Howard Tate RIP

HOWARD TATE, who got a second chance at a musical career three decades after being derailed by disputes with industry executives, personal tragedy and drug addiction, died Friday of natural causes. Tate was born in Macon, GA, and grew up in Philadelphia, where as a teenager he sang with doo-wop group The Gainors. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, he had three Top 20 R&B hits, including “Get It While You Can,” written by his longtime producer Jerry Ragovoy and later made more famous by Janis Joplin. But within a decade, Tate had walked away from his career, disillusioned that he wasn’t getting the royalties he thought he deserved. He took up a new career selling insurance in suburban Philadelphia. Then, he said, tragedy struck: A daughter died in a fire, and his marriage fell apart. He drank heavily, then became addicted to crack and other drugs and ended up homeless in Camden, NJ. By the mid-1990s, he got clean, became a minister and eventually led a congregation in Willingboro, NJ. Around that time, Tate’s 1967 album Get It While You Can, considered a classic by soul aficionados, was reissued on CD. In his liner notes, Ragovoy wrote that the singer was probably dead. But in 2001, a chance meeting between Tate and a former member of Harold Melvin’s Blue Notes tipped off the music world that he was alive. And in 2003, he returned to Ragovoy’s Atlanta studio to make Rediscovered, which was nominated for a Grammy. (12/8a)