Byrd Moore did play with Tom Ashley and fiddler Clarence Greene in Byrd Moore and his Hot Shots. They were "dicovered" by Frank Walker with Columbia in the famous Johnson city sesions in 1929.

Amazingly Moore recorded or played with:

Fiddlin Powers Family
Earl Johnson
Dock Boggs
Clarence Ashley
Melvin Robinette
Burnette and Rutherford
Clarence Greene and Jess Johnston

A drifter and itinerant musician, Byrd Moore was born (as William B. Moore) in 1899 in Blackwater, VA. A gifted guitarist and singer, he drifted through Virginia, Kentucky, Georgia and Tennessee most of his life, making money as a barber when he wasn't playing music. He lived in Whitesburg, KY where he married in the early 1920's.

When he was in KY he lived briefly with the family of The Fiddlin' Powers and taught Carrie Bell Powers to play guitar. In the mid-1920s he played regularly with Dock Boggs in and around Wise Co. Moore worked regularly and recorded with fiddler Melvin Robinette in 1929. He also spent some time performing with Burnette and Rutherford in Monticello KY.

He recorded for Okeh as a side-man for Clarence Greene and Jess Johnston. During the 1930s he was married to a bootlegger in Esserville, VA. By the 1940s he was burdened by a difficult drinking problem and diabetes. In the late 40s he was found broke and in ill health in a Wise County Poorhouse where he died in 1949.

Richie