Ballad and folktale collector. A native of Swannanoa, North Carolina, Moser first served
as an informant for University of Tennessee folklorist Edwin C.Kirkland, to whose
influential collection he contributed several ballads. After teaching for a time at
Knoxville, he moved on to a series of educational positions in western North Carolina,
where he continued to contact, and collect from, local singers and storytellers. Using a
portable recording machine borrowed from an Asheville doctor, he made more than 100
field recordings during the late 1930s and early 1940s, including ballads, folksongs, and
fiddle tunes. He also recorded a full text of “Jack and the Heifer Hide” from Maud Long,
a descendant of the famous Harmon-Hicks families, perhaps the first sound recording of
an Appalachian Jack tale.
In 1945 he gave a well-received talk at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, using his recordings as examples, and he was encouraged to bring them to the
attention of Duncan Emrich of the Library of Congress. Emrich loaned Moser a more
sophisticated portable disk recorder and commissioned him to contact and re-record his
informants. The resulting field trip, which occupied the summer and fall of 1946, led to
several hundred recordings being added to the Library’s Archive of American Folk Song.
Moser recorded Maud Long and Asheville revivalist Bascom Lamar Lunsford, along with
many other local singers and musicians.
Moser also attended the 1946 Renfro Valley Folk Festival in east Kentucky, where he
collected material from participants. Among others, he met Jean Ritchie, whom he
recorded for the first time. Many of Moser’s disks were issued by the Library of
Congress, first as 78-rpm singles then as parts of LP albums illustrating Appalachian
folksongs and ballads. Moser was also influential in directing the Library of Congress to
Maud Long’s folktale repertoire, which she recorded soon after while residing in
Washington, DC.
In 1955 Kenneth S.Goldstein recorded Moser’s own folksong performances, which
were later released on a Folkways LP. During his long retirement, Moser became an
accomplished landscape painter; his daughters Joan and Irene Moser also became active
in the local folk preservation movement. His papers and recordings are kept in the Moser
Family Archives, open by application to his family.
Moser was typical of many Appalachian educators who worked independently to
record their culture’s folksong and folktale traditions. He received little support from
grants or institutions, and he published nothing in the way of formal folklore research;
hence, he is little known. Nevertheless, he was a pioneer in using sound recordings to
document both text and texture of the performing traditions he contacted.
Bill Ellis
References
Ellis, Bill. 1994. Roots of Revivalism: Maud Long’s Jack Tales. InJack in Two Worlds, ed. William
Bernard McCarthy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Goldstein, Kenneth S., ed. 1955. Artus Moser: North Carolina Ballads. Sound Recording.
Folkways Records FA 2112.
Johnson, Anne, Andy Garrison, Helen Lewis, and Jerry Johnson. 1985. Artus Moser of Buckeye
Cove. 28 min. Whitesburg: Appalshop. Documentary videorecording.