Lee Moore

Walter LeRoy Moore came into the world on 24 September 1914 in Circleville, Ohio, and passed away on 17 August 1997. As a youngster he picked up guitar and later added dobro, launching his career with the travelling troupe known as the Yodelling Texas Cowboys. During the mid-1930s he performed with the Mountain Melody Boys and subsequently joined Buddy Starcher’s Mountaineers as vocalist at WRHS in Charleston. In 1938 he wed Juanita Picklesimer, born 1917, and the pair began working as a duo. Over the following years they built a following on stations such as WHIS in Bluefield and WHMN in Fairmont, West Virginia, WSVA in Harrisonburg, Virginia, WROL in Knoxville, Tennessee, and WPAQ in Mount Airy, North Carolina, before settling in 1949 at WWVA in West Wheeling, where they became mainstays of the Wheeling Jamboree.

Moore cultivated a cowboy persona that included wearing a brace of Colt revolvers onstage, yet the couple’s sets ranged across popular ballads, country numbers, and religious material in which Juanita particularly shone. Their son Roger Lee Moore, born 1940, joined the act while still very young. From 1953 through 1969 Moore hosted a four-hour late-night country program on WWVA that earned him the moniker the Coffee Drinking Night Hawk. Their earliest recordings appeared in 1953, and Moore gained notice for his rendition of “The Cat Came Back,” which served as his theme. The couple divorced in 1960; Moore remained on the Jamboree alone until 1974, when, after a second marriage that also ended and a third that followed, he moved to Troy, New York. There he continued appearing at events across the Northeastern states into the 1980s before largely withdrawing from regular performing, aside from occasional shows.

Across his career he cut material for various imprints, among them the Canadian ARC and the German Cattle labels, yet his chief contribution lay in his extensive radio work. In 1983 Cattle issued a collection of previously unreleased RCA Bluebird sides.