It was blinding.

I’ve done a lot of Western Swing music throughout my career.

By age 15 he was playing double bass on a tent show tour with a Grand Ole Opry musical group, and at 18, he accepted a position touring with Little Jimmy Dickens.

I picked up and left.

I love him very much.Peter Lewry is a freelance music journalist and photographer.

He reluctantly embraced electric bass, not using the one he owned until "Jim Reeves wanted it on something, and I had bought one from somebody and I think it was in self-defense.

There was a huge crush of people.

"I'm sittin', watchin' and hearin' every bit of this and playin' at the same time. True enough.

Called me over to his table, complimented me, shoot!

Great song.

We thought we were doin' country music, then later on, it got defined as rockabilly."

Born : November 30, 1932 in Nashville, Tennessee. Moore, Garland, Randolph and other A-Teamers accompanied Presley on his 1958-62 Nashville sessions and onstage at his 1961 Hawaii concert.

After the Opry relocated to the Ryman Auditorium in 1943, he hung around the backstage door, where musicians and officials befriended him, occasionally inviting him inside.

Jack Drake was kind to me. They usually let me pick my band. At the time he wasn’t on a label so it was produced as a speculative project.

Interior remodeling accidentally left the hut with such superb acoustics that "the Quonset hut turned out to be the big cheese," Moore says.

He was the one who taught me how to pull an upright bass string with conviction.

6

"The bad thing," he says, "is I had to play electric bass.

I was something new; I was a player, not a comedian," he asserts.

In 1946, the group performed in rural areas outside Nashville and on WGNS radio in Murfreesboro with singer Bob Jennings.

Mom Upchurch's boarding house on Boscobel Street, popular with struggling musicians, was home base. It was all we had ever known. Killing Yourself to Live: A Journey from Darkness to Light .

WSM became a classroom for Moore, who hung around for "Noontime Neighbors."

We didn’t think we could risk losing our studio work. Then, when he turned 18, Moore was offered a position to tour with Little Jimmy Dickens, which he accepted. It was an amazing event. Moore taught himself, but during Saturday shoe-shining at the Ryman, he threw musical questions at customer Jack Drake, bassist with Ernest Tubb's Texas Troubadours. Some user-contributed text on this page is available under the 2 tracks

There’s no finer man on the face of this earth.

Bob Daisley's Hamer bass in Hard Rock Cafe Prague, 2011. This was with ‘Paul Howard and the Arkansas Cotton Pickers’.Bob: Brilliant musicians developed the Nashville Sound with the guidance of Owen Bradley.

Columbia's Don Law, Capitol's Ken Nelson and RCA's Steve Sholes had Moore on their first-call list, leading to his charter membership in Nashville's original A-Team.