Moses Rascoe Day
Moses Rascoe (born July 27, 1917 in Windsor, NC, died March 6, 1994 in Lebanon, PA) got his first guitar in North Carolina at the age of 13 and turned professional in Pennsylvania some 50-odd years later. In between, he traveled the roads as a day laborer and truck driver, playing guitar only for “a dollar or a drink,” as he told Jack Roberts in Living Blues. 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 at the age of 65, he gave his music a shot. The local folk-music community took notice, as did blues and folk festivals from Chicago to Europe. Rascoerecorded his first album live at Godfrey Daniels, a Pennsylvania coffeehouse, in 1987.