Buddy Moss

Complete Recorded Works (16 January 1933 to 23 October 1941)

Vol. 2: 19th September 1933 – 11 August 1934

Buddy Moss, vocal / guitar; Curley Weaver, guitar. Buddy Moss, vocal /guitar

Genres: Blues, Country Blues, Georgia Blues, Piedmont Blues, Country Blues Guitar, , Ragtime Guitar, National Guitar

Abridged from this album’s original booklet notes. During July and August 1934 Buddy Moss cut eighteen titles over five sessions, with all but one of them being subsequently released. To gain an appreciation of how valuable, or otherwise, Buddy was to his record company as a potentially large seller of records, his contracts of the time indicate that he was paid $5 for each selection. By the end of the following year that payment had been doubled to $10. It has often been commented that Buddy Moss was the most influential East Coast bluesman to record in the years between Blind Blake‘s last session and Blind Boy Fuller‘s first. Listening to these solo items it becomes fairly apparent where some of the sources of Fuller’s musical ideas, as well as some of his vocal technique, were found. This is best exemplified by Some Lonesome Day where the mode of singing and guitar style are very proto-Fuller. This recording is markedly different, both in lyric and approach, to the song of the same title of 21 September 1933 on which he is accompanied by Weaver. To carry the Blind Boy Fuller analogy further, the meter of Dough Rollin’ Papa is exactly that used by Fuller for his hugely successful, I’m A Rattlesnakin’ Daddy, recorded the following year. Being in a solo setting and without the instrumental constraints of others seemed to alter Moss’s singing style. His vocal developed a deeper, more sullen, tone at times reminiscent of Leroy Carr at his more languid. In turn this brought about an introverted almost desolate air to his recordings. Indeed this may have been purely a reflection of the mood of the man himself. There does seem to have been, over several sessions, a preponderance of such themes as sexual frustration, death, misery, sleepless nights, infidelity, alienation etc, so perhaps such a hypothesis is not that so from the mark. The Blind Blake inspired Insane Blues found Buddy Moss ill at ease with the world,

“Blues and trouble, I mean they will drive you wild. They won’t only drive you crazy, they’ll make you commit suicide”.

While the East Coast favourite, Trick’s Ain’t Walking No More, though maintaining a ragtime tempo, had a vocal more in keeping with the moody, magnificence of Lucille Bogan‘s recording rather than those of his Piedmont contemporaries. In Jinx Man,  BuddyMoss sounded like a man constantly dogged by unstable relationships, laying the blame for such failings firmly at the door of a jinx,

“I’m just a mistreated man and the jinx is on poor me. Since my baby left me, seems like the whole world down on me”.

Alan Balfour Copyright: 1992 Document Records

DOCD-5124