Dave Moore
Evolution of a Folksinger
by Maureen Brennan

It all began with a tin sandwich in a Christmas stocking in Iowa. At the age of 20, Dave Moore pulled his first harmonica out of a festive sock, and life was never quite the same. Shortly after the holidays, he took a road trip with a friend. They didn't have a radio in the car, so Moore provided the music round-trip with his new Christmas toy.

He didn't grow up listening to the blues and the great harp players, but a rather typical mix of ambient music. "It would be two things," he said. "The stuff that was just on the radio in the late 60s, the hits and the music our family listened to around the house. The records I remember are Louis Armstrong, Johnny Cash, Roger Miller, and some rock 'n' roll records. I was pretty much a regular kid as far as what I listened to.

"When I started to play harmonica, I played tunes that were easy to learn. I had no inkling that there was any kind of history of American music, or that the stuff I heard at home came from anywhere else. I played 'Oh Susannah' and 'Swanee River.' But then as I got deeper into it, and got completely ensnared by the instrument, I started to explore and see who else was playing it, to ask for advice."

Moore worked many jobs and traveled extensively before coming to music. He spent a couple of years at a couple of different colleges and traveled widely throughout the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, and parts of Latin America, including Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. As he traveled, he found work as a fruit-picker, a plumber's assistant, a shop clerk, a lumberyard worker – whatever jobs were available in the places he wanted to be.

The traveling and assorted jobs didn't stop when he started to play the harmonica, but the instrument had definitely cast its spell. "I really think that from the first few days or weeks after I began to play the harmonica, I knew that it was definitely the largest interest in my life," Moore explained. "I was fascinated by Latin America and the third world in general, and I think a lot of these jobs I was doing were a way to get by as I learned the music. I still entertained some idea that maybe somehow I would get involved in – I didn't know, the Peace Corps or something out of the country – I was drawn to out of the country. But when I came back to the States from Colombia and formed a blues duo, that's when I knew that this was going to be the main thing. I didn't have any idea what it was going to lead to, or what it was going to be like, or how hard it was going to be, or how fun it was going to be. I didn't have any idea that I would play guitar or write songs; it was just, for me, it became pretty much everything."

As his obsession for the harmonica grew, it was only a matter of time until he found the great blues players. "It wasn't at all like 'I'm going to be a blues harp player,' " he concedes. "It was completely a fluke that I got this harp and I began to play it, and I couldn't stop playing the thing. I was working at a bookstore at the time, and this guy suggested Sonny Terry, and that was a good choice, because all his records, audio-wise, were good and clear and accessible for somebody hearing this music for the first time, as opposed to if you just started off with some old recording of a scratching 78. But pretty soon I was into all the great old harp players – Sonny Terry, Sonny Boy Williams, Big Walter Horton, and that whole bunch of acoustic and electric players."

Moore's first gig was at a fraternity house in Palo Alto, California. "It was probably only a year after I began," Moore said. "I was living in this rooming house, and this guy heard me playing. He had a blues band, and he asked me to sit in with the band. They were playing a fraternity gig at Stanford, so I went along and played. It was kind of amazing to just play harmonica on a stage."

For a number of years, he continued working a wide variety of non-music jobs, and sitting in on musical sessions where he could. His researching and listening to harp players led to his picking up the guitar as well. The harp was often accompanied by guitar, or the duos or bands he was sitting in with featured the guitar. "I was just drawn into it, as well. I can't remember exactly what year it was; I think I was around 27 or 28. I just holed up, listening to blues tapes, and traveled around when I could to hear the music, and try to pick it up. So, it kind of became those two instruments."

Part of the time, when Moore was first learning the guitar, he was living in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, and he took occasional lessons from a Chiapas guitarist with an American ragtime repertoire. At another time, he headed to Louisiana, working for a while on an off-shore oil rig and scouring the Mississippi Delta for bluesmen to listen to, play with, and learn from.

Moore's first recording, Juke Joints and Cantinas, came out of a prize he received at a small folk festival in Avoca, Iowa. "It was a folk-singing contest," he remembered, "and the prize was 12 hours of studio time in Chicago. We had a deadline in which we had to use the studio time. At the time, I had just begun to perform on guitar and vocals. I had a trio with a bass player and drums. I didn't know exactly that I was going to make a record; it was just, use the studio time and get the experience. I had played on other people's records, but I had never really done my own thing. So we just went in, and we played the tunes that we'd been doing. We did the whole record in 12 hours, but then it was like, 'Oh yeah, we've got to mix.' So I bought another day and we stayed around to mix."

Musically, things were moving pretty fast for Moore around this time. On his frequent returns to Iowa, he discovered a thriving folk music scene. One of the musicians Moore kept crossing paths with was Greg Brown. "Sometime in the late 70s, I finally came back to Iowa City, and I began playing with Greg with some regularity. I was playing with some other duos and trios around the area, and that would be the time when I really began as a full-time professional."

Without too much nudging, Moore can wax philosophically on the subject of Iowa as a modern mecca for folk music. "I tend to be a real patriot about East Iowa musicians; and I don't know if that's because it's a uniquely cool music scene or if it's because it's such a surprise to people, that I wind up defending it. All I know is that, apart from blues influences, the second main influence for me is these people in this area. I'm not clear why there is stuff going on, but I could speculate. Maybe part of it is that Iowa City is a college town, and some people from the small towns were drawn here; but it's far enough away from any big city that it didn't end up being a stepping stone to another place. So people just put down roots here and played within the community. That dynamic can be good for music. Other than that, it's been a place that, especially in the early years, the business end of it took second place to the music end, and that can be good for music, too," he laughed.

"The bottom line is that I really don't know, but I'm associated with some people that I'm really proud to be associated with. And maybe it's just a coincidence that we all live in this little area here."

One of the biggest fans of Juke Joints and Cantinas was Garrison Keillor of "A Prairie Home Companion." Greg Brown had become something of a regular on the radio program, and he often brought Moore along to do some of the shows. "I always get a kick out of Juke Joints, but Garrison really dug it, so he began to ask me and the band I had at the time to come on. And that was most of the work I did in the couple of years following Juke Joints. We did the show up there lots, and traveled with them when they went on the road, as well."

On his travels, Moore always listened to the music around him. He became smitten with conjunto music and headed to San Antonio, Texas, to give it a better listen, and, once again, to see what he could pick up. Some of his early efforts on the accordion made their way onto Juke Joints and Cantinas. "If I look at it critically," he said, "the accordion stuff on the record has got a lot of energy because I was so enthralled with that music, but it doesn't have a lot of technique. These were just some of the tunes I learned. We had begun to play them in the trio, and people got a kick out of them, so when we went in the studio, we used them."

In the summer of 1985, while the first record was in production, Moore went back to San Antonio on a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He received the grant to study with the great conjunto accordion player Fred Zimmerle. In 1987, he received a second grant from the Iowa Arts Council. "In between those grants, every chance I could get to go to Texas, I would go down there, and Fred and I would hang out. He was really a mentor in a lot of ways, and the only teacher I ever had on anything. But over the years, more than anything, we were just good friends."

While in Texas playing conjunto music, Moore began writing some of the original songs that would appear on his second recording, Over My Shoulder. In the five years between Moore's first two CDs, he refined his craft. He went from the talented amateur playing covers to a working professional with original songs and tunes. "It was a big change," he said. "I had begun to write. I was performing mostly solo, and it just became what I did in that five-year period. Vocally, I began to find my way a little bit with Over My Shoulder. That was the thing that probably took me the longest to come to, and I think I'm still looking for a voice. It became more of a singer/songwriter record; and the conjunto playing, I think, got a little more interesting."

One of the ways that Moore practiced the songwriting craft was through working with budding songwriters in Iowa's schools. "I may have dabbled with songwriting just a touch when I was learning guitar, but it really came in when I began to write tunes with grade school kids and 'at risk' kids. There was this work to be had for the Iowa Arts Council writing tunes, and I hadn't done that kind of work. But I applied to do it, and I got the gig. The first songs I wrote were with kids. I wrote about what they wanted to write about. I thought, 'It's sort of like the harmonica; this is more than a chore, it's a pleasure.'

"The Arts Council had me all over, small towns, nursing homes, prisons, but the bulk of it was in elementary schools. Of all the groups I ever worked with, it was the 'at risk' kids that were most interested to write songs. Not to romanticize them, but a lot of them, in their alienation, had already been drawn to music – rap music or heavy metal, usually. Just because I was playing acoustic music was not a real problem; they just knew that it was a guitar and that I did this for a living, and it sounded cool. Another thing about them is that they have a real depth of experiences that a lot of people don't really have – interior lives that are kind of spooky and full of cobwebs that cry to get out. It was kind of a natural pairing, and it surprised me as well that they would be so interested in the process."

Several years ago, while Moore was touring the Over My Shoulder recording on the East Coast, he carried along a few cassettes of "Elmo, The Hungry Overhead Projector." The tape contained songs written by Iowa schoolkids, interspersed with a couple of bluesy harmonica tunes. Sometimes, to the delight of his audiences, one or two of those songs would make it into the live shows. Moore doesn't work in the schools much anymore, although he would like to put together a kids' record one day.

While the five years between Juke Joints and Cantinas and Over My Shoulder may have seemed a long stretch, it would be another nine years before Moore recorded his new CD, Breaking Down to Three. Moore had been set to record a new album in 1994, when he and his wife lost a daughter in infancy. When he began to tour again, he stayed closer to home and family. He also did some field research for the Smithsonian Institution when Iowa had its sesquicentennial (150th) birthday celebration. ut of that project, he produced a recording for a local Mexican group. In the ensuing years, Moore kept performing, playing and writing more songs.

Released in September 1999, Breaking Down to Three contains 10 of those songs. They are entirely original compositions, most of them autobiograpical in a way that a novelist might include slices of his own life to give his tale authenticity and believability. When he took these songs into the studio, Moore gathered a crew of Iowans around him to produce and record the backings. "Nothing against non-Iowans," he said. "I just think it really felt right. These are all the people I've been playing with. They all have families, most of them have kids; even the person who did the photographs (Sandy Dyas) is local. It kind of solidified in that direction when Bo Ramsey and I began to work together." Ramsey, also an Iowan, has toured extensively with Greg Brown and Lucinda Williams' band; he's also produced several of Brown's recordings.

"I was pretty confused about how to proceed," Moore said. "Not just in deciding on this group of songs but how to go about it. Bo was a big help with that. I couldn't say enough about the support I got from this group who played on it [Rick Cicalo on bass, Steve Hayes on drums, and David Zollo on piano] and the support from Bo as a producer. There were many times in pre-production, and during the sessions, when I was just real glad these guys were all my friends."

With music, musicians, and producer chosen, and studio time booked, all should have been smooth sailing. Yet, the first day they were scheduled to record, Ramsey woke up with a herniated disc. The day was lost, and Moore began to think, "Well, I guess I wasn't supposed to make a record in '94, and I guess I'm not supposed to make one now.

"Bo decided we should go forward and do it. We all got out of our separate rooms and hunkered down together. We just really only had the one day when the band was there, and we had to let it fly. We had the tunes arranged pretty well. The first day we were going to start with 'Let's Take Our Time and Do It Right' because that made sense as a first song. But by the second day, when we actually got going, we started out with 'Magic Dust' because it was pretty clear we were going to need some magic to get through this. The drummer said it was like starting 20 points behind in a basketball game, and we really had to pull together to pull it off."

In the song "All the Time in the World," Moore explores the concept that we don't always have all the time in the world to live our lives, and no one knows that ahead of time. It was a particularly personal song in its approach, for Moore to include on this CD, but its message crosses all human boundaries.

Some of the songs on Breaking Down to Three had to have been difficult for Moore to record. He agrees that they were, not just for him, but for all the musicians. "A lot of the songs, I think, really hit them, and they brought a lot of commitment to it. I think you can hear it on the record — at least I can. I don't know what other people are going to think as to whether it's a good album, but it carries a certain spirit to it. Maybe I'm just romanticizing the session itself, but for me, it was almost as important what we went through to make the record as what ended up being the record. The session itself almost reflected the path the songs took."

The final test of the strength of this recording and the songs themselves might just be whether they can be performed live. "It's interesting because when I was in pre-production, I looked at these songs, and I said to my wife a number of times, 'I don't know if I'm ever going to want to sing half of these songs.' But I have been doing them. Part of the reason is that some of the song performances that we did on the album are so unlike what we thought they would be. 'Midnight,' in a way, was so unlike what I thought it would be, I almost had to relearn it. Other songs are emotionally kind of moving to me. I decided that, when I feel like doing them, I'm going to do them. So far, I've been performing them all."

Breaking Down to Three carries the same indomitable American spirit as Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath or Sally Field holding up the handmade "Union" sign in the film Norma Rae. Dave Moore may have started out without any knowledge of the history of American music, but he's learning fast and creating a history of his own through his original songs, populated by and set in the breadbasket of America.