Between Blind Blake’s final recordings around 1932 and Blind Boy Fuller’s debut in 1935, Piedmont blues changed dramatically, and Eugene “Buddy” Moss is the missing link that explains why. Born into a sharecropping family of 12 children in Jewell, Georgia, with a birth year debated between 1906 and 1914, Moss taught himself harmonica by immersion, busked on Atlanta’s Decatur Street by 1928, and was pulled into his first Columbia session in December 1930 with Curley Weaver and Barbecue Bob as the Georgia Cotton Pickers. When Barbecue Bob died of pneumonia in late 1931, Moss taught himself guitar, partnered with Blind Willie McTell, and in January 1933 recorded 11 released sides in New York for ARC, more than his mentors got from the same sessions.

This episode explains how his bouncier tempo and relaxed vocal delivery made the intricate Piedmont style accessible, how his 1934 recording evolved into the standard Hey Lawdy Mama, and how his fee doubled from $5 to $10 a song by 1935 while he recorded 15 songs in a month with Josh White. Then the story collapses: in 1936 he was convicted of the shooting murder of his wife and imprisoned for six years. After Blind Boy Fuller died in 1941, manager J.B. Long and Columbia Records sponsored his parole to fill the vacancy, but his October 1941 comeback sessions with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee produced only three released tracks before wartime shellac rationing, the 1942 musicians’ union recording ban, and shifting tastes toward electric blues shut the door. Moss spent twenty years on tobacco farms, driving trucks and running elevators until a 1964 backstage visit with Josh White at Emory University sparked a partial revival, including Newport in 1969. He died in Atlanta on October 19, 1984, at 70, still largely forgotten.

• How a teenage harmonica player from a sharecropping family got into a 1930 Columbia session with Atlanta’s blues veterans
• Teaching himself guitar after Barbecue Bob’s death and out-recording his mentors in New York in 1933
• The stylistic bridge from Blind Blake to Blind Boy Fuller and the origin of Hey Lawdy Mama
• The 1936 murder conviction and a parole sponsored by a record label that needed a replacement star
• Shellac rationing, the 1942 recording ban, twenty years of manual labor, and the incomplete 1960s rediscovery