Buddy Moss

Eugene "Buddy" Moss was, in the estimation of many blues scholars, the most influential East Coast blues guitarist to record in the period between Blind Blake's final sessions in 1932 and Blind Boy Fuller's debut in 1935. A younger contemporary of Blind Willie McTell and Curley Weaver, Eugene "Buddy" Moss was part of a near-legendary coterie of Atlanta bluesmen, and one of the few of his era lucky enough to work into the blues revival of the 1960s and '70s. A guitarist of uncommon skill and dexterity, he was a musical disciple of Blind Blake, and may well have served as an influence on Piedmont-style guitarist Blind Boy Fuller. Although his career was halted in 1935 by a six-year jail term, and then by the Second World War, Moss lived long enough to be rediscovered in the 1960s, when he revealed a talent undamaged by time or adversity. Moss was one of 12 children born to a sharecropper in Jewel, a town in Warren County, Georgia, midway between Atlanta and Augusta. There is some disagreement about his date of birth, some sources indicating 1906 and many others of more recent vintage claiming 1914. He began teaching himself the harmonica at a very early age, and he played at local parties around Augusta, where the family moved when he was four and remained for the next 10 years. By 1928, he was busking around the streets of Atlanta. "Nobody was my influence," he told Robert Springer of his harmonica playing, in a 1975 interview. "I just kept hearing people, so I listen and I listen, and listen, and it finally come to me." By the time he arrived in Atlanta, he was good enough to be noticed by Curley Weaver and Robert "Barbecue Bob" Hicks, who began working with the younger Moss. It was Weaver and Bob that got him his first recording date, at the age of 16, as a member of...