Moore was born and raised inGreenwood, Mississippi. His mother, a music teacher, taught him how to play thepiano, but she disapproved of her son’s interest in the music he heard beingplayed on the streets. “I wasn’t allowed to play the blues when my mother wasteaching. She just didn’t like the sound of the blues. It just didn’t comparewith church music,” he says.
Though she never came to hearhim perform, Moore smiles and nods knowingly when he speaks of her. “That’sjust the way she was, but she was right in her own way.”
When, in 1951, Moore moved fromGreenwood to Chicago in search of better work, he became the protégé ofRoosevelt Sykes, a celebrated piano player and charismatic performer with arumbling boogie style. “He was the one that really taught me the differentangles of the blues and jazz. I wanted to play like him.”
Sykes wasn’t the only legendMoore encountered in Chicago. “When I first got to Chicago, I met this guy theycalled Muddy Waters and this guy Jimmy Reed,” he recalls.“ There were a bunchof guys like that then. They were making money and everything and I tried toget with them too, but I couldn’t play to the standards.” Moore hit the road,determined to perfect their styles and master their timing.
“I traveled with them to see what they weredoing. So I would listen to them real strong, so I could play just like them.When some of the guys would get drunk and couldn’t make the grade, they wouldcall me in to play and that’s how I got started and eventually I became apretty big man.”
When Moore took the stage atthe Times Cinema on Oct. 24., he was a “pretty big man.” Dressed in a pressedgrey suit, the crowd-pleaser pounded the keys and sang the blues with alifetime of experience behind him. With his soulful vocals and youthfulintensity, Moore brought back the boogie-woogie golden era, only this timeeveryone wanted to play like him.
