Bob Moore

Moore was born in Nashville on 30 November 1932 and grew up near Shelby Park. At nine he had a shoeshine stand near the entrance of the Ryman Auditorium, and a year later he had formed a band, the Eagle Rangers. At twelve he met Owen Bradley, then playing trombone in the WSM staff band, and by fourteen or fifteen he was playing bass on the road with the Grand Ole Opry duo Jamup & Honey’s tent show. At eighteen he joined Little Jimmy Dickens’s band, and at twenty-three he took a place on Red Foley’s ABC television show Ozark Jubilee in Springfield, Missouri, commuting to Nashville during the week until, after two years, he went back to Nashville for good.

Bradley gave him his start in the studio. In 1950 he hired Moore for a direct-to-disk transcription recorded from the stage of the Ryman, and when Bradley took charge of Decca’s Nashville operation he brought Moore in as a session bassist. Through the 1950s Moore played on Nashville recordings in what came to be called rockabilly, and he became the first-call bassist of the A-Team, the core group of Nashville studio players that began to come together in the early 1950s. In 1958 he played the first of many sessions for Elvis Presley, whose “Are You Lonesome Tonight” he later played on. He was on almost all of Patsy Cline’s Decca sessions from November 1960 to February 1963, including “I Fall to Pieces” and “Crazy,” and he played on Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” Marty Robbins’s “El Paso,” Sammi Smith’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler.” His credits run from Johnny Cash, George Jones, Loretta Lynn and Tom T. Hall to Bob Dylan, Jerry Lee Lewis, Patti Page, Burl Ives and the jazz players Al Hirt and Pete Fountain.

His bluegrass work centers on Flatt & Scruggs. On 29 and 30 August 1953 at the Castle Studio in Nashville’s Tulane Hotel he was the bassist with Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Louis Innis, Curly Seckler and Benny Martin for “I’ll Go Stepping Too,” “I’d Rather Be Alone,” “Foggy Mountain Chimes” and “Someone Took My Place with You,” and on 3 September 1955 at Bradley’s studio he played on “It Won’t Be Long” with Chet Atkins on guitar. He came back to their sessions in the late 1960s, sharing the bass chair with Jake Tullock and others, and played on the August 1969 sessions for their album of Bob Dylan and other contemporary songs, among them “Maggie’s Farm” and “Nashville Skyline Rag.”

Moore was also an investor in Monument Records when the label moved from the Washington, D.C., area to Nashville, and he worked there as a player, arranger, producer and session leader. Original pressings of Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely,” “Crying” and “Candy Man” credit “Roy Orbison with Bob Moore’s Orchestra and Chorus.” Under his own name, as Bob Moore & His Orchestra, he released “Mexico” on Monument in 1961; it spent ten weeks in the Billboard Top 40, peaked at No. 7, topped the Easy Listening chart and went to No. 1 in Germany. In 1960 he was among the Nashville session players billed as the Nashville All-Stars for the Newport Jazz Festival; their set was canceled after a riot at the festival the day before, and they recorded on the lawn of a Newport mansion instead, released by RCA as After the Riot at Newport.

Moore died on 22 September 2021, at the age of 88. He was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame in 2007 with the other members of the Nashville A-Team, and he is also in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame and was honored in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Nashville Cats series. In 1994 Life magazine named him the greatest country bassist of all time, and on his death the Country Music Hall of Fame called him the most-recorded bass player in country music history.