Blues artist Arnold "Gatemouth" Moore, one of the few survivors of the Natchez Rhythm Club fire on April 23, 1940, died Wednesday at Kings Daughters Hospital in Yazoo City, Mississippi after a long illness. He was 90.

He was born Arnold Dwight Moore on Nov. 8, 1913, in Topeka, Kan. He claimed he earned the nickname "Gatemouth" because of his loud singing and speaking voice. He graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis in 1938.

The first Angels on the Bluff tour in 2000 featured some of those who died in the infamous “Natchez Rhythm Club” fire and Philip West described the event.

"Walter Barnes and his orchestra from Chicago were coming to town. Walter Barnes coming to Natchez!" West said with emphasis. "Now in 1940 you had your Duke Ellington's and your Woody Herman's, but Barnes well, Barnes was cream of the crop."

West described how hundreds packed into the large wooden rectangular building that was the Rhythm Club, all doors boarded but one. "One way in, one way out." And he went on to tell us how the interior was decorated with Spanish moss which was hung from the ceiling and the walls.

"They covered this stuff in a petroleum-based insecticide to kill all the little critters. Then, as the club filled and the orchestra played someone dropped a cigar or a cigarette and poof! The whole place went up."

More than 200 people were killed in the worst fire disaster in Natchez history. Many are buried at the Natchez City Cemetery.

At the age of 16, Moore went to Kansas City, where he sang with the bands of Bennie Moten, Tommy Douglas and Walter Barnes.

In 1941 he returned to Kansas City where he recorded his first record and wrote such songs as "Somebody's Got To Go," "I Ain't Mad at You Pretty Baby" and "Did You Ever Love A Woman?” which was recorded by B.B. King and Rufus Thomas.

He was the first blues singer to sing at Carnegie Hall, according to a resolution recognizing him at the Mississippi Legislature this year.

He recorded gospel and blues albums into the 1970s. He recorded his last record in 1977 under as "Great R&B Oldies" on Johnny Otis' Blues Spectrum label. This was a blues release as Gatemouth re-cut some classics and cut some new ones including a salute to his old stomping grounds on "Beale Street Ain't Beale Street No More."

Read the articles that the Natchez Democrat published about this tragedy.