One Man's Trash

"I had made my own keyboard but had nothing to put it on, and my daddy said 'you can't put it on the table, we gotta eat on there.' So one day, I was travelling downtown and saw an ironing board on the side of the road and I thought it would be a great thing to put my keyboard on and get it out of daddy's way.”

Thus Carolina bluesman and maverick inventor Ironing Board Sam explains the source of his unique nickname, which he earned very early in his music career. A poor child with all the passion for music but none of the means, Sam Moore decided to improvise his way into a stage career, and his makeshift accoutrements gave him a memorable handle. “I was trying to get gigs so I could support my Daddy. I finally got a job as an entertainer with a fair, and then at a club in Memphis Tennessee, playing with a group called The Five Men Of Rhythm. I brought my synthesiser on the ironing board, and draped a ribbon around it because I was ashamed of the ironing board. People would come up to me and pull up my curtain and laugh – that was how I got the nickname Ironing Board Sam. I was really ashamed of it, but it didn't hurt the band any; we were still packing out the house,” he laughs.

What began as a painful reminder of his lack of means began to work in his favour, as the ironing board became a drawcard in itself. “The ironing board idea got so popular people began to hear about me around Tennessee. From there I began to get more work, and soon people started to accept the ironing board pretty well.”

Whilst the Ironing Board forms the backbone of his moniker-led mythology, what is less well known about Moore is his penchant for invention; his knack for assembly would put MacGyver to shame. “I was asked by a club owner in Miami to play some dates; this was really early on in my career,” he recalls. “I said yes, but at that time I didn't have a decent instrument. He offered to buy me one, so I picked a white Hammond trimmed with gold… But unfortunately the club burned down, and my organ burned with it. I rented another for a while but it was too expensive, so I headed home and stopped playing clubs for a while.

“One day, coming home from college, I found some telephone wires along the side of the road, and some tubes. I picked them up, and when I got home hooked up the tubes to the wires, and it made a hum. Then I got some thumb tacks and placed them on a two-by-four piece of wood and attached them to the wires. I put the end of the wire up on the ring on my finger, so when my ring touched the thumb tacks it made a note and I could play that way – I'd made myself a keyboard.”

With his homemade synthesiser and ironing board, coupled with obvious musical talent, Sam began to get a name for himself, and the bookings began to flood in. Soon he was offered his own late night TV show, The Night Train. “So a school teacher came and offered me a spot on TV – Channel 5 in Nashville. My show came on at 12-midnight, and it was just me and all the guests I wanted to feature. It was on for two years and from there I really got my start, and I've been pretty much touring ever since. I've never been to Australia yet, but I can't wait to go. Australian people are always so friendly – they've got a real Southern-type attitude, and I like that mentality.'

Ironing Board Sam will be playing the following dates: