At Jacksonville, FL, where he was living with his brother, Mr. F. R. Moody, Dr. Joseph Burnley Moody died on September 8, 1931. Dr. Moody was born at Clarksville, VA on June 24, 1838. In his youth the family moved to Kentucky and he was educated at Bethel College (Russellville).This remarkable and faithful man of God spent most of his life in Kentucky. Among the Baptist churches of which he was pastor in this state were PeeWee Valley, LaGrange, Elk Creek, Harrod's Creek, Paducah, Bagdad, Owenton and others. In the eighties he was pastor of several churches in Tennessee, including the Central church in Memphis. During the nineties he was for two years pastor at Hot Springs, AR and for four years at San Antonio, TX, from which city he moved in 1898 to the pastorate at Tampa, FL.
He was one of the founders of the Hall-Moody Institute in west Tennessee, and was the author of several religious books and pamphlets. At different times he was editor of The Baptist Gleaner, The Baptist, and the Baptist and Reflector. Dr. Moody was an unusually well-informed writer on religious teachings. His was what may be called a doctrinal cast of mind, and his dominant urge in all his writings as well as in his spoken messages, was to find and expound the true and full meaning of the inspired Word of God.
There are thousands of Baptists in Kentucky and many in other states whom Dr. Moody led to Christ and nurtured in Scriptural knowledge. He was also the last of his own group of staunch and rugged men of God who carried on for Christ in his active manhood for more than two generations. He knew and worked with J. R. Graves, T. T. Eaton, J. N. Hall and J. M. Pendelton, as well as John A. Broadus and J. P. Boyce, and many other Baptist leaders who have now passed on. In fact he knew, as few other did a very large section of the entire personnel of Baptists in the South throughout two full generations. In his young manhood he was in spirit a pioneer of the gospel. That wholesome pioneering spirit never departed from him. So long as he was able it was his pleasure to mingle in simple fellowship with his Baptist brethren in their most unpretentious assemblages. Baptist associations were to him a happiness.
Besides his brother, F. R. Moody, of Jacksonville, there is another brother, Mr. J. W. Moody, of Crofton, KY. His son Claude D., now partially invalided, is a devout and informed Baptist of large Christian experience, whose knowledge and love of the Bible are marked and exceptional. While a father in Israel of the age of Dr. Moody has remained among men, beyond time when most of the presons whom he knew best were living, there is yet in his long years of service a high spiritual worth which leads an appreciative spirit of fellowship to offer, at the time of his departure, the tribute of reverence. If Dr. Moody himself could determine any published words about him, he might not improbably urge that little be said about him, but that rather we should write, as we do now, in joyous confidence, "Blessed are the dead, which die in the Lord, from hence-forth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them" (Revelation 14:13).
========== Newspaper account, Sept. 17, 1931 - This is taken from Missionary Baptist Church paper, Haywood, CA, Vo. 40, No. 9, 3/1/1993.
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