Cecil Moore

about

Cecil Moore was born on a farm six miles from Luling, TX on July 5, 1929. He began playing music in the late forties with Clarence ‘Sleepy’ Short, a fiddler who’d worked with some of the top bands in Houston and San Antonio. As a duo, Cecil and Sleepy appeared at area nightclubs like The Bluebird Inn in Kingsbury and the Shamrock Inn in Luling. The Korean War put Cecil’s music career on hold for a couple of years, but by 1953 he was out of the military and forming his own band, The Notes, who took up residence at the Flamingo Club in Seguin, holding down a regular gig there for a few years in the mid-fifties. Charlie Fitch had been aware of Moore for some time, but for whatever reason did not record him until 1958 (and only then after Cecil agreed to help finance the session). Moore recorded Walkin’ Fever and (I Lost My) Little Baby at ACA in Houston on March 22, 1958. Sales of the single were encouraging and for the next several years, Moore became a steady presence for the Sarg Label and the South Texas music scene. In 1964, Moore recorded the instrumental tune Diamond Back that went on to become the single most successful Sarg record. The response upon its initial release on April 7, 1964, was immediate. Of the radio stations that issued their own charts, Diamond Back hit the Top 10 in San Antonio, Houston and Austin. Atco picked the record up for national distribution and sold several thousand records. The attention Moore garnered from Diamond Back was inevitably brief, b

why this is interesting

# Cecil Moore This body of work captures an understudied corner of mid-century Texas music—the regional dance hall sound that flourished between mainstream recognition and local legend. Moore's recordings document a musician navigating postwar Texas, blending Western swing influences with the dance rhythms that kept small-town venues alive. What emerges is historically significant precisely because it resists easy categorization: neither fully country nor jazz, neither metropolis nor backwater, but something distinctly rooted in place. The craft here rewards close listening—the instrumental interplay, the regional dialect in phrasing, the sense of a working musician solving problems in real time for real audiences. It's a reminder that American musical history extends far beyond recording

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