Scotty Moore
Guitarist who brought a distinctive finger-plucking style to Elvis’s most dazzlingly original songs
SCOTTY MOORE, who has died aged 84, was the guitarist who with Bill Black on bass made up Elvis Presley’s band for thrilling early recordings such as That’s All Right, Mystery Train and Baby Let’s Play House.
In the summer of 1954, Moore had recently left the US Navy and was starting out with his own group, Doug Poindexter’s Starlite Wranglers, when Sam Phillips, the visionary record producer and owner of the Sun Studios in Memphis, introduced him to a promising teenage balladeer called Elvis Presley. To Moore, the name sounded like something “out of science fiction”.
In early July Elvis turned up to an initial practice session at Moore’s house, flamboyantly dressed in pink trousers with a black stripe, white shoes, and a shiny “ducktail” hair-do. At first neither Moore nor Bill Black were particularly impressed. Black told Moore that the teenage singer, who had been nervous and hesitant, struck him as a “snotty-nosed kid” with “wild clothes”; but, he conceded, “the cat can sing”. For Moore, the boy was “as green as a gourd”.
The following evening the trio – with Elvis on rhythm guitar – went into the Sun Studio. Sam Phillips watched intently from the control room: he was urgently looking for something fresh and vital, but the conventional ballads they started with failed to supply it. After about a dozen takes of the yearning country song I
Love You Because, they decided to have a break.
It was at this point, as Elvis later explained, that a song “popped into [his] mind” and he started “kidding around” with it. It was an old blues number by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup called That’s All Right (Mama). Moore related what happened then to Presley’s biographer, Peter Guralnick: “All of a sudden Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam… stuck his head out and said: ‘What are you doing?’ And we said: ‘We don’t know.’ ‘Well, back up,’ he said, ‘try to find a place to start, and do it again.’ ”
With That’s All Right Elvis infused a traditional blues song with all the qualities of raw vitality, exuberance and freshness that Phillips was searching for – the sort of music, as he put it, “where the soul of man never dies”. He was delighted with the chemistry of the three players, which seemed to have bolstered Elvis’s confidence and given him a new looseness.
He urged Moore, who was a great admirer of the virtuoso style of Chet Atkins, to “simplify, simplify”; Black, similarly, added not fancy riffs but just a powerful bass rhythm. Between them their forceful, propulsive playing made up for the absence of a drummer. One of Phillips’s innovations was his use of a makeshift, electronic echo he called “slap-back”, which contributed to the reverberating guitar sound.
Moore, meanwhile, used a thumb pick to create a fuller effect: “I’m sure on That’s All Right I tried single-string stuff at first. But it sounded so empty. So I slid into thumb, finger and rhythm, trying to stab a note here and there. Actually, throughout all the Sun stuff, I stayed with that technique.”
Initially Moore and Black were not sure what to make of the radically new, ragged and impromptu sound, but, as Moore recalled: “It just flipped Sam – he felt we really had something.” The two guitar players shook their heads and said: “Well, that’s fine, but good God, they’ll run us out of town.”
Within a couple of days a record had been cut, with a rhythm and blues version of a country waltz, Blue Moon
of Kentucky, as the B-side. The renowned Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips (no relation) played it on his radio show – and the switchboard was immediately lit up with telephone calls.
Dewey, excited to have discovered a genuinely new voice and eager to share it with his audience, played the song at least seven times in a row.
Moore recorded many of Elvis’s most dazzlingly original songs at Sun Studios, and his distinctive fingerpicking style would influence a host of later guitarists, including Jimmy Page, the founder of Led Zeppelin, and Bruce Springsteen.
In his autobiography, Life, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones remembered the life-changing effect of listening to Scotty Moore guitar licks on tracks such as That’s All Right, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Mystery Train, Money Honey and Milk Cow Blues Boogie. “Scotty Moore was my icon,” he observed. “I’d have died and gone to heaven just to play like that. How the hell was that done?”
Winfield Scott (“Scotty”) Moore was born at Gadsden, Tennessee, on December 27 1931. His parents were interested in music and he played his first guitar at the age of eight. But it was in the US Navy, in which he served from 1948 to 1952, that his enthusiasm blossomed. He bought a gold Gibson ES-295, an electric guitar designed for jazz but which was to became in Moore’s hands the quintessential “rockabilly” instrument. Later he played a Gibson L5 and a Super 400.
Moore’s touring and recording partnership with Elvis, with Black and the later addition of DJ Fontana on drums, survived the period of Elvis’s spectacular success and move to the RCA label, although his earnings failed to grow in line with the star’s. (In all he claimed to have made a relatively modest $30,000 from his work with the King.) Moore was even, for a time, Elvis’s manager, his reserved and steady personality exerting a benign influence on the young star. Moore played on hits like Heartbreak Hotel,
Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock. But in 1958 Elvis was drafted into the US Army and this meant a hiatus of two years. When he returned to America in 1960 after his tour of duty in Germany he seemed slicker, less edgy and more commercialised.
A fine “comeback” album was recorded and there was a television show with Frank Sinatra, but Moore noticed for the first time that Elvis was relying on powerful prescription drugs to keep going under the pressures of fame. Through the 1960s he worked sporadically with Elvis on the increasingly listless and formulaic film soundtracks which were virtually his only musical output, but they drifted apart and Moore devoted his time instead to running his own studio in Nashville.
Then in 1968 a television special was proposed in an attempt to revive Elvis’s interest in music-making. Bill Black had died a few years earlier but Moore was brought in along with Fontana on drums. The three were recorded for television with a small studio audience, reminiscing, joking around and playing hits of the 1950s in an informal “jam” session. The result was an unexpected triumph: in the company of his old friends Elvis successfully managed to recapture the electricity of his live performances of a decade earlier.
But it would be the last time Scotty played with Elvis or saw him. By that stage Elvis and his management – led by Col Tom Parker – wanted new collaborators, chiefly the brilliant guitarist James Burton, who was hired the following year to lead the band in the Las Vegas live shows which would be Elvis’s bread and butter for the next seven gruelling years.
After that, Moore largely gave up playing guitar (apart from some nostalgia tours latterly) and focused on producing other artists, among them Dolly Parton and Ringo Starr. By now a revered figure in popular music, he published a memoir in 1997, That’s
Alright, Elvis, reissued in a revised edition in 2013 as Scotty and Elvis: Aboard the Mystery Train.
In 2000 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Scotty Moore was thrice married and divorced; he is survived by a son and four daughters.
Scotty Moore, born December 27 1931, died June 28 2016