Rural Music Roots: Spencer Moore's Recordings
90-Year-Old Musician's Early Country Songs Help Preserve History
Mar 2, 2009
In spite of the fact old-time country musician Spencer Moore has played with some of rural music’s earliest greats, including the original Carter Family and blind fiddler G. B. Grayson (1887-1930), the North Carolina artist’s earliest historic recordings aren’t widely circulated.
Dr. Paul Wells, director of the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, said in a Feb. 5, 2009, telephone interview that the now 90-year-old musician has had “an interesting career” and has “a pretty good repertoire,” yet most country-music fans remain unaware of his historic recordings.
With a memorized repertoire of at least 500-600 songs, Moore, whose most recent album was released on the Tompkins Square record label when he was 87, has “been around (the Americana/country scene during his time) and surfaced every few years,” Wells said, including on recordings from the ‘50s that were contained on two series recorded by folklorist/music collector Alan Lomax; namely, on the Atlantic and Prestige International record labels.
Old-Time Music by Spencer Moore Recorded in 1950s and Later
Regarding those recorded sessions, “Lomax did a field trip in 1959 (that resulted in two) series called Sounds of the South and Southern Journey,” Wells explained, “(and) … I think it's all from the same trip. I think (Lomax) got some funding from ... Atlantic to do the field recording,” which included cuts by the Virginia-based artist Moore.
According to Wells’ research, Moore is “credited as Spence Moore on Atlantic and as Spencer on Prestige.” Also, added the music scholar, Moore not only recorded in the 1950s, “but again in the late '70s, '77 and '80, and he's usually singing ballads for the Blue Ridge Institute at Ferrum, Va., College.”
Josh Rosenthal, producer of Moore’s self-titled Tompkins Square album, has called Moore an “increasingly rare living link to our musical past” and “a treasure we all should cherish.”
Early Rural Music Records Valuable to Country Music and Popular Music History
One of the reasons his recordings are indeed historic, Wells shared, is because he is among the old-time or rural musicians who would write, then sing about, real events that occurred locally, helping create an oral history within a given region.
“In the era before mass media and news, this was a way that local songwriters would write about things that made a local impact, like an oral history,” Wells explained. “Some are accurate in terms of maintaining the facts, and in others, they take a lot of poetic license. ...
“In the days before recording, one might print something up on a broadside, like (news of) an execution, and it was a way of recording the news,” he continued.”Once record companies started recording rural music, there were some of these ‘event songs’ that were recorded, and some stuck and some didn't. Then they started recording what became country music.”
Early American-Folk Songs Popular Among Record Companies
As for the rural or early country songs recorded by Moore, “they’re traditional American folk songs,” said Wells, an associate professor of music at MTSU. “Probably the people who recorded him wanted that at the time. He did one known to folk-song scholars as Three Little Babes (The Wife of Usher's Well), but that's not a title that's known in this country. It's a scholars’ title, not something traditional singers called it.”
Moore also recorded a song with origins in Kentucky titled The Murder of the Lawson Family, Wells said, “and I think he calls it The Lawson Murder, and that's a famous real-life ballad. I think that’s where a man murdered his family, his wife and children, and then took his own life after that.”
Tracing the History of Early Commerical Recordings
As for how such songs, and their singers, came to the attention of record companies, Wells said a Texas fiddler known as Eck Robertson gets credit for going to New York “on his own volition,” where he convinced Victor Records into recording him in 1922.
“That's usually seen as the first rural, Southern music recording, an authentic one,” Wells remarked. “Victor didn't do too much to pursue that market at the time, but then when Fiddlin' John Carson (1868-1949), known locally as a character and what not, from Atlanta, Ga., recorded for the Okeh label in 1923, The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane, that was the impetus for record companies to pursue that Southern market, that rural-music market.”
From that point on, he noted, recording Southern artists, with their rural tales set to music, become of interest to record companies, but not because of their historic value or relevance at that time.
“There was very much a commercial impetus behind it,” Wells said of labels’ initial interest in recording these old-time artists, because “they could sell it.”
For more information about musician Moore, please access Artist Profile: Old-time Country's Spencer Moore.
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