Doc Watson
A guitarist and singer from Deep Gap, North Carolina, whose flatpicked playing and repertoire of mountain songs reached city audiences at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, and who played with his son Merle for two decades.
Deep Gap
Arthel Lane Watson was born in Deep Gap, North Carolina on March 3, 1923. He bought a Sears Silvertone guitar with money earned cutting chestnut trees, and later played a Martin D-18. His early influences were the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. He took the name Doc, American Songwriter reports, after an audience member suggested it; BMI lists about 156 songs under his name, mostly instrumentals and adaptations of traditional material.
In 1953 he joined Jack Williams's band in Johnson City, Tennessee, playing electric guitar, and tuned pianos for a living. In 1960, on the advice of the folklorist Ralph Rinzler, who became his manager, he switched to acoustic guitar and banjo, and his first recording was Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley's, with Clint Howard and Fred Price. He played Greenwich Village in February 1961 and the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, which brought wide acclaim. The Watson Family, a Folkways LP of his family's music, came out in 1963.
With Merle
His first solo album came in 1964, when he began performing with his son Merle, and from 1974 they worked as a trio with the bassist T. Michael Coleman, recording eleven albums between 1973 and 1985. His singing and playing on "Tennessee Stud" on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972) kept his career going after the folk revival faded. MerleFest, held each spring in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, began in 1987 or 1988 in Merle's memory. His last performance was at MerleFest on April 29, 2012, and he died on May 29, 2012.
He won seven competitive Grammys, from Then and Now (1973) to Legacy (2002, with David Holt), and a Lifetime Achievement award in 2004. Other honors include the National Medal of Arts in 1997 and the NEA National Heritage Fellowship in 1988. Arlen Roth called him the first rural acoustic player to truly amaze urban audiences in the early 1960s, and Clarence White, Tony Rice and later Billy Strings extended his flatpicking. The posthumous Milestones (2013) holds 94 unreleased songs, and the tribute I Am a Pilgrim: Doc Watson at 100 appeared in 2023.
Albums
- The Watson Family 1963 · compilation · Folkways
A 1963 Folkways LP of field recordings of the Watson family and neighbors, with the first recording of "Your Long Journey".
Songs
- Your Long Journey The Watson Family · 1963
A song of mourning first recorded by Doc and Rosa Lee Watson in 1963, later sung by Emmylou Harris and by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.
Sources
- Doc Watson, Wikipedia
- The long journey of Doc Watson, American Songwriter (2020-06-15)
- Doc Watson, 1923-2012, GRAMMY.com
- Rosa Lee Watson passes, Bluegrass Today (2012-11)