UPPER NORTH FORK–Ian Moore is a busker, no doubt about it, and you get that sense right away, even if you can’t quite put a finger on it.
He has that sort of buzzing, sharp air of a border collie, but without the obedient routine or the seriousness. And come to think of it, you can usually tell what a dog is focused on, which isn’t always true with Ian.
Still, the parts fit.
Ian Moore, fiddling
“Busking” is a term not so familiar in the hills, except as it smacks of something you do in the back row of a theater, or maybe when the corn comes in. It’s common enough out in the world, though.
Buskers are street performers, and Moore is one of those, in spades. If entertainment were a porkpie hat, Ian would wear it. He’s a fiddler, a dancer and a singer, a storyteller and a musicologist. He learns things obsessively, wears vintage clothing well, and is comfortable in the company of just about anybody.
His stock in trade is the Appalachian fiddle, and Moore comes by it naturally, if not natively, because for him it’s an outgrowth of the traditional Irish tunes that first paid his rent. He plays with abandon, often dancing and singing at the same time, and children flock to him.
He’s become a familiar sight in the southern mountains, playing everything from coffee shops to train depots to gated communities. And he’s a regular in Asheville, playing the busking and paying-gig scene with or without a band. He hosts a standing Tuesday night open jam at Guadalupé Café in Sylva. He’s written and performed for the Asheville Ballet.
Still, you might wonder where to find the corner of Upper North Fork Road and “street performer.” Well, it lies with the colorful story of Moore, who has been frum-round-here for about a decade.
Ian Moore grew up in Queens, New York, son of a Broadway cellist. He learned classical music and dance early, but rebelled and nearly dropped music altogether in his teen years. Friends talked him out of it, though, and recruited him to bands until he was playing two Irish pub gigs a week.
Add those funds to what you can make on the street, throw in a dash of frugality, and you’ve got a New York living.
Street performers can make good money, and it’s a sink-or-swim environment that hones skills. Plenty of performers of eventual conventional fame started on the street, from George Burns to Bob Dylan to Robin Williams.
Moore played New York subway stations and street corners, and was a regular on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He played impromptu with Mayor Rudy Giuliani, respectfully at St. John’s Cathedral and hungrily during a standing gig at a cheese shop on 9th Ave.
“Right there among the dried sturgeons and smoked mozzarella,” he recalls.
But then came the redhead.
After a chance meeting at a wedding, Faye Holliday, eventual founder and owner of Sylva’s Spring Street Café, lured Ian southward. Theirs was a union made on a tinker’s bench, and it lasts until this day.
Moore arrived in Jackson County in his mid-twenties, having never driven a car.
“Knowing Irish music leads naturally to Appalachian fiddle tunes,” he says. “But knowing how to ride a bike doesn’t help you learn how to drive a car.”
With the explorer’s sense of a big-city boy, he roamed the mountains, his vehicle dented at every fender and shedding clumps of weeds at the bumpers.
Soon he was in his element, playing with many Sylva area string bands in the music-rich late 90’s. He dusted strings with bands called Pignut Hickory, Big Tasty and the Roots and the Diamond Cutter Stringband. Most memorably, though, was a band called Smoky Mountain Drum and Bass, an experiment in cookery, with jazz musicians, DJ’s, old-time balladeers, jam rockers and more, that created a sound with an unlikely coherence. The band was a favorite at festivals but was short-lived, there being too many chefs in a crowded kitchen. One off-shoot, though, called the Moolah Temple Stringband, still performs.
Moore’s longest-running gig has been with the Asheville-based band The Ribtips, with whom he has performed in various capacities since early in the decade. A favorite on the Asheville busking scene, the Ribtips are essentially a “skiffle” band – a jug band without the jug – that combines stringed instruments with homemade instruments and vocals in a sound that mixes jazz, blues and old-time stringband influences.
Where does the future lie for Moore? Since he and Holliday are most at home here, he admits they’re likely to stay rooted. But Holliday sold her successful restaurant in 2006, and she and Ian are quite comfortable with how the world is morphing global. They’re as self-reliant over the borders of countries as the borders of counties, you might say. They spent a few months last year in Montreal on a whim, and are frankly liable to pop up just about anywhere.
Still, though, even after a decade, Moore sees the Southern Highlands with relatively fresh eyes, and finds his inspiration here.
“[When I play I want to sound like] scraps of wood and old, papery, dried-out lakebeds,” he wrote recently, in his understated way. “Like night frogs on the first of May, hazy noontimes on the sides of summer highways, and markets set up in disused parking lots.”
Nashville, here he doesn’t come.
There’s no shortage of rattlesnake lore in the mountains, nor rattlers themselves, although they’re pretty shy and tend to stick to the high ground. We’re blessed with only one species, the timber rattler, and although that snake is potentially quite dangerous — it’s large, has long fangs and lots of venom — it has a relatively mild disposition.
