[1] A younger contemporary of Blind Willie McTell, Curley Weaver and Barbecue Bob, Moss was part of a coterie of Atlanta bluesmen.

Moss's career was halted in 1935 by a six-year jail term and then by the Second World War, but he lived long enough to be rediscovered in the 1960s, when he revealed that his talent had been preserved through the years.

[1] Moss was one of 12 children born to a sharecropper in Jewell, Georgia, in Warren County, midway between Atlanta and Augusta.

He began teaching himself the harmonica at a very early age, and he played at local parties around Augusta, where the family moved when he was four and remained for the next 10 years.

"[1] By the time he arrived in Atlanta, he was noticed by both Curley Weaver and Robert "Barbecue Bob" Hicks, who began working with the younger Moss.

Weaver and Barbecue Bob secured his first recording date when he was 16, as a member of their group the Georgia Cotton Pickers, on December 7, 1930 at the Campbell Hotel in Atlanta, cutting four songs for Columbia: "I'm on My Way Down Home," "Diddle-Da-Diddle," "She Looks So Good," and "She's Comin' Back Some Cold Rainy Day."

[1] In January 1933, he made his debut as a recording artist in his own right for the American Record Corporation (ARC) in New York City,[4] accompanied by Fred McMullen and Curley Weaver, cutting three songs, "Bye Bye Mama," "Daddy Don't Care," and "Red River Blues."

Moss's records were released simultaneously on various budget labels associated with ARC and were so successful that, in mid-September 1933, he returned New York City along with Weaver and McTell.

At this point, Moss's records were outselling those of Weaver and McTell and were widely heard in the southern and border states.

[5] AllMusic noted that "This body of recordings also best represents the bridge that Moss provided between Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller – his solo version of "Some Lonesome Day" and also "Dough Rollin' Papa," from 1934, advanced ideas in playing and singing that Fuller picked up and adapted to his own style, while the lingering influence of Blake can be heard in "Insane Blues".

[6] In 1964, Moss chanced to hear that his old partner Josh White was giving a concert at Emory University in Atlanta.

Moss performed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969 and appeared at Electric Circus, in New York, in the same year.