Biography
Born on February 7, 1919, in North Carolina amid a household of eleven siblings, Spencer Moore developed an early affinity for mountain folk music through exposure to recordings by Charlie Poole, Jimmie Rodgers, and similar artists. His proximity to the acclaimed blind fiddler and singer G.B. Grayson further shaped his musical path. During his mid-teens Moore ordered a guitar by mail from Sears & Roebuck, and by the late 1930s he had formed a duo with his brother Joe Moore, performing as the Moore Brothers; the pair once shared a bill with the Carter Family during a tent show appearance. After military service in World War II, Moore took up tobacco farming while continuing to master new material and perform at neighborhood house parties and dances. In 1959 Alan Lomax captured his playing for the Southern Journey field recordings, a period when Moore also maintained a regular slot on Bristol’s Farm Fun Time radio broadcast. Nearly fifty years later, Josh Rosenthal of Tompkins Square Records encountered a Lomax photograph from that 1959 session showing Moore with his guitar before a field of spiked tobacco; Rosenthal located the musician at his Chilhowie, Virginia, residence and taped him on June 20, 2006, when Moore was eighty-seven. More than seventy years after first taking up the instrument, his debut release, Spencer Moore, appeared on Tompkins Square in 2007. Although he has retired from tobacco cultivation, Moore still performs at local dances and gatherings near Chilhowie, where he is said to hold five or six hundred folk songs in memory, with some accounts placing the total in the thousands.
Albums