Wayne Moss, a Nashville session guitarist whose electric guitar work helped define the sound of country and rock music across three decades, died April 20 at age 88.
Born Feb. 9, 1938, in South Charleston, WV, Moss moved to Nashville in 1959 and joined Brenda Lee’s touring band the Casuals before co-founding the Escorts with drummer Kenny Buttrey and multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy. That core group of musicians went on to play on Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” album and hundreds of other sessions. Moss played the signature guitar riff on Roy Orbison’s No. 1 “Oh, Pretty Woman,” the guitar solo on Waylon Jennings’ “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line” and on recordings by Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Tammy Wynette, Joan Baez and Linda Ronstadt, among many others.
In 1961, Moss founded Cinderella Sound Recording Studio in Madison, TN — Nashville’s oldest continuously operating studio. Songwriters Dennis Linde, Alex Harvey and Mickey Newbury cut the first recordings of “Burning Love,” “Delta Dawn” and “An American Trilogy” there…