The Charleston Gazette

(Charleston, West Virginia)

July 17, 2003

Doc Watson is fit as a fiddle tune

With a lifetime of music behind him, Doc Watson has no plans to stop playing now.

“I was 80 on the third of March,” Watson said in a phone call from his Deep Gap, N.C., home while a recording of cross-tuned fiddle played in the background. “I don’t know if I will ever quit picking. I may get off the road now pretty soon — it depends on my health.”

“It is a gamble after you pass 80, you know,” he added, in his warm, friendly voice. “I am in pretty good shape yet. If I complained about my health, somebody ought to hit me.”

A recipient of the National Medal of Arts and a National Heritage Fellowship, the five-time Grammy award winner has recorded close to 60 albums, and his music is known around the world. These days, he still performs 20 to 35 dates a year.

Watson brings his music to Charleston at 8 p.m. Saturday, as part of the Clay Center’s Stretched String festival. Joining him will be his grandson, Richard Watson, and longtime sideman Jack Lawrence. Also appearing will be the renowned jazzman and crew the David Grisman Quintet.

Watson is quick to credit his late son Merle, Richard’s father, and his wife, Rosa Lee, for his remarkable career in a marriage that also yielded a daughter, Nancy.

“She was the third partner in the deal,” he said. “Taking care of the home end of the business, a lot of it. Helping Merle with that and looking after things that needed a good mama and wife to look after for us.”

Merle Watson died in a tractor accident in 1985. The loss devastated the Watsons and in 1987, in memory of their son, they founded the Merle Watson Memorial Festival.

Better known as Merlefest, the gathering outside Boone, N.C., is attended by thousands each April.

“I think without either Merle or her, I know I wouldn’t be here talking to you,” he said. “Dues-paying days are hard if you don’t have good help when you are handicapped.”

Watson, who has been blind since he was 1, describes his music as “tradition, and whatever else I want to play.” His shows include everything from old time fiddle tunes to blues, ’50s rock ’n’ roll to ragtime, Jimmie Rogers and country music.

And there is that dazzling guitar playing. Watson is among a handful of guitarists who helped create the flatpicking genre (flatpickers pick fiddle tune melodies note for note with a dexterous up-and-down motion of the pick).

As a child, he soaked up everything from old-time banjo and fiddle tunes to early country music on 78 rpm records, blues, Dixieland and classical music. He was in his late 30s and was playing a gold top Les Paul electric guitar in a country band when the late folklorist Ralph Rinzler happened upon him.

It was 1960, and the folk revival was in full flower across the country. Rinzler was in North Carolina to record legendary old-time banjo player Clarence Ashley. Watson played guitar in the band.

Yet this folk music gig was not his doing, Watson is quick to make clear.

“Wait a minute,” he says, when asked about it. “Somebody GAVE me the idea and encouraged me to do it. I was afraid. To me it was a big gamble. I didn’t think people were going to listen to the old-time things. [Rinzler] encouraged me that I had something to offer,” he said.

He laughs at those early shows. “I remember the first solo concert I did. I got that tape back home [after] somebody recorded it and gave me a copy. It was so bad I erased it.”

With his music making taking an unexpected turn with the folk revival, it was time for some traditional-music wood-shedding. He didn’t have to go very far.

“Ralph Rinzler went around with me and collected the old-time tunes. He collected a lot more than I learned, but it gave me some insight on music from the past,” Watson said. “It was just around the county. We didn’t go way out there. [Just] old-timey people.”

This included his own family. Nearly everyone in his and Rosa Lee’s families sang or played an instrument, and their roots run deep in western North Carolina. (Watson lives on land cleared by his great-great-grandfather.)

Consider the ballad “Tom Dooley.” While the Kingston Trio’s 1958 hit record may be the best-known version, the song is based on a 1941 field recording by fellow Tarheel Frank Proffitt.

Watson’s ancestors knew the people involved in the ballad that he knows as “Tom Dula.” While he is willing to speak about the song, the murder remains a serious subject. Based on real events, the lyrics concern the death of a woman named Laura Foster, supposedly at the hands of Tom Dula, a Confederate veteran who was hanged in 1868.

“My grandmother’s family knew Tom Dula’s folks, and all about that,” he said. “It was believed amongst everybody back in those days that Annie Melton killed that girl [and] Tom covered up for her — a little bit of chivalry involved here.

“Instead of the eternal triangle that the Kingstons said about Tom Dula’s situation, there was a quadrangle,” Watson said. “There was two guys and two girls, and both guys were involved with both girls. That’s the way it went.”

He has yet more family connections to classic ballads.

Members of his family were visited by folklorist Cecil Sharp in the years before World War I, Watson remembers. Sharp was in America to find ballads that were dying out in his native England.

“Rosa Lee’s dad’s mother, her grandmother, must’ve sung a few songs for him and it is thought she sang that ballad, ‘Georgie’ for him,” he said.

English texts of this centuries-old song refer to political intrigue. American versions, such as Watson’s, tell a different story, but one with which he feels a connection.

“In good old-time music, when you grow up in that situation and hear a few of the old ballads sung — though you didn’t grow up in the time of the Scottish boy who stole the king’s horses and got hanged for it — you can feel exactly what his people must have felt when he was put on the gallows for stealing horses.

“That is where my roots go back to, to my grandmother and my grandpa’s sister, Rosa Lee’s grandpa. It goes all the way back to that. They were from the old school.”