A little after noon on New Year's day 2001, the Rev. Howard Tate was standing in line at a ShopRite grocery store in Willingboro, New Jersey, waiting to buy a bottle of barbecue sauce, when he ran into an old friend. "I was surprised to see him," remembers Ron Kennedy, a former singer with Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, with whom Tate had toured in the Sixties. "I told him, 'Howard, there's people trying to find you, man. I think they owe you some money."

For the previous few months, Phil Casden, a DJ at a Philadelphia oldies station, had asked listeners to call in if they knew of Tate's whereabouts -- or if he was still alive. Though never a major star, Tate is one of the masters of Sixties soul, "the missing link between Jackie Wilson and Al Green," as Elvis Costello has put it. His 1966 debut, Get It While You Can, is a spectacular showcase of suave, muscular, gospel-powered singing, heavily influenced by Sam Cooke, with a joyous, shrieking falsetto that became Tate's trademark. The record produced three radio hits, and B.B. King, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix all covered its songs. But it didn't sell well, a fact that Tate's producer and co-writer, Jerry Ragovoy, blames on releasing it on the jazz-oriented Verve label. Tate's second album, Reaction, got an even more limited release, in 1969. Tate and Ragovoy recorded together again in 1972, but that album flopped worse than Get It While You Can.

Then, not long after the 1972 release, Tate vanished. For the next twenty-nine years, he never contacted anyone associated with his music career -- not Ragovoy, nor his record labels, nor any of the musicians he recorded and toured with. He worked for a while selling life insurance, then slid into drug abuse and homelessness. When Tate ran into Kennedy at the supermarket, Tate had no idea that his music -- and his mysterious disappearance -- had made him a cult hero. By the mid-Eighties, says Ragovoy, when people called looking for Tate, "I'd tell them, 'I've tried to find him. I wish I could help you, but I have a feeling that maybe he died.' "

During those ruinous years, the worst of which Tate spent on the streets of Camden, New Jersey, he says he did nearly die several times. But in 1994, he had a religious epiphany, cleaned up and devoted his life to helping other drug addicts get straight. He took a job as the minister of a small church in southern New Jersey and says he never contemplated a return to singing. "I walked away from the music business so long ago," Tate says, sitting on a battered, floral-pattern couch in the living room of his two-room bungalow in rural New Jersey. "I just couldn't take it anymore. After I left, I didn't ever listen to records or the radio. If I walked into a store that was playing music, well, I just walked back out."

Word of Tate's reappearance spread fast, and a week later he got a call from Ragovoy, now seventy-three, a heavyweight producer who worked with many of the finest Northern soul singers and wrote some classic songs, including "Time Is on My Side," made famous by the Rolling Stones. The two met for lunch in New York and decided to try making another record. "I didn't know exactly what to expect," Ragovoy says. "But as soon as he started to sing, I nearly fell off my chair. That voice was all there. I thought, 'This guy's amazing,' and I told him so."

Even after all these years, it seems, Tate and Ragovoy still rely on each other. "I always loved Howard's voice," says Ragovoy, "and when I was writing other songs, not knowing where he was, somehow I'd hear Howard's voice in my head. I guess you could call him my muse."

In July, Tate released Rediscovered. Some of Ragovoy's compositions stray into corny territory, but for the most part the album is a formidable return from one of the last great original soul men. Tate's voice is bright, expressive, shaded with warm, smoky textures. His delivery has mellowed over time, but it's also more confident, charged with electricity and emotion. Even with age, the falsetto is all there. He nails ballads and midtempo grooves best, especially "Either Side of the Same Town," co-written for Tate by Costello, and "Don't Compromise Yourself," which Tate sings with the heartbreaking sincerity of a man who knows what happens when you do.

When Tate decided to make a nonreligious album, the church kicked him out and evicted him from the large middle-class home it had supplied as part of his salary. Last year, Tate and Tiger, his three-year-old tabby cat, moved to this cramped, thin-walled cabin on the Rancocas Creek, where Tate fishes for catfish and bigmouth bass. "I catch some big ones back here," he says, sitting on a wooden platform above the slow-moving brown water with Tiger at his feet.

Tate is dressed in black polyester slacks, a white undershirt and scuffed dress shoes. He wears large gold-frame glasses and has the same jet-black Afro and warm, goofy grin as he did in photos from the Sixties. Except for a prominent belly, Tate looks surprisingly un-aged, boyish at sixty-four.

Inside, we sit around a glass coffee table littered with soda cans, newspaper clippings, photographs and scraps of paper with phone numbers. The TV is turned to CNN, on mute. Tate slouches into the shabby couch that also serves as his bed. Tiger falls asleep on the floor nearby.

This morning, he taped an interview for NPR; tomorrow, he'll talk to CNN. Most of the media coverage has portrayed Rediscovered as the happy ending to a long, troubled story. Tate recognizes the feel-good story line, and most of the time he plays along with it, but in other moments he acknowledges serious conflicts about this comeback. "I'm very lucky to have this chance, I know that I'm blessed," Tate says, "but sometimes, when I really start to think about it, well, I don't have such a good feeling inside."

Tate grew up singing in his father's Philadelphia church and joined a local gospel group, the Bel Airs, as a teenager. One of the Bel Airs, Garnet Mimms, had recorded a hit, "Cry Baby," with Ragovoy, and he introduced the two. "Ain't Nobody Home," the first single Tate and Ragovoy recorded, was a radio hit in Atlanta, Detroit and several other cities in 1966. Tate was living in Philadelphia with his wife and baby daughter, working as a cement mixer. "One day I came home, and there's a limousine parked out front," he remembers. "I was in my work boots, caked with cement -- my face was as white as this envelope -- and this man, I think he was a promotions guy, got out of the limo and said, 'Howard, get in the car. You gotta go to Detroit right away. Your record is taking off, it's Number One.' "

Tate said he would quickly shower and change, but the man told him there was no time. "He counted out ten $100 bills in my hand," Tate says. "That was more money than I'd ever seen. So we left."

In Detroit, Tate went shopping for a suit. "I saw a thirty-nine-dollar suit that looked real shiny to me," he says. "I got that and some five-dollar knob-toed shoes. I figured I'd keep all that other money and take it home." That night, Tate showed up to the club in his new duds. That's when he realized he'd made his first showbiz mistake. "Marvin Gaye went on first -- I think he had a show somewhere else later that night -- and that man had a suit on that had to cost a thousand dollars!" He laughs. "And the shoes he had on had to cost three or four hundred! They were patent leathers, man, you could see your face in 'em. He had a rock on his hand big as this," he says, making a fist.

"I was about to go on," he continues. "The women were screamin' and hollerin,' tryin' to get to me -- tearin' at me. But when I got on the stage and all the lights hit me with this cheap outfit on, I saw all these women just stop, with this big disappointed look. Oh, you'll never know how embarrassing it was."

Tate never made that mistake again. With his friend, singer Joe Tex, as fashion consultant, Tate bought six mohair suits, patent leather shoes and a diamond watch and ring. The record label paid for it, as well as a Cadillac. But Tate says that's all he ever got.

Like most black performers of the Sixties, Tate went out as part of a traveling show on the chitlin circuit, sharing a bus with Mary Wells, Aretha Franklin, Jackie Wilson, B.B. King, Percy Sledge and Freddie Scott. "The first tour was a hundred and five one-nighters," he says. "They grabbed you when the record hit the charts with no money, they put you on the bus, and they took all your money. It was a flimflam every which way.

"I never needed the chitlin circuit," Tate goes on. "But I had no manager. Nobody lookin' out for my interests. You gotta take time with an artist. It takes a lot of work. Superstars are built."

When Tate got off the road, he expected to see royalty checks. They never came. "I called the record company, and they tell me, 'Jerry got to give it to you, we can't do nothin'.' " (In an arrangement typical then for black artists, Tate had signed a production deal with Ragovoy, who was signed to Verve.) Ragovoy is aware of Tate's suspicions -- for both men it is a sore spot in an already fragile relationship. Ragovoy insists the reason Tate didn't get paid is because his music never made money. He estimates that a ninety-nine-cent single in those days had to sell 150,000 copies to turn a profit. "I told Howard, 'You can't make royalties until we pay back,' " he says. "I did the best I could to explain, but Howard was very strong-headed, and he believed he was being cheated."

Frustrated, Tate went looking elsewhere for help. The bus driver on one of his tours told him about a management company that could get him paid. "He said, 'Lloyd Price can get your money.' " Price was a singer with several hit records who had started his own record label, Turntable, and a club with the same name at Fifty-second and Broadway in Manhattan. So Tate drove to the city to meet Price and an associate, Harold Logan. Tate and Logan took a taxi to Ragovoy's office. When they got there, Logan asked Tate to wait outside. What happened next is not something Tate or Ragovoy likes to talk about, but both acknowledge that Logan pulled a gun on Ragovoy and demanded that he give Tate the money the singer believed he was owed. "It was a mess," Tate says. "When I saw that, I says, 'Look, I don't go for that.' I didn't say it too loud or too forceful either, because I was scared." Not long after, Tate got a call from Logan late one night. "He said, 'Howard, I got your money.' " They arranged to meet the next day. A few hours later, Tate's phone rang again. It was the FBI. Logan had been shot in the back of the head in his office above the Turntable club; his jewelry and cash had been stolen. "The FBI told me, 'You were the last person he talked to,' " Tate says. "They said the killer had to be there when you were talking to him."

Remarkably, Tate and Ragovoy put aside their differences to record a second album, in 1972, this time for Atlantic. The record, while not as stunning as Get It While You Can, is soulful and sophisticated, and it includes several songs -- "It's Your Move," "She's a Burglar" and "8 Days on the Road" -- that Tate sings in his powerhouse live performances today. While the album was being recorded, Atlantic's chief soul producer, Jerry Wexler, left the company. The label chose one of the weakest tracks, "Keep Cool (Don't Be a Fool)," for the single. The album tanked. "We got caught up in the transition at Atlantic," Tate says softly, "which was another bad break for Howard Tate."

Not long after that, Tate just walked away. He took a job selling life insurance at Prudential to support his growing family (Tate and his ex-wife, Clara, had six children), but his life was unraveling. In 1978, a fire burned down his house and killed his youngest daughter, Sondi. Tate was burned on more than forty percent of his body while trying to rescue her. "When I lost my daughter," he says, "that was a very devastating thing. That, and the music, both just had a really, really devastating effect on me. The combination, it was just more than . . ." He pauses. "You know, a person could commit suicide."

His marriage was falling apart, and Tate was drinking heavily. Then he tried cocaine. "I had this young, pretty girl on the insurance route," he says. "She came out in a nightgown one day and said, 'You wanna take me to lunch?' She was all dolled up and lookin' good and smellin' good, and I said, 'All right, I'll take ya to lunch.' I should have nixed it." Tate began seeing the woman regularly. One afternoon, the woman's brothers came over with some coke. "I said, 'Well, let me just try a little bit.' So I gave him forty dollars, and it started from there. It only takes one time. I wanted it more and more, and every day I needed it more and more. And then one day I tried that pipe."

Tate continued to work for Prudential until 1984. "I remember going into the office one day and somebody said, 'Why you losin' all that weight?' I went into the men's room and looked in the mirror, and I realized I must have lost seventy, eighty pounds. It had never occurred to me."

Tate left the office that day and never returned. "They never fired me," he says. "I just never went back. I called in sick, used up my sick time, and then I called in and put in to withdraw my pension. I withdrew that and spent all that on cocaine, too.

By 1985, Tate was homeless, crack-addicted, sleeping in shelters, alleyways and cardboard boxes. During the entire nine years he was homeless, no one ever recognized him as Howard Tate the soul singer, and he never told anyone. "Some of them might have known my name, but they never associated that with me being no recording star," he says.

In 1994, in the throes of drug withdrawal, Tate says he had a religious vision, and he never went back to the pipe again. He cleaned up and started a drug-outreach program on the same streets -- sometimes even visiting the same crack houses -- where he'd spent his worst years. He became the minister of the Outreach Ministry and Church in Mount Holly, New Jersey. "I was very comfortable," he says, perhaps longingly, "living in a $200,000 home, with all kinds of credit cards."

These days, despite his return to singing, Tate lives humbly. He still hasn't seen any back royalties from his early records, and no money is coming in from the new one. His credit cards are "exploded," and he gets by on a small Social Security check. He acknowledges that it was strange to perform on David Letterman, celebrate with filet mignon and cheesecake paid for by his label and sleep in an upscale Times Square hotel, then return to this life the next morning.

Still, touring is picking up. His second and third albums have recently been reissued, and his manager is trying to put together a European tour. In the meantime, Tate spends his days fishing, reading the Bible, doing community outreach and watching his favorite TV shows, Gunsmoke and Divorce Court. He's in contact with his ex-wife and sometimes has dinner with her and their children, ages twenty-nine to forty-four. Tate is no longer interested in fancy cars or mohair suits, but he hopes to make enough money to buy some land and start a center to house and rehabilitate drug addicts. "I asked the Lord for $5 million," he says, "but if I can come up with $500,000, I'll get a farm and get it off the ground."

Though his anger about the business and his resentment of Ragovoy often bubbles to the surface, he says that God has given him the strength to forgive and the perseverance to keep going. He says he's at the peak of his power, and he's pretty convincing when he says that this time it's all going to work out. "You see, when I was a young man I just had a big voice," Tate says. "Now I know how to sing. I know when to exert power on certain parts of the song. I know how to lay low and sort of cruise the ladies, as you might say." He laughs. "I call that 'singin' intelligence.' I know what I'm doin', and I know that I can get what I've always wanted. That comes from all the experiences I've had, all the frustrations and disappointments. And it comes from intelligence, see. Right now, I'm singin' smart."

(From RS 936, November 5, 2003)