Dolemite in Indian Territory?!

 

Rudy Ray Moore in Dolemite
From RogerEbert.com

Dolemite! The Human Tornado! Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-in-Law! The Avenging Disco Godfather! Prince DuMarr! The godfather of rap! Rudy Ray Moore was all of this and more. 

Moore was an inveterate entertainer who tirelessly promoted his self-image. The basic outlines of his self-history are laid out in the Eddie Murphy Dolemite Is My Name. That film is a love-letter from contemporary Black comedians to beloved, influential mentor. (In addition to Murphy, Keegan-Michael Key, Craig Robinson, Titus Burgess, and Wesley Snipes star in the film.) 

Dolemite Is My Name opens in the 1970s, when Moore was living in Los Angeles and working at Dolphin's, an historic Black-owned record store. In Moore's telling, a wino named Rico frequently told performed "toasts," humorous and often obscene stories told in rhyme. Moore offered to pay him if he performed one of his routines, the story "Dolemite." Impressed with the story, he developed it and some others he picked up from Rico and other men into a comedy routine. The routine formed the material for a successful comedy record, "Eat Out More Often," and then the film Dolemite. 

Rudy Ray Moore was in his late 40s when Dolemite came out, and the film was the culmination of decades spent working as a performed. Moore had tried working as a dancer, a singer, and a rhythm and blues musician before finding success as the outlandish "blue" comedian. 

While Moore found success in Los Angles, he spent most of his life in the midwest, in cities like Akron, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Toledo. However, he was born in the south. He was born in Fort Smith and spent his childhood in northwest Arkansas. This in itself is unremarkable. Moore was born at the start of the Great Migration, a time when millions of Black people left the south for midwest seeking social and economic opportunities. 

A recently listened to an interview with Moore's biographer (Mark Jason Murray) and realized that his time in Arkansas is somewhat of a mystery. Talking about himself was one of Moore's favorite actives, but he said almost nothing about his family and his childhood in Arkansas. His biographer said that the topic made him uncomfortable, and it was difficult to get him to discuss it. Intrigued, I decided to poke around the available records, and Moore's family background is almost as interesting as Dolemite's!

Rudy Ray Moore's family background

Rudy Ray Moore doesn't exist. Moore's birth name was Rudolph Frank Moore. He was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas but spent most of his childhood in Logan County. Born in 1927 to Nathaniel and Lucile Smith Moore, Rudy was the oldest of seven children. When Rudy was an infant, his father worked as a farmer, but by 1940, he had turned to coal mining. 

Both parents were young, Nathaniel had been born in 1907, Lucille in 1911. I have not been able to find much information about Lucille's parents, but Nathaniel's parents are well-documented. They were John J. and Della Byrd Moore. Della was born and raised in northwestern Arkansas a few years after the end of the Civil War, in 1868. Her parents, Sugh (or Suggs) and Celia Sheppard Byrd, were born in the 1850s. I can't find any information about their lives before the war, but they were almost certainly enslaved and likely worked on small family farms (there were few large plantations in northwestern Arkansas).

John J. Moore is unusual in that details about his life before the Civil War were recorded. He was born in Oklahoma (then Indian Territory) in the Creek (or Muscogee) nation. He was enslaved by a Creek man named Billie Grayson (or Brayson). After the end of the Civil War, he went by the name John Grayson for a numbers of years. In the first years after the war, he moved to northwestern Arkansas. He moved back and forth between Indian Territory and Arkansas from the late 1860s until the 1880s. It was in the 1880s that he and Lucille met and got married. During this period, John, like many freedmen, worked as a farmer, but by 1891, he became active in the church. In that year, he moved to Fort Smith to serve as a church minister. Three years later, he moved to Missouri to preach. 

Nathaniel was one of the youngest children of John and Della. It's unclear where he was born as the extent records are contradictory. Some records state that he was born in Wagoner County, Oklahoma (a city near the Creek Nation), while others state that the was born in Logan County, Arkansas. In any case, the family had moved to northwestern Arkansas when Nathaniel was young.

Rudy Ray Moore's family

Unfortunately, I haven't gotten a copy of Moore's biography, so I haven't been able to find any details about his childhood. It was doubtlessly difficult. Arkansas as a whole was a poverty-stricken state that was firmly in the grip of Jim Crow segregation. Moore was fortunate that his parents had a stable marriage, but he evidently found Arkansas unbearable, and at age fifteen (in 1942), he left his family and moved to Cleveland, Ohio. In later interviews, Moore said that he wanted to escape depressive prospect of spending his life working in the fields. However, I suspect that he also had a falling out with his parents. Although his family otherwise appears to have been closely knit, Moore appears to have had a minimal relationship with them. 

As a teenager newly arrived from rural Arkansas, Moore found work as a waiter and bus boy in hotels. Through that work, he became exposed to the entertainment industry. Cleveland, at the time, was a national center for manufacturing that had a booming economy. The Black population had experienced major growth as Black family in south were drawn to the region by the availability of well-paying factory jobs and relatively mild political climate. An exciting Black entertainment district grew out of this environment, and Moore decided that he wanted to become a part of it. He began performing singing, dancing, and comedy routines in clubs. One of the first characters he played was bare-chested, turban-clad man named "Prince DuMarr." Moore would remain working as an entertainer and performed for the remainder of his life. His biographer recounts that, at the end of his life, Moore was living in a nursing home and regularly performing before other residents. 

Moore's family took an entirely different path. In the 1940s, a few years after Moore left for Ohio, his parents and siblings moved to southwestern Wyoming, likely because his father had found work at a coal mine. They were still living there in 1950, but then the records about them becomes thin. It is clear that the family members became close. Moore's sisters (Geraldine and Della) married and moved away to live with their husbands, but his brothers and parents all settled in the area around Spokane, Washington. Moore's brother were active in the Baptist church. Both Louis N. and Gerald were deacons, while Nathaniel Jr. was a reverend. 

While there feelings went unrecorded, his church-going brothers must have been horrified that their sibling was famous (or notorious) for creating some of the most lewd and vulgar Blaxploitation films of all time. 

There are hints that the brothers maintained some contact with Moore. Moore is mentioned by name in the obituaries for both Louis N. and Nathaniel, Jr. But, after Moore left for Ohio, he appears to have been largely forgotten by the people Moore left behind. A November 4, 2019 article in the Arkansas Times reported that there is no indication in Arkansas towns of Fort Smith or Paris that Rudy Ray Moore once lived there. Many residents have no idea who he is. When the reporter asked the Fort Smith Visitors' Bureau about Moore, a bureau official answered, "Was he a marshal?"

Moore's work in entertainment takes on a new dimension in view of his childhood and his lifelong estrangement from his family. The creation of outlandish characters like Petey Wheatstraw and Dolomite appears as an act of self-invention, a life-long effort by a Black teenager from Arkansas to do more with himself than work the cotton fields. That Moore, only two generations removed from slavery, succeeded in crystallizing the storytelling traditions of Black working class men into a series of independent films is perhaps an achievement almost as remarkable as the fantastic acts of Dolemite.

Sources

1. Koch, Stephen. “Straight Outta Westark.” Arkansas Times, November 2019, pp. 62–64, 66–67.

2. Petkovic, John. "Legend of Rudy Ray Moore: How a Cleveland dishwasher became the subject of Eddie Murphy’s "Dolemite Is My Name." The Plain Dealer, October 20, 2019.