Shenandoah Waltz · There’s a Big Rock in the Road

Clyde Moody, born in Cherokee, North Carolina, in 1915, first recorded as a singer and rhythm guitarist for Bluebird in the late 1930s. In January 1938 he recorded in Charlotte with Steve Ledford and Wade Mainer. In 1938 and 1939 he recorded at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Rock Hill, South Carolina, with Wade Mainer’s Sons of the Mountaineers and J. E. Mainer’s Mountaineers. At the Kimball House in Atlanta in February 1940 he cut six sides with Ledford and Jay Hugh Hall as the Happy-Go-Lucky Boys, and Bluebird issued three singles from them that year.

He joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys at the Grand Ole Opry in September 1940. At the band’s first Bluebird session, back at the Kimball House on 7 October 1940, Moody sang lead on “Six White Horses” and “No Letter in the Mail”, with Tommy Magness on fiddle and Cousin Wilbur Westbrooks on bass. He also played mandolin on “Mule Skinner Blues” while Monroe played guitar. In 1941 he worked as a duet with Lester Flatt at WBBB in Burlington, North Carolina, then rejoined the Blue Grass Boys from 1942 to 1945. In February 1945 he recorded under his own name for Columbia at WBBM in Chicago, though “Two-Timin’ Blues” was not issued until 1948. In 1946 Bullet released two singles made in Nashville.

His first session for King, around February 1947, was at E. T. Herzog’s studio on Race Street in Cincinnati, with Syd Nathan producing. It produced “Shenandoah Waltz”, a tune by fiddler Chubby Wise to which Moody wrote the words, and Fred Rose’s “There’s a Big Rock in the Road”. King released the pair as King 619 in April 1947. The record was a hit and made Moody “the Hillbilly Waltz King”. Waltzes ran through his King releases after that. “Carolina Waltz” came from a December 1947 session at King’s own studio on Brewster Avenue that produced seventeen sides, and “Waltz of the Wind” from another that month. “Cherokee Waltz” followed in 1949 and “West Virginia Waltz” in 1951. On 17 August 1952 the Delmore Brothers, Grandpa Jones and Red Turner backed him on four sides, and the same session produced gospel records with him as the Brown’s Ferry Four. His last King single appeared in March 1953.

Moody then moved to Decca. He recorded at Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel in Nashville in March 1953 and January 1954, and the first Decca single paired “The Kind of Love I Can’t Forget” with “Mexican Joe”. Later singles appeared on Renown in 1958, on Starday in 1963 and 1964, on Little Darlin’ in 1969, and on Old Homestead in 1972, when he returned to “Six White Horses”.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.