Monday music minute: Big Bill Moss

He was too funny to be called "Austin's Leadbelly," though musically it fit.

Big Bill Moss and Allen Damron in 1966. Photo by the Statesman Morgue Archive of the Austin History Center.

The 11^th Door at 1101 Red River, gave Janis Joplin her first paid gig in December 1965, opening for Big Bill Moss, a powerfully-voiced Cleveland native, who played a 12-string guitar and talked almost as much as he sang. This “American Indian Negro of Spanish Jewish descent,” often played in a duo with Allen Damron, the Raymondsville native who managed the Door. There hadn’t been too many, if any, interracial duos before them, but 1966 was the year I Spy went on the air, so why not?

Where the secret agents played by Bill Cosby and Robert Culp rarely, if ever, acknowledged a racial difference, that was part of the Moss/Damron act, with jokes about being a suntanned hillbilly, and the like. The irreverent Moss, who referred to himself as a “vulgar teddy bear,” would sometimes slow down a song and announce “here’s the white part.” He had the big personality to pull it off. “Why don’t you play protest songs?” Statesman music columnist Jim Langdon asked in ‘66. “The only thing I’m against is virgins,” Moss answered, one of many smart aleck replies.

Moss and Damron were also roomates, with a big couch always open to Jerry Jeff Walker during his brokeass drifting days. According to his Gypsy Songman autobio, Jerry Jeff wrote “Mr. Bojangles” at that apartment in ‘67, performing it for the first time at the 11th Door. Damron recorded the song live on the Sept. ‘67 opening night of the Chequered Flag on Lavaca, releasing it as a hand-out single to promote the club. Walker’s version wouldn’t come out until ‘68.

Big Bill tried the Greenwich Village folk scene before Austin, with the great Josh White as a mentor. Then came the troubadour life which brought him to every folk club in Texas- all three. He liked the 11th Door the best, besides someone stole his guitar and he had to stay.

Moss was also a talented photographer, a skill he developed since he was a 16-year-old photo helper for the Cleveland Call & Post. When that became his main source of income in the early ‘70s, he cut way down on performing except at Kerrville each year and the occasional reunion with Damron circa 1980. Moss was also a DJ, “the Moose,” on KNOW, Austin’s Top 40 station.

Moss and Damron were not the first interracial act in Austin. In 1961, New Orleans shouter Joyce Harris told Austin label Domino that she wanted to record with a Black band and they found her Clarence Smith and the Daylighters. That East Austin band consisted of singer/guitarist Smith (who would become “Sonny Rhodes”), Willie Cephas on guitar, Ira Littlefield, Jr. on drums, George Underwood on bass, and Mack Moore on piano. They couldn’t play together live in those days of segregation, but Joyce and the Daylighters sure smoked in the studio! And nobody thought the singer was white until she lip-synced on American Bandstand.