Moore was born and raised in the Johnson House on 1400 North 12th Street in Fort Smith, Arkansas,[5] and eventually moved to Akron, Ohio, and then Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

[7] He joined the US Army and served in an entertainment unit in Germany, where he was nicknamed the Harlem Hillbilly for singing country songs in an R&B style.

[8] After his honorable discharge he lived in Seattle, Washington and then Los Angeles, where he continued to work in clubs and was discovered by record producer Dootsie Williams.

[6] He recorded rhythm and blues songs for the Federal, Cash, Ball, Kent, and Imperial labels between 1955 and 1962, and released his first comedy albums, Below the Belt (1961), The Beatnik Scene (1962), and A Comedian Is Born (1964).

[8][9] By his own account, Moore was working at the world famous Dolphin's of Hollywood record store in Los Angeles in 1970 when he began hearing obscene stories of "Dolemite" recounted by a local man named Rico.

Moore recorded a number of street poets, including Big Brown who, before he moved to Los Angeles, had been an influence on Bob Dylan, among other artists, while living in Greenwich Village.

[12] In 1970–71 he recorded three albums of material, Eat Out More Often, This Pussy Belongs To Me, and The Dirty Dozens, where "with jazz and R&B musicians playing in the background, [Moore] would recite raunchy, sexually explicit rhymes that often had to do with pimps, prostitutes, players, and hustlers.

[3][4] The character was "the ultimate ghetto hero: a bad dude, profane, skilled at kung-fu, dressed to kill and hell-bent on protecting the community from evil menaces.

His "rapid-fire rhyming salaciousness exceeded the wildest excesses" of Foxx and Pryor,[1] and his highly explicit style kept him off television and major films.

[15] After appearing on a 1995 episode of Martin titled "The Players Came Home",[17] he reprised the Dolemite character for the intro of Busta Rhymes' album When Disaster Strikes...[18] Snoop Dogg's 1999 album No Limit Top Dogg, and Ol' Dirty Bastard‘s 1999 music video "Got Your Money“, in which the rapper was digitally inserted into scenes of Dolemite.

[21] Moore reprised the character Petey Wheatstraw on the 2008 song "I Live for the Funk", which featured Blowfly and Daniel Jordan.

"[1] On June 7, 2018, it was announced that Craig Brewer would direct Dolemite Is My Name from a script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski with Netflix producing and distributing and Eddie Murphy starring as Moore.