Randy Moses is a longtime local legend, known for his career as a musician in family-band the House of Moses. Now, he works for the Board of Education in Middletown and can be seen at local events, open-mics, and at the First Zion Baptist Church, which is the only building on the South End that still stands.
Me and my four brothers we were all born here in Middletown. I had a good support. And my mom and pop. I mean, people just respected them. And guys my age, you know, my dad raised some of them kids cause they didn’t have their fathers, you know? We are all close today. I got exposed so much music and art.
Between concerts at MoCon and the Chapel, Wesleyan showed Moses “a lot of the most famous people I’ve ever seen in my life…like Junior Walker and the All Stars. I seen all these R-B groups there, Roy Ayers. Great concerts.” He saw Miles Davis at the Chapel; “the famous jazz artists, you know, they all played in the chapel.” The day he went to the Miles Davis concert, Moses recounted that “I went and got my ass whooped because I was home too late but then I told them, I said, Pop man, this is Miles Davis! But he was pissed off because we broke curfew
Recounting everything that went down at the young peoples’ watering hole, the Otis Playground, Randy Moses said:
You could drive your car into the playground and park on the grass. It had the music going on, we had the grills out there frying fish. And nobody bothered us. Police didn’t bother us, and they knew where we were. That Black lieutenant from the police department, he always came down and hung out with us. Yeah, and my cousin’s husband, he would come down because he was a ball player too. Otis Playground was like a famous playground.
There was just people in the neighborhood, they could play guitars, they could play horns…We always had jam sessions like on people’s porches during the summer. Yeah, fry a fish, just have a good time. The old people’d be out there dancing, oh, yeah, it was beautiful.
