From: "Dik de Heer" Date: Sat Nov 30, 2002 7:14 am Subject: Born To Be With You : Bob Moore BOB MOORE (By Shaun Mather) Born 30 November 1932, Nashville, Tennessee Bob Moore was perhaps the most prolific of all the Nashville A-Team, having played in excess of an amazing 17,000 recording sessions. A native of Nashville, he grew up with country music. On Saturday nights, the nine year-old kid became a shoe-shine outside the Ryman Auditorium, home of the legendary Grand Ole Opry. He was working on local radio a year later, and two years after that was the regular show-shine boy for Jack Drake, the bass player for Ernest Tubb. Drake began to mentor the young Moore, showing him the tricks of the trade and how to tune the double bass. Moore turned professional at 15, joining the band of comedy duo, Jamup and Honey, and also working dates with Little Jimmy Dickens, Cowboy Copas, Flatt & Scruggs and Eddy Arnold among others. In 1952 he was the bass player for Red Foley on the Ozark Jamboree in Springfield, Missouri and part of Marty Robbins' band in Nashville, commuting a thousand miles of single track road every week. As the recording scene expanded in Nashville, he was able to return home and settle down as a session player. His unbelievable portfolio includes hundreds of million sellers, a fraction of highlights being : Are You Lonesome Tonight, A Fool Such As I, Big Bad John, Bridge Over Troubled Water, City Lights, Crazy, Devil Woman, El Paso, Dream Baby, He'll Have To Go, Hello Darlin', King Of The Road, It's Only Make Believe, D-I-V-O-R-C-E, Pretty Woman, Rainy Night In Georgia, Only The Lonely, I Fall To Pieces, Sea Of Heartbreak, She Thinks I Still Care, Six Days On The Road, Sweet Nothin's, The Gambler, There Goes My Everything, There Stands The Glass, Wolverton Mountain, Young Love....... His rockabilly track record isn't what you'd call shabby either, playing on countless '50s electricity charged sessions by the Johnny Burnette Trio, Milton Allen, Melvin Endsley, Johnny Horton, Autry Inman, Wanda Jackson, Janis Martin, Ronnie Self, Johnny Carroll, Conway Twitty and even some cat called Moon Mullican! Chet Atkins, Floyd Cramer and Boots Randolph, as well as most of the A-Team dabbled with their own singles, and Bob Moore was no exception. He scored a world-wide smash with the instrumental Mexico on Monument in 1961. Moore was a partner in the Nashville based label, and served as the arranger for the label's top seller, Roy Orbison. Roy and Bob forged a formidable partnership and their Nashpop sound set new standards for the industry, with perfect records like Oh Pretty Woman, Only The Lonely and Dream Baby. Content to work in the studios, Bob did venture on the odd tour, playing some high profile shows with Elvis each side of his Army stint, and spent large chucks of the '80s touring with Crystal Gayle and Jerry Lee Lewis for whom Moore produced the Rocket album. Recent times have seen him and his fellow A-Teamers receive some long overdue recognition, for it was them as much as the artists that helped create Nashville's position on the musical map. Me and Phil met Bob a couple of years ago, when he came with Joe Leonard to our hotel room on Music Row - he was a real nice guy and even "mooned" for the camera in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame studios a couple of days later! His career is best summed up by himself. "I can imagine how tragic it would be for a man to work all his life and not have access to what he did. I can turn on the car radio, and I can always hear me!" Recommended listening: Any prime time Nashville album is likely to have Bob Moore on it. About the only artists he didn't work with were the Everly Brothers who usually used Lightnin' Chance. For intimate moments chuck on some Big O or Gentleman Jim, for more energetic exertions, put on a Decca rockabilly compilation. Website: http://www.nashvillesound.net/firstindex.html P.S. by Dik : For those who like the Monument recordings by his orchestra (like Henk and me) there is the CD "Mexico" by Bob Moore and his Orchestra on Collectables (18 tracks).