Hugh Moore

Hello City Limits was recorded in August 1985 at Star Recording Company in Miller’s Creek, North Carolina, and issued by Folkways Records in 1986. Moore planned it as an instrumental record but kept only two instrumentals, his own “Let It Ride” and “Marshal’s Reel,” the second named for the session’s engineer, Marshal Craven. He played banjo and sang lead on most of the album, with Huffman on rhythm guitar and tenor, Danny Bowers on fiddle, mandolin and baritone, Parks Icenhour on lead guitar, Dale Lee on electric bass and David Johnson on pedal steel, mandolin and bass. The songs ranged from John Elgin’s title track and the Louvin Brothers’ “The Family Who Prays” to “Ashes of Love” and “Pain in My Heart,” co-written by Bobby Osborne, and Moore and Johnson mixed it.

At OMS Records, Moore concentrated on musicians of bluegrass’s first generation and on traditional country singers. Around 2000 he produced Bobby Osborne’s The Selfishness in Man, Kenny Baker’s Cotton Baggin’ 2000 and Johnny Russell’s Actin’ Naturally, and he mixed Josh Graves’s Sultan of Slide; Vassar Clements’s Full Circle and Benny Martin’s The Big Tiger Roars Again followed in 2001, Baker’s Spider Bit the Baby in 2002 and Jeannie Seely’s Life’s Highway in 2003. He was a close friend of Martin’s and recorded a number of his albums in the 1990s.

In 2020 he gathered musicians to record performances from their own studios, which he mixed: a version of “Never Ending Song of Love” sung by Billy Troy, Josh Graves’s son, with Bobby Osborne on mandolin and vocals, Boj Osborne on bass, Ray Legere on fiddle, Chris Sharp on guitar and Allyn Love on steel, with Moore on banjo, followed by a Flatt & Scruggs tribute. In May 2026 he released “Look Down Bluebell,” written by his nephew Joseph Terrell of Mipso, on which Michael Cleveland plays fiddle and Moore sings and plays banjo, guitar and bass, ahead of an album, What the Strings Remember, due later that year.