Photos by Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

Moore holds a record of "Dad, Sister and Mother Are Gone," which was written by his wife.

Spencer Moore strums his old Gibson guitar on his front porch near Chilhowie. He doesn't play as much as he used to, but he still knows plenty of old songs.

Spencer Moore's songs were recorded by Alan Lomax in 1959, when the folklorist scoured the Virginia mountains for folk songs.

Moore picks a solo.

CHILHOWIE -- Years ago, Spencer Moore sat down with his brother Joe and compiled a list of all the songs they knew.

The brothers had grown up in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, where old-time mountain ballads bloomed like azaleas and music poured like the trickling headwaters of a major river. They had learned to play and sing the way people have always learned to play in the mountains -- by listening to the songs of their mother and father.

Joe wrote them down. "Ommie Wise," "Burglar Man," "Greenback Dollar," "The Girl I Left Behind" and "Lover's Farewell" were barely a drop in the creek. Joe kept writing, listing songs on blue-lined notebook paper, fronts and backs. "May I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight," "Fire on the Mountain," "Jimmy Sutton." The song titles almost filled a notebook. "Cumberland Gap," "Devil in the Woodpile," "Claude Allen," not to mention well-known standards "Wildwood Flower," "Don't Let Your Deal Go Down" and scores of other ballads, fiddle tunes and blues songs.

"By the time he was all done," Spencer Moore remembered, sounding somewhat amazed, "he wrote down nearly 2,000 numbers."

But again, that was years ago.

"I wouldn't come within a gunshot of a thousand now," Moore lamented.

One thousand songs. Spencer Moore, who turned 89 in February, still sings the songs he's known since he was a younger man. Many of them are about terrible things -- tragedies, gruesome murders and buried children. Southwest Virginia's musical heritage, like its history, is awash in blood. Tales of shootings, natural disasters, lust and drunkenness made up the soundtrack of these hills, as did love songs and sacred numbers. Moore knows them all, or did.

He also knew many of the people who penned some of the old Virginia songs. As a boy, he knew the legendary G.B. Grayson and Henry Whitter and he remembered hearing the news about Whitter's death in 1930. He and his brother played a tent show with the famous Carter Family in the 1930s. He crossed paths with Ralph and Carter Stanley and other Virginia musical royalty.

After a lifetime making music, Moore, too, can consider himself among the greats. One historian called him "a treasure." His musical knowledge is so vast and highly regarded, he was once recorded by famed folk-music expert and producer Alan Lomax, who helped archive America's musical culture. That was 50 years ago, when Moore was still relatively young, but the songs were still old.

Now, Moore is old, too. He still performed publicly until a recent leg injury left him holed up inside his ramshackle four-room house in rural Smyth County.

Still, he's proved as resilient and durable as an old fiddle tune. Recently, a new collection of his songs was released by Tompkins Square (www.tompkinssq.com), a New York City-based folk label that has released albums by legends that include Charlie Louvin and anthologies of great acoustic guitar players.

The self-titled "Spencer Moore" boasts Moore's renditions of some of the best-known mountain folk songs.

"I never get tired of it," Moore said. "Music is what I do."

A step back into time

Moore popped open the guitar case and pulled out his longest-running accompanist -- a well-worn 1950s-model Gibson acoustic guitar with his name embroidered on the strap.

"I reckon I need new strings," he said, almost apologetically, as he fiddled with the tuning pegs and plucked each string with a thumb pick.

Moore's wife, Elma, died a few years ago. He lives alone in the same house they lived in for almost 60 years. He came to this section of Smyth County, a few miles south of Chilhowie, right after World War II, during which he served in North Africa, Spain, Italy and Greece with the 345th Engineering Regiment.

The living room is adorned with artifacts -- a 1982 calendar hangs on a wall adjacent to a poster for a long-ago Chilhowie Apple Festival. A Westinghouse boom box sits on a table where he can still reach it and play cassette tapes of himself. He doesn't have an answering machine, so he still answers his black rotary-dial telephone.

When asked if he remembered the first song he ever learned to sing, he paused just a second and said, "Well, 'Charlie Lawson' was amongst the first'uns."

After minimal prodding, he fingers a D chord and gropes for the words of "The Lawson Family Murders," an unpleasant song about an unpleasant event -- the murder-suicide of a North Carolina family by the father, a respected tobacco farmer named Charlie Lawson (call it the rare Christmas murder ballad).

"It was on last Christmas evening

The snow was on the ground

At his home in North Carolina

The murderer he was found

His name was Charlie Lawson

He had a loving wife

But they never knew what caused him

To take his family's life"

The song is based on a true story, as were most of the grievous "murder ballads" of yore. The phrase "if it bleeds, it leads" could be applied to old songs such as "Poor Ellen Smith" and "Down in the Willow Garden," ballads about helpless women done in by awful men. Moore knows those songs, too.

He has also known personal tragedy. The only child he and Elma ever conceived was a stillborn son.

"The doctor told us not to have any more," he said. Mother and child's chances of survival would not be good. "He said it'd either be her or it, one."

Alma Moore wrote a song called "My Baby Boy Is Gone." The ode to her lost child is a microcosm of all other mountain ballads. The songs are so sad because they are the sound of a community mourning.

Moore tried to remember the words to his wife's song, but like the face of long-lost lover, they would not come to him.

"I'm forgetting a lot of songs," he said.

'A treasure' with no equal

Raymond Spencer Moore was born near Jefferson, N.C., and grew up in Laurel Bloomery, Tenn. Being one of the youngest of 11 children, Moore never had to know many outsiders. The family worked on a farm and entertained themselves with music. His father had been a sawmill hand who played fiddle and his mother sang gospel songs. Moore remembered learning the epic "John Henry" from his parents.

A family friend was G.B. Grayson, the famous blind fiddler who made numerous records in the 1920s with his musical partner, Henry Whitter. Grayson had recently visited the Moores before he died in a car crash on Aug. 16, 1930.

"A man picked him up on the way home and let him ride on the driver's side running board," Moore said. "A truck hit him and killed him."

Moore and his brother Joe formed a duo as teens. Moore attended the famous Whitetop Mountain Music Festival in Grayson County in 1933. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt was there -- her father had lived a time in Abingdon -- and Moore remembered hearing her sing "Three Little Babes," an ancient British Isles ballad that she had learned as a girl.

By the 1950s, the Moore brothers played semiprofessionally. They played on the "Farm and Fun Time" radio program on Bristol's WCYB, the same show the Stanley Brothers helped popularize in the late 1940s.

Moore cut a 45 rpm record for Bristol's Shadow Records in the 1960s. The single featured another of Alma's terribly sad songs, "Dad, Sister and Mother are Gone" (another true story) backed with the cheerier-by-comparison "Please Come Back Darling."

Lomax, the slightly quirky collector of field recordings, came to Moore's house in 1959. He set up his reel-to-reel tape recorder in Moore's living room and captured a few songs. Later, Lomax recorded Moore singing in a tobacco field.

The recordings established Moore as one of the best-known singers of mountain ballads in the South. He might even be better-known nationally than locally.

"He is a treasure," said Vaughan Webb, a historian with the Blue Ridge Institute in Ferrum. BRI recorded Moore for a pair of its acclaimed "Virginia Traditions" album series in the 1970s and early '80s. Webb interviewed Moore in Smyth County in 1984.

"He is a real songster," Webb said. "The nice thing about Spencer was his variety of songs. He sang blues, gospel, some strictly country stuff. ... There may be others who have repertoires that are as equally broad, people who have learned songs off LPs and CDs, but no one learned them the way Spencer did. He learned them at a time when the music business was built from the ground up."

Larry Hogston runs a bluegrass jam session in Saltville often frequented by Moore when he was still ambulatory. He said the crowd misses Moore's songs.

"There's nobody like him," Hogston said. "He's one of my all-time favorites. He knows the way a song's supposed to be sung because he even knew the authors."

He still knows how to sing 'em, even if he doesn't know as many songs as he used to,

"Seems like if you don't play for a while, you lose out," he said. "You forget the numbers and you lose out on your playing, too."

A request was made for "John Henry." He didn't dwell too long.

"Well John Henry was a little baby

Sittin' on his mama's knee

John Henry looked over and seen that little piece of steel

Said, Hammer's gonna be the death of me"

Just like his mama taught him.