Photo: Peter D. Figen / Reuters
Doc Watson poses backstage at the legendary McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, California, in 1986.
DOC WATSON
Doc was a legendary performer who blended his traditional Appalachian musical roots with bluegrass, country, gospel and blues to create a unique style and an expansive repertoire.
Watson, who was blinded before his first birthday, won seven Grammy Awards, in addition to the Grammy for lifetime achievement he received in 2004. In 2006 he won in the category of best country instrumental performance for his playing on "Whiskey Before Breakfast."
The more than 50 albums to Watson's name testify to the extraordinary breadth of his musical interests and skills. He made several recordings of backwoods old-time music with members of his family, including his wife, Rosa Lee, and her father, the fiddler Gaither Carlton, yet he could cross from that rugged milieu to a Nashville studio and work easily with country music's leading session musicians on albums such as Good Deal (1968), while on the 1995 album Docabilly he recalled his rockabilly days, 40 years on.
He also revealed on many occasions a deep knowledge and understanding of the blues, drawn from black musicians such as Mississippi John Hurt and white predecessors such as Jimmie Rodgers and the obscure Frank Hutchison, whose mesmerising Worried Blues and Train That Carried My Girl From Town Watson reinstated into the folk canon. His musical memory was remarkable, his repertoire packed with songs from old 78rpm recordings – some remembered from his youth, some supplied on tapes from record-collector friends – by artists such as Rodgers, the Carter Family (whose When the Roses Bloom in Dixieland was the first song he had learned to play) and another blind guitarist, Riley Puckett. Given those resources, he hardly needed to write material of his own, and he seldom did, but with Rosa Lee he composed the poignant threnody Your Long Journey, heard by a fresh audience on Alison Krauss and Robert Plant's 2007 album, Raising Sand.
A favourite of my brother Steve’s and I adopted his passion for all things fingerpicking from this man
I couldn’t quite believe it when Steve brought his first Doc album home . . . . . BLISS!
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