Tiny Moore
Tiny Moore was a western swing mandolinist and fiddler who played electric mandolin with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys from 1946 to about 1950, and later with Merle Haggard and the Strangers. He was mostly known for popularizing the electric mandolin, and from 1952 he played a five-string electric instrument built for him by Paul Bigsby.
He was born Billie Moore in Texas in 1920. He took violin lessons as a boy, played country dances with his uncle, his mother and cousins, and played fiddle and guitar in a school group called the Clod Hoppers until he graduated in 1937. The family then joined his father in Port Arthur, where Moore worked in a grocery store and played popular music with the banjo player Woody Edmunston and the guitarist Jimmy Wyble, copying the music of Benny Goodman. In the early 1940s he worked in a trio with the jazz guitarist Lloyd Ellis, played with Happy Fats and his Rainbow Ramblers on KVOL in Lafayette, Louisiana, led a band called the Jubileers that recorded for Bluebird, and played with the Crustene Ranch Gang in Houston. He took up the mandolin shortly before he was drafted in 1943 and spent two years as a radio operator and instructor in the Air Force.
Back in Port Arthur in the summer of 1946, he came to the attention of Bob Wills, who was playing at the Pleasure Pier, and he spent the next four years with the Texas Playboys. He is on the band’s Tiffany Transcriptions recorded in San Francisco in 1947, playing electric mandolin and sometimes singing, and on its Columbia session in Chicago in October 1947, alongside Eldon Shamblin on electric guitar, Herb Remington on steel, Joe Holley on fiddle and Billy Jack Wills on bass. By early 1950 he was also managing the Wills Point Ballroom in Sacramento, California, and he began playing with Billy Jack Wills on KFBK there. It was during this time that Bigsby built him the five-string electric mandolin, tuned C-G-D-A-E, which arrived in 1952. He recorded with Billy Jack Wills’s Western Swing Band in Hollywood and on radio transcriptions in Sacramento through the mid-1950s, playing electric mandolin and fiddle.
He rejoined Bob Wills briefly in 1955 but would not go back on the road. He worked on local television in Sacramento as “Ranger Roy,” and in 1961 opened the Tiny Moore Music Center there, teaching guitar, fiddle and mandolin.
In April 1970 he played mandolin on Merle Haggard’s tribute album to Bob Wills, recorded at Capitol in Hollywood with former Texas Playboys including Eldon Shamblin, Johnnie Lee Wills and Joe Holley. In 1973 he appeared on The Last Time, the last album Bob Wills took part in, and from 1973 to 1976 he was a member of Haggard’s Strangers. He played electric mandolin on Haggard’s sessions through the mid-1970s, including the September 1974 session at Columbia’s studio in Nashville that produced “Kentucky Gambler,” with Johnny Gimble on fiddle, and he was still recording with Haggard and the Strangers, on fiddle and mandolin, in October 1984.
In 1979 he recorded Back to Back for Kaleidoscope with the mandolinist Jethro Burns, produced by David Grisman, and in 1980 the solo album Tiny Moore Music for the same label. He also played often with Eldon Shamblin and was active in the California Old Time Fiddlers Association. He died after a heart attack in December 1987 while playing with the Cadillac Band at Cactus Pete’s in Jackpot, Nevada.
