Moses Roscoe
Moses Rascoe (27 July 1917 – 6 March 1994) was an American blues singer and guitarist.Moses Lee Rascoe was born in Windsor, North Carolina. His father played harmonica and his mother piano. He got his first guitar 13 first playing the streets and then juke joints. He hoboed around the South and moved to York, Pennsylvania in 1940.
Incredibly it wasn’t until some 50-odd years later that he turned professional. In between, he traveled the roads as a day labourer and truck driver, playing guitar only for “a dollar or a drink,” as he told Jack Roberts in Living Blues.
For most of his life making a living at music was the furthest from his mind. “I heard tell of so many people that had got beat out of their money” Roscoe explained, “that I said forget it. They were’nt going to beat me out of anything”.
But he’d picked up plenty of songs over the years, from old Brownie McGhee Piedmont blues to Jimmy Reed’s ’50s jukebox hits, and when he retired from trucking for the Allied Van Lines at the age of 65, he gave his music a shot. With a mellow baritone voice and finger picking his 6- and 12-string guitars, Rascoe told simple stories in the blues and gospel tradition.
The local folk-music community took notice, as did blues and folk festivals from Chicago to Europe. Rascoe recorded his only album live at Godfrey Daniels, a Pennsylvania coffeehouse, in 1987 which was produced by Radio DJ Gene Shay for Flying Fish records. After which he was in demand, appearing at the Newport Folk Festival and the Chicago Blues Festival.
He continued performing up until he died at the Vetrans Administration Medical Cenrer, Lebanon, Pennsylvania on 6 March 1994. He was buried at Indiantown Gap National Cemetery, Annville.