The music business tried to kill rock n roll, and keep its retirement money for its own greedy record label self.
It might have worked too, if not for the smash of a powerful class action lawsuit to the proverbial temple of the corrupt work at play.
It took nine years and mountains of legal drama to prove it and make it right in a court of law, but when Joyce Moore discovered that her management client Sam Moore had been cheated out of his retirement payments for being a pioneer of rock n roll, soul, modern country, rhythm and blues, they took it to the house of justice, and they won.
You've heard Sam with Bruce Springsteen, Conway Twitty, Joe Bonamassa, Aretha Franklin, Sting, Clapton, Bon Jovi, Mariah Carey, the list goes on and on.
Go on all the way back to when he started out in Miami talent shows, met a guy named Dave, and hired a sixteen piece band of Cuban horns to follow them around the world as the original blues brothers of "Soul Man," and "Hold On I'm Coming" fame, Sam and Dave.
The record company was illegally withholding disbursements into the Musician's Union's retirement fund, and AFTRA knew about it the whole time and did nothing about it.
Thanks to Sam and Joyce, founding members of the R&B Foundation, artists get paid for and are protected in their work.
It's all connected to the Music Modernization Act which was passed by Donald Trump actually and Sam Moore even performed at Trump's inauguration in 2016.
In Trump's 2024 campaign, usage of the song "Soul Man" and "Hold On Im Coming" was blocked by a copyright claimant on the master recording and songwriters portions of those tracks, which Sam Moore as the performer on those songs had no control over and probably disagreed with completely as an underhanded political move for money by someone in the estate of Isaac Hayes
The industry is only barely catching up to streaming and certain expiration dates for catalog reversions through copyright terminations so it should be a pretty interesting decade, but thankfully Sam and Joyce Moore know they fought to make it right and it worked.
In fact, Sam performed at Trump's inauguration in 2016 and was close with George H.W. Bush too.
