THOM MOORE webpage

Thomas Lanning Moore was born on December 6, 1943, in California, the third son of a heavy-equipment operating engineer from the island of Santa Catalina, off Los Angeles. After the war, his mother, who was by nature a romantic and a reader of Isak Dinesen and Lawrence Durrell, persuaded her husband to take employment in East Africa and the Middle East, so he spent his formative years in Ethiopia (1950-53) and Lebanon (1955-61). After graduating from the American Community School in Beirut, he entered the U.S. Navy and served four years as a journalist on the staff of the Pacific Fleet commander in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. While in the Navy he married Kathleen Mary Donahey, his first wife. Their daughter, Erin, was born in Hawaii in 1964. He entered the University of California, Los Angeles, after getting out of the Navy in 1965, not soon enough to avoid service in Vietnam. He took a bachelor's degree Magna cum laude in Slavonic Languages and Literatures in 1969 and a master's in the same subject in 1970.


BIOGRAPHIC DETAILS Thomas Lanning Moore was born on December 6, 1943, in California, the third son of a heavy-equipment operating engineer from the island of Santa Catalina, off Los Angeles. After the war, his mother, who was by nature a romantic and a reader of Isak Dinesen and Lawrence Durrell, persuaded her husband to take employment in East Africa and the Middle East, so he spent his formative years in Ethiopia (1950-53) and Lebanon (1955-61). After graduating from the American Community School in Beirut, he entered the U.S. Navy and served four years as a journalist on the staff of the Pacific Fleet commander in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. While in the Navy he married Kathleen Mary Donahey, his first wife. Their daughter, Erin, was born in Hawaii in 1964. He entered the University of California, Los Angeles, after getting out of the Navy in 1965, not soon enough to avoid service in Vietnam. He took a bachelor's degree Magna cum laude in Slavonic Languages and Literatures in 1969 and a master's in the same subject in 1970.

He moved himself and his family to Ireland in 1971, settling near the town of Sligo. With his wife and another American couple, Rick Epping and Sandi Miller, he formed the band Pumpkinhead in 1973, performing a mix of original material and Irish traditional music. The only recording released by the band was in 1975, the very first release (LUN-001) of the Bothy-Band house label Mulligan, but the band itself was dissolved a year later. He then founded a new group, Midnight Well, including the vocalist Janie Cribbs, the guitarist Gerry O'Beirne, and the accordionist Mairtin O'Connor, which also recorded in Ireland with Mulligan Records (LUN-011), in 1977. Vicissitudes of various shapes and sizes ensued at this point, among them his divorce from his first wife in 1978 and the breakup of Midnight Well shortly after. He returned to California in 1979 and found himself an instructor of English grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary at a college in Van Nuys, a position he held until July 1987. Then the coming Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty convinced him to refresh his Russian language capabilities, which he did courtesy of the U.S. Navy Reserve, after which he went to work for the newly formed On-Site Inspection Agency (OSIA) as an interpreter-escort for Soviet inspectors coming through Travis Air Force Base in northern California. The entire period he was in California in the 1980s he was writing songs and performing weekly in Pasadena with the Irish-music band Train to Sligo (Personnel: Jerry MacMillan, Janie Cribbs, Gerry O'Beirne, Paulette Gershen, Judy Gameral, Thom Moore, Cait Read, et al.). One of his songs, The Crooked Road (Carolina Rua), was made popular by the Irish singer Mary Black in the summer of 1989, and he decided to return to Ireland and resume his musical career in the fall of that year. Fate intervened in the form of a job offer with Hughes Technical Services Company as an interpreter-inspector at the INF permanent-monitoring site in Votkinsk, a manufacturing city in the Udmurt Autonomous Republic, on the European side of the Ural Mountains in what is now once again Russia. Not wanting either to give up this opportunity to live and work in Russia nor his intention to return to music in Ireland, he spent as much as possible of his frequent time off from the Votkinsk job in music circles in Ireland, renewing contacts and exposing his newer material to appreciative people in Ireland via a private recording of his songs of the intervening years, Dreamer in Russia.

Fate again intervened when he fell in love with and married Lyubov Gennadyevna Koroleva, a Russian interpreter-escort at the Votkinsk site and native of Izhevsk, and perforce quit the restrictive circumstances of his government job, finding worthwhile employment in 1993 as a professor of English at the Udmurt State University in Izhevsk. He continued this practice of working in Russia and playing music in Ireland until his removal here with his new family in November, 1995. His creative work, which he considers more literary than musical, nevertheless shows the distinctive influence of the various countries and cultures of his experience. But the most serious influence of his life has been and will always be the rich instrumental-music tradition of Ireland, upon which he bases an ever-increasing amount of his work. Top

	Any questions, comments, or requests can be directed to Thom at thom@harp-thistle.com Copyright © 2000 Thom Moore Return to Thom Moore's page or go to The Harp and Thistle