I’ll Break Out Again Tonight · Kentucky Girl

Charlie Moore was born Charles B. Moore Jr. in Piedmont, South Carolina, on 13 February 1935. He sang and played guitar, and the Dixie Partners name appears on his first records. Starday bought the masters of a fall 1958 session made at radio station WFBC in Greenville in February 1959. An April 1959 date at WANS in Anderson followed, with Ansel Guthrie on mandolin and Curley Ellis on banjo. Both sessions were gospel and came out as Starday EPs, No Grave and The Crossroads. In June 1960 he cut “Big Daddy of the Blues” and “The Story of Love” at Wayne Raney’s studio in Oxford, Ohio, for the American label.

From December 1962 to October 1966 Moore recorded as a duo with the guitarist and singer Bill Napier. The sessions were at the King studio on Brewster Avenue in Cincinnati, usually with Henry Dockery on bass. Between February 1963 and March 1967 the pair released twenty-one singles, one on Bethlehem and the rest on King. Truck-driving songs recur, among them “Truck Driver’s Queen” (1963) and “Long White Line” (1965), alongside gospel, instrumentals and topical songs such as “Is This a Useless War?” (1966). King also collected their work on LPs, among them Folk ’n’ Hill and Songs by Moore and Napier for All the Lonesome Truck Drivers.

After King, Moore led the Dixie Partners on a series of small labels. “Lorena Go Home” and “Bringing Mary Home” were cut in Demorest, Georgia, in late 1969 for Country Jubilee. At Wango in Baltimore, around 1971, Ray Davis produced “The Rebel Soldier” with Chubby Wise on fiddle. In January 1972 he recorded for Vetco in Cincinnati with Butch Robins on banjo and Paul Mullins on fiddle, and a Starday session in Nashville that October yielded a new “Lorena, Go Home” backed with “Your Letter” (Starday 45-966, March 1973).

From 1973 most of his records were made for Old Homestead, the Michigan label John W. Morris had founded in 1971, at its studio in Brighton. The first sessions produced A Tribute to Clyde Moody, with Curly Lambert on mandolin, Ben Green or Tommy Hunter on banjo, and Terry Baucom among the fiddlers. “I’ll Break Out Again Tonight” comes from those sessions. It was paired on Old Homestead 45-5036 with “Kentucky Girl,” recorded in 1974 for The Traditional Sound of Charlie Moore and the Dixie Partners. The label issued mostly LPs, with three singles: 45-5027 (1973), 45-5036, and “Avery County” (45-5047, 1979). Bill Napier rejoined him for Old Homestead sessions in August 1975 and July 1978. Moore died on 24 December 1979.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.