This week in 1961, cartoonist James Thurber died in New York City at age 66, California’s most destructive fire was raging thru Hollywood Hills, U. S. advisors in Viet Nam reached 16,000 and a Tennessee musician was making music history with a song about “Mexico.”

 

Music historians have said that if one copy of every record on which Bob Moore  performed were placed end to end, they would line both sidewalks of the one-mile stretch between Owen Bradley Park and Belmont College along 16th Avenue, Nashville, Tennessee’s  famed Music Row.

 

The musician holding this distinction is bass player extraordinaire Mr. Bob L. Moore, who, with over 17,000 recording sessions to his credit, may well have played on more recordings than any other musician in the world.  Bob's talents are heard on literally hundreds of million selling records that feature some of the greatest legends in music history.

 

LIFE MAGAZINE (special edition September 1, 1994) named Bob Moore as the number one "Country Bassist" of all time but many recognize Bob Moore as the being the best "all around" Bassist of all time. His musical experiences are as diverse as having worked on a Big Band for twenty years, performing by invitation at the Newport Jazz Festival and recording with Arthur Feidler and The Boston Pops.

 

In the early days, Bob Moore worked on the road with acts that included Elvis Presley, Red Foley, Connie Francis and Brenda Lee.

 

Bob Moore was hired to  work the Ozark Jubilee with Red Foley  in 1952. But being on the road wasn’t easy. Working simultaneously with Red Foley in another state and with Marty Robbins in Nashville, Tennessee  was exhausting work.  Marty Robbins and Red Foley even re-arranged their performance schedules in order to use Bob and other band members who worked for both artists.  

 

Bob commented, “ I was commuting a thousand miles every week for two years when I was working with Red Foley in Springfield, Missouri, and with Marty Robbins in Nashville, and that was before freeways when you had to drive two lane roads all the way."

 

Owen Bradley was a moving force in the Nashville record business in the 1950’s. Moore's big break came when Bradley joined Decca Records.  He played on records with Patsy Cline, Brenda Lee, Chet Atkins, Rex Allen, Ernest Tubb, Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn, Eddie Arnold, Bobby Darin, Floyd Tillman, Faron Young, Web Pierce, Lefty Frizzell, Connie Francis, Bobby Helms and many lesser known artists who are now considered, among the young audience, to be "rockabilly" treasures. These include artists such as Johnny Burnette, Ronnie Hawkins, Johnny Carroll, Johnny Horton, Ronnie Self, Warren Smith and others.

 

He added, "In one year, I did almost three hundred record sessions just for Mercury Records alone-- four (three-hour) dates a day, six or often seven days a week.”

 

Moore developed the reputation as a “take charge” kind of guy in recording sessions and that did not go unnoticed by record producer Fred Foster, who hired Bob as music director for Monument Records.  Moore is the guy responsible for that “throbbing” sound on those chart topping Roy Orbison records many years ago. In the meantime, Foster decided to record Moore as an artist on his own and the result was “Mexico,” which was written  by Boudleaux Bryant. 

 

His Monument Records single “Mexico” was pop music’s number one single the week of October 2^nd, 1961.

A winner of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Science's Superpicker Award many times, Moore also won the NARAS organization's highest musician award, "Most Valuable Player", during most of the years in which this award was presented. NARAS (the Grammy People) formerly presented the Superpicker Award to those musicians whose work generated the most hit recordings, and the "Most Valuable Player", as one NARAS spokesman put it, was given to a musician whom they chose as "The one you would most like to have on the most important record session of your career."

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