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Mixing family and music at home in Middle Tennessee

Story by Hollie Deese
Photography by Reeves Smith

Robbie Brooks Moore was selling cell phones at an AT&T store in LA when Kevin Moore — blues musician Keb’ Mo’ — came in with his broken phone. He was tall and handsome, and they immediately hit it off; the fact that she was also a musician helped connect them even more.

They began building their life together in California — getting married, having son, Carter Mandela, buying a house. But they moved into their Middle Tennessee home eight years ago, found on a trip when Kevin was playing a show at the Ryman. Five days later they put in an offer contingent on the sale of their LA home, which ended up going for well over its asking price after 15 offers.

“It’s like a homecoming for me, coming to the South where my roots come from,” Kevin says. “I was moving closer to the place where it all began. I came here in my 50s, and I turned 60 in Nashville. It’s like a fresh start. This is a place I kind of started life over again.”

Carving out spaces that are conducive to Kevin’s music was key in their new home, starting with his office where he writes alone, unless their 9-year-old dog, Rudy, is hanging out, too.

“The next record I’m doing, I’m looking for a very personal kind of thing. This is where I can be alone and force myself to go deeper,” he says. “I feel like this space is reminiscent of how I wrote my first record. It’s a couch, a coffee table, a guitar, a pad and pencil, no computers.”

Where he wrote that first record was a small two-bedroom apartment on Adams Boulevard in LA, with a living room set up very similarly to his current office.

“I would sit down with my guitar and just have a pad of paper, and I would practice listening to music,” he says. “And sometimes I would practice playing scales while watching Oprah, and I would sit and write and dream, too.”

He says there’s always a classical radio station on, the music wafting through even when he’s not in there, so it permeates the atmosphere with inspiration. There is a separate studio, and then a green room with snacks and a standup arcade machine for breaks between sessions.

“I have been fortunate to have three main writing places, depending on who I’m writing with and what the purpose is,” he says. “If I’m writing with someone for the purpose of recording a song, I like to go straight into the control room where we’re going to record. But if we’re just writing just for the sake of writing, I’ll go into the green room and we’ll snack.”

Everything in the home was knotty pine when they moved in, so paint was required everywhere, except, of course, the exposed beams overhead. And while Kevin says his wife takes the lead on inspiring the ambience of the house, they do have a system for choosing colors.

“She picks a paint color, and I go one shade darker. That’s the color,” he says. And for him, it’s Farrow and Ball or nothing. “It’s like you want to eat the wall.”

And Robbie’s fine with the collaborative system they’ve worked out, for their home life and record label, Kind of Blue Music. She runs it, as well as the charity they are involved in, Turnaround Arts, working with a school in Chicago directly on arts programs.

“Generally if we both talk about it, we come up with an even better idea than what the original was,” Robbie says. “Mostly he kind of lets me do it. But he’s got good opinions. He’s got a good eye.”

For example, the Moores had tried a number of pieces on a large wall in their living room — a kimono from Japan, a bookshelf. They finally together found the perfect piece on a trip to India, a large tapestry that even looks good when the Christmas tree is up.

“Everything we do is big, and we’re on a blues budget,” she says. So it helps that the art that is everywhere around the house is usually tied to people and travels and feelings. An investment always worth making, many of them are even gifts.

 Keb’ Mo’ shares what type of spaces inspire him

Over the fireplace is a photograph from Anthony Scarlati after Robbie saw something of his on Facebook that immediately made her cry. They have three pieces from artist Brian Nash, including one in the powder room and a commission Robbie had done for Kevin as a Christmas gift.

A portrait of Amy Winehouse was a gift for Kevin, too, for Father’s Day. It was done by artist and family friend Asher Wood as a thank-you for letting him stay with the Moores for a bit while his new home was finished being built. Other friends, glass artist Marlene Rose and giclee artist Robbie Firestone, have pieces on display.

“Kevin and I wrote a song together called ‘I’m Amazing,’ and those are the lyrics of it,” she says of another special piece. “We had a children’s choir sing at our wedding, and they painted that as our wedding gift.

And the father of Ross Hogarth, Moore’s sound and mixing engineer, is illustrator Burne Hogarth, known for creating the Tarzan comics. The Moores have one of his prints, too, which was framed at Bennett Galleries.

“The more art we’ve gotten here, it just feels so good,” she says. “I want everything in here not to just take up space, but when I walk past it I want it to make me smile. I want to just get that feeling of a special memory, so I’ve really focused on that in the last couple years.”

Robbie even went out on a limb and painted the soundwaves piece in the green room as a gift for Kevin this past Valentine’s Day.

“I mostly do photography, but I want to learn to paint. So I’ve been tip-toeing into that,” she says. “And we want to show our son to just go ahead and try things. If it’s bad, so what?”

For many Nashvillians, the flood of 2010 was an event that symbolized loss. But for Kevin 'Keb' Mo'” Moore and his wife, Robbie Brooks Moore, it also signaled a fresh start.

The three-time Grammy-winning blues and Americana artist had spent nearly 60 years in Los Angeles until Robbie, a fellow musician he met at an AT&T Wireless store back in the early 2000s, suggested they give Nashville a try. Robbie had worked at Southwestern Publishing Group in college and fallen in love with the city, maintaining close relationships with friends still living in town. Not one to cross his wife, Kevin eventually conceded.

'We wanted to move our son somewhere not so…crazy. It was between here and Portland, Oregon. We kind of had to pick here because of the music and the location. I wasn't really down with [coming to Nashville] at first, but mama [Robbie] wanted to go,” Kevin teases. 'Surprisingly enough, when I got here, I fell right into it. It was like all my friends were here waiting for me.”

'Everyone in Nashville has been so welcoming of us,” Robbie says. 'It's been a good experience in every way.”

The Moores and their then-three-year-old son Carter, now eight, moved into their spacious Franklin digs three days before the floodwaters swept through the area, leaving mass destruction in its wake. While their new home, built in 2005 and perched high in the hills, went untouched, many of Kevin's instrumentswhich were stored at Soundcheck Nashville on the banks of the Cumberlanddid not. The few that survived complete annihilation are now on display in the front music room and living area of the couple's three-level home.

After the waters retreated, the Moores unpacked and life regained some sense of normalcy. Then it was time to tackle the daunting task of making over the 6,100-square-foot space. Instead of consulting an interior designer for the project, Robbie, who has no formal design training but is admittedly an HGTV fanatic, decided to do it on her own. As Kevin embarked on local musical pursuitsengaging in cowrites with a number of Southern artists and placing more emphasis on Americana tunesshe got to work on the home.

While Kevin continues to release new musichis 12th studio album, last year's BLUESAmericana, garnered three Grammy nods, and he cowrote a track called 'Remedy” on Zac Brown Band's latest efforthe and Robbie also have set their sights on other projects, including starting their own label, Kind of Blue Music, for which she serves as CEO. (Since they've been together, Robbie has also appeared on every one of his albums as both a vocalist and writer.)

'Kevin was with other labels for so many years that we started to research what it would be to do it on our ownthe more we dug in, it just seemed like we should try it,” she says. 'So I just dove in and figured it out.”

The 2,500-square-foot Kind of Blue studio is a significant upgrade for the Moores, whose entire house in California was just 1,700 square feet, with a backyard garage from which Kevin wrote and recorded.

'We had the peaceful sound of the 405 and the 10 wafting through our house,” Robbie says of their time in L.A. That background noise has been replaced by the symphony of birds and other woodland creatures that pass through the couple's well-manicured property, which no doubt will continue to be a haven for the Mooresfar from any devastating floodwaters or buzzing interstatesas they renovate the remainder of the home.