By the time he moved to Colorado just before the turn of the century, bluegrass mandolinist John Moore had established himself as one of San Diego County’s most influential and accomplished musicians. Born in Oceanside in 1960 and raised in Vista, Moore helped establish San Diego’s surprisingly fertile bluegrass community: He played for decades with the late fiddle/banjo great Dennis Caplinger in the nationally known group Bluegrass Etc., and gave formative lessons to future stars Chris Thile and Sean Watkins of Nickel Creek.
These days, Moore spends a good bit of his time overseas, sometimes playing music but primarily working as an equine clinician — “conducting clinics for riding schools, private organizations, mounted police departments and major equine events,” he explains on his website.
But he almost always finds time to return to Vista every August for Summergrass. With either Bluegrass Etc. or the bluegrass supergroup California, he’s played nearly every Summergrass, held annually since 2003 on the grounds of the Antique Gas & Steam Engine Museum on the northern edge of Vista.
Since Caplinger’s death in 2021, Moore has performed with other bluegrass luminaries under the simple and flexible name “John Moore and Friends.” This year’s bunch includes Kentucky guitarist Rick Faris, Grammy-winning bassist Todd Phillips, Kruger Brothers banjo ace Jens Kruger, and rising-star fiddler Laura Orshaw. The festival runs Friday through Sunday; tickets, $35-$110, are available here.
We spoke with Moore by phone earlier this week for the latest installment of our “Five Questions” series.
1. This is the fifth year you’ve played Summergrass billed as John Moore and Friends, after Dennis Caplinger’s death in 2021 marked the end of Bluegrass Etc. Is the “Friends” lineup constantly changing?
What I do is I’ll call different musicians that I know in the business, so it can be slightly different every year. The bands that I normally performed with (in the past), most of the guys have passed away So I started playing the Summergrass festival as John Moore and Friends, and at other festivals as well. I would get John Cowan from the Newgrass Revival, or Stuart Duncan or Ron Block from Allison Krauss’s band, or Brad Davis from Billy Bob Thornton’s band — different people in the industry that that are well-known in their own right.
2. Did you have any involvement in the Front Porch Music Preservation Society, which created Summergrass in 2003?
Well, probably indirectly. I was born and raised in Vista, and so was Dennis. So there was a bluegrass scene in San Diego County, and in between L.A. and San Diego. The people who have participated in that have grown with it, grown old and retired. Some have passed away, and new generations keep picking it up. I stopped being real directly involved when I left California in January 1998. But the people who did form Summegrass were good friends from the North County Bluegrass Club. One was a former student named Corky Shelton, and Sandy Beesley was also a former student of mine. They were wheelers and dealers and movers and shakers with the bluegrass scene.
I played the festival in one capacity or the other, either with Bluegrass Etc. or the band California with Byron Berline and Dan Crary and John Hickman. I think there’s maybe only been one year that I didn’t play, because I was in Europe. I spend a lot of the year overseas. But Summergrass is a hometown festival for me, and I really appreciate that they let me be involved in it. It’s kind of a homecoming for me every time I go there.
3. Let’s talk a little more about your early days in San Diego County. Were you born in Vista?
Well, I was I was born in Oceanside, actually, in 1960. My folks never lived in Oceanside. It was just the closest hospital. There was no Interstate 5 freeway, and there was no 78 freeway that went from Oceanside through Vista to Escondido. When I was a kid, there was no stoplight in the town of Vista. I remember when they put the first one up on the corner of East Vista Way and South Santa Fe Avenue. It was a rural town.
I don’t know if a lot of people now are aware of it, but there were three brothers that invented the Dobro guitar; the name Dobro comes from the Dopyera brothers. One of them, John Dopyera, had a shop in Escondido called the Fiddle & Fret Shop, and my parents bought my first mandolin from him. So I was playing mandolin, listening to records. I would go down to the music store and my friend Jack Webble would play with me.
Jack told me about a kid in town named Stuart Duncan who lived across town, and he hooked the two of us together. He was already playing with some kids from Oceanside, Jim and Steve Hady. The band was called the Pendleton Pickers because all our parents worked on Camp Pendleton. Then my sister joined playing bass, so we had that little band when we were kids. We played the Grand Ole Opry — I think I was 13, Stuart was nine, my sister was 15. Stuart left town, and that kind of dissolved the band. I played with my sister for a long time, and then met Dennis Caplinger around 1980. He was still in high school; I think I was just out of high school. He and my sister and I started playing together, and it just kind of went from there.
4. You’re often cited as an early teacher of world-class mandolinist Chris Thile. How did that come about?
Chris Thile’s dad, Scott Thile, was a piano tuner, and they had moved into the area. My mother was the president of the music teachers association, and so mom started using him. He’d come to the house and play, or to tune her piano, and he had a little toddler boy. Chris was a year and a half old. When we were in town, Bluegrass Etc. played every Saturday night at That Pizza Place in Carlsbad. A lot of well-known musicians would come in and sit in, and Chris would dance in the aisles. He was real interested in the music.
Meanwhile, Sean Watkins was taking piano lessons from my mom, and Chris started taking mandolin lessons from me when he was three. So he was getting where he was playing pretty good, and they’d come out That Pizza Place and I’d get Chris up to play. Sean got inspired to quit piano; he wanted to take mandolin lessons, and his folks let him do that. So he started taking mandolin from me, and then later guitar.
So Sean and Chris were my students, and we did it for several years. Sara (Sean’s sister and the third member of Nickel Creek) started taking fiddle lessons from Dennis Caplinger. She was three years old when I remember her saying she was going to play the fiddle. Later the Thiles moved to Idyllwild, and Kathy (Chris’s mother) lined up a bunch of students up there for me. I would go up once a week and teach eight or ten students, and then teach Chris. That was in order to keep Chris’s lessons going, until they moved to Kentucky.
5. You had a cameo as a musician in the HBO series Deadwood about 20 years ago. How did you end up on the show?
David Milch was the producer and the writer and everything of that show. I think he got my name from David Ligon at Nickel Creek Ranch (on the Texas-New Mexico border); the Nickel Creek band is named after that ranch. He knew everybody, and they had cast him as Jack McCall’s lawyer. Jack McCall’s the guy who killed Wild Bill Hickok. For season two, Milch was looking for some musicians, and I think Ligon gave him my name.
I was just in one episode; it was the last episode of season two. I did some soundtrack work for them, but in the one where you actually see me, they have a wedding in the bar, and I play the wedding march on an old mandolin while they come down the stairs in the saloon.
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