These valiant souls carry on in their search for the truth, a difficult goal to be sure when so many people come to the party wearing the exact same name tag. B.J. Moore may have used initials in order to avoid being confused with other performers and songwriters named Billy Moore -- but the effort was in vain if that was the case. The name Billy Moore is still listed for several of B.J. Moore's co-writing efforts in the genre of country & western, the most well known of which is the aforementioned ballad recorded by Eddy Arnold.

Any mention of the name Billy Moore could subsequently cause confusion with a man who wrote arrangements for big bands and was responsible for some enjoyable R&B songs such as "You Dyed Your Hair Chartreuse." That Moore's career started out several decades earlier and seems to embrace a less miserable point of view than the initial-marked songwriter, whose list of songs actually does include a ditty entitled "Misery," a Western swing standard. There are numerous other performers from the Billy slot in the extended Moore dynasty: a trumpet player from the Roaring Twenties, a Canadian record producer, a rip-roaring R&B tenor saxophonist, and a ragtimey bluesman from the Virginia tidewater among them. Put them all in the same wrong place and it wouldn't be too long before B.J. Moore would get the idea for a musical question: "What's He Doing in My World"? Moore and co-writers Carl Belew and Eddie Bush won a Grammy for the hit, first published in 1965. ~ Eugene Chadbourne