Charlie Moore

Charles Benjamin Moore Jr. was born in Piedmont, South Carolina, on 13 February 1935. He learned from the country performers who broadcast from the South Carolina upstate, and he sang in a smooth style closer to Red Smiley and Clyde Moody than to the mountain singers of bluegrass. In the mid-1950s he worked on radio and television in the western Carolinas. His first records, four gospel songs cut with the Dixie Partners at radio station WFBC in Greenville in the fall of 1958, were bought by Starday early in 1959 and issued on an EP, and a second Starday EP followed from a session at WANS in Anderson that April.

In 1960 he was joined by Bill Napier, formerly of the Stanley Brothers, who played banjo, lead guitar and mandolin while Moore sang lead and played guitar. They worked on television in Spartanburg and in Panama City, Florida, and began recording for King in Cincinnati on 28 December 1962. That first session produced “Truck Driver’s Queen,” which Moore and Napier wrote; issued as a single in September 1963, it became their best-known record and was covered by other artists. By October 1966 they had recorded about 108 numbers for King, issued on nine albums that ran from gospel (Grand Ole Opry Hymnal, 1964) and trucking songs (Songs by Moore and Napier for All the Lonesome Truck Drivers, 1965) to Country Music Goes to Viet Nam (1966). Their “I Believe in the Old Time Way” was later sung by Ola Belle Reed and her family. Napier and Moore went separate ways in the late 1960s.

Moore worked as a disc jockey for a time and in 1970 started a new Dixie Partners. He recorded an album for Country Jubilee, two for Vetco in 1972, among them Sings Good Bluegrass with “I’m Leaving Detroit” and “Barbara Allen,” and one each for Wango and Leather, and another album for Starday that was never released. In January 1973 he made an album with Don Reno, and the same year he began a long run of albums for Old Homestead in Brighton, Michigan. The fourth of them, The Fiddler (1975), has him singing lead and playing guitar and bass, with Ben Green on banjo, Larry Jefferson on mandolin and Johnny Dacus on fiddle, on “The Legend of the Rebel Soldier.” The Country Gentlemen had already recorded the song, with Charlie Waller singing, in December 1971 for their Rebel album The Award Winning; Moore’s version became his signature song and was included in The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music.

His own “Kentucky Girl,” cut in 1974 with Curly Lambert on mandolin and Terry Baucom on fiddle, came out as an Old Homestead single with “I’ll Break Out Again Tonight,” and Larry Sparks recorded it in 1986 for his album Classic Bluegrass. Napier rejoined Moore for some of the later Old Homestead sessions, the last of which, in July 1978 and January 1979, became Cotton Farmer (1980). Moore died on 24 December 1979, at the age of 44, and Old Homestead issued two more volumes from his tapes, Country Music Memories, in 1981.