tate's legendary 1967 album, which in those days was rare and even today is not exactly commonplace. Eventually we found a copy on eBay -- not too reasonably priced, as we recall, but we went for it anyway. We were not disappointed. It is one monster Memphis soul track after another, with Tate hitting the songwriter-producer Jerry Ragovoy's songs out of the park. "Get it While You Can" is the show stopper -- Tate did it at the Blues Festival -- but there isn't a bad cut on the whole thing.

It was heartwarming to see Tate back in the limelight, after his being lost for so many years to drugs and homelessness. His daughter had died in a fire, and it sent him off into quite a tailspin. Yet his voice had come through all of his tribulations intact. As he himself said on the Waterfront stage, "I don't know; it's a miracle."

Anyway, we were saddened to see on the Wiki page that Tate died of leukemia this past December. When we were kids, we were taught that you can pray to the saints for their help. We may find ourselves tossing one up to Reverend Howard every now and then from here on out.