Clyde Moody

Clyde Leonard Moody was born in Cherokee on 19 September 1915 and grew up hearing the local string-band music. Brother duets were popular in country music when he was young, and in the mid-1930s he and Jay Hugh Hall, a brother of Roy Hall, formed the Happy-Go-Lucky Boys on WSPA in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He played rhythm guitar with a thumb and index-finger style of his own. His first records were made for Bluebird at the Hotel Charlotte on 27 January 1938, with the fiddler Steve Ledford, Hall and the banjo player Wade Mainer. With Ledford and Hall he joined Wade Mainer’s Sons of the Mountaineers, who worked regularly on WPTF in Raleigh, and he sang lead on their Bluebird recordings of “Farther Along” (1938) and “Sparkling Blue Eyes” (1939); in February 1939 he also recorded with J. E. Mainer’s Mountaineers. On 5 February 1940, at the Kimball House in Atlanta, he, Ledford and Hall recorded six sides for Bluebird as the Happy-Go-Lucky Boys, among them “No Letter in the Mail Today,” with Moody singing and playing mandolin and guitar.

In September 1940 he joined Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys at WSM and the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, at a time when the band was still a string band and Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs had not yet arrived. At Monroe’s first Bluebird session, again at the Kimball House on 7 October 1940, with Tommy Magness on fiddle and Cousin Wilbur Wesbrooks on bass, Moody played rhythm guitar and sang lead on “No Letter in the Mail,” “I Wonder If You Feel the Way I Do,” his own “Six White Horses” and the quartet “Cryin’ Holy unto the Lord.” On “Mule Skinner Blues” and “Dog House Blues” Monroe played guitar and Moody the mandolin, the only time a Blue Grass Boy other than Monroe played mandolin on one of his records. In 1941 Moody left to sing duets with Lester Flatt on WBBB in Burlington, North Carolina, and in 1942 he rejoined Monroe, staying until the mid-1940s, when he went out on his own as a solo act on the Opry.

His solo recordings began for Columbia in Chicago on 20 February 1945, followed by Bullet in Nashville in 1946. In February 1947, at the E. T. Herzog studio in Cincinnati, he cut his first session for King Records with Syd Nathan producing, and its “Shenandoah Waltz,” backed with Fred Rose’s “There’s a Big Rock in the Road,” became his best-known record and earned him the names “the Hillbilly Waltz King” and “the Genial Gentleman of Country Music.” More waltzes followed on King through the early 1950s, among them “I Waltz Alone” and “Carolina Waltz” (December 1947), “Cherokee Waltz” (1949) and “West Virginia Waltz” (1951), along with country ballads such as “Next Sunday Darling Is My Birthday” and “Too Young.” In the late 1940s he moved to Washington, D.C., to work for the promoter Connie B. Gay, and he appeared on television there in 1948; he later had a daily television show in Raleigh. On 17 August 1952 he recorded for King with Alton and Rabon Delmore, Grandpa Jones and Red Turner, both under his own name and as a member of the Brown’s Ferry Four. Decca recorded him at Castle Studio in Nashville in 1953 and 1954, including “The Canadian Waltz” and “The Spanish Waltz.” In 1955 he toured with the young Elvis Presley.

In the late 1950s he left music for a few years to sell houses. He came back in the early 1960s: in 1962 the Baltimore record man Ray Davis recorded him alone with his guitar, singing gospel songs and old favorites (issued in 1989 by Rebel as White House Blues), and in September 1963 Starday recorded the album Songs That Made Him Famous, produced by Tommy Hill. Aubrey Mayhew produced a more modern country album of waltzes for Longhorn in 1965, with Hoot Hester on fiddle and Kenny Buttrey on drums. As the folk revival drew older performers onto festival stages, Moody played the first bluegrass festival, at Fincastle, Virginia, in 1965, and became more active in bluegrass. In 1972 he returned to Nashville and played bluegrass and country there for the rest of his life. For Old Homestead he recorded Moody’s Blues: Bluesy Bluegrass (1972), with a new “Six White Horses” and “Shenandoah Waltz,” A Country Tribute to Fred Rose (1976) and Early Country Favorites (1979) with Tommy Scott, and the same label issued Charlie Moore’s A Tribute to Clyde Moody in 1973. He performed at the White House three times.

Clyde Moody died in Nashville on 7 April 1989. His career had run from old-time duets and string bands through the first years of the Blue Grass Boys to the country crooner of the King years, and in 2011 he was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame.