By John Davidson
Collegian Reporter

To hear Doc Watson play “Deep River Blues” on his new live CD, “Legacy,” you think you must be hearing two guitars. To hear him pick out fiddle leads on “Beaumont Rag” you realize that only someone who had been playing his entire life would ever be able to do it. Then you remember that he is 79 years old. Then you remember that he is blind.

Doc Watson’s life is as captivating and astounding as his music. Born in 1923, he was blind from a very young age but learned to play harmonica and banjo and guitar as a child in the hills of North Carolina. He immersed himself in and mastered the music of those hills, the finger-picking styles, the rhythms and melodies, the stories and songs of the Appalachian mountains. He would sit on the porch for hours, listening to old records and picking them out on a home-made banjo, honing his skill and finding his style; it’s what the old-timers call “wood-shedding.”

In the early 1960s he was “discovered” by the urban folk revival and began traveling to major cities, playing his old-time mountain music.

People in New York, Boston and Los Angeles had never heard music like that before, never heard of Grady Martin or Guitar Boogie Arthur Smith or Maybelle Carter. The first time many of those “folkies” heard flat picking was when they heard Doc Watson.

“Legacy,” a triple-CD chronicling Watson’s life and music, was released last year and recently won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album.
The first two CDs feature conversations between Watson and David Holt, an acclaimed multi-instrumentalist, music historian, and old friend of Doc. They played a series of concerts in the late 1990s and Holt had the idea for the “Legacy” project after seeing how intrigued audiences were when he talked with Doc about his past during these concerts.

The result is two CDs in which Doc tells stories about his life and music, interspersed with solo studio performances by the two men. The third CD is the Legacy Concert, recorded in March of 2001 in North Carolina, and features 18 live tracks of folk and mountain music, deftly picked, strummed and hawed out by Holt and Watson to an enthusiastic crowd. The CDs come with a 72-page booklet of photos, quotes, and stories from people who have known or played with Watson throughout his long life.

Doc Watson is in every way a class of musician all his own. He is, in many respects, the bridge between old-time Appalachian mountain music and the modern American versions of folk and blues which emerged from it. Listening to him tell his stories on the “Legacy” CDs, one realizes how profoundly his life reflects the cultural life of America and the many changes it has gone through in the last fifty years. As a child, Doc learned to play local music; as an adult, he brought that music to the rest of the country, and our music and culture are richer because he did so.

That he is blind is a testament not only to his musical virtuosity, but to the depth of feeling behind his singing and playing. “I dream in feelings, pure feelings,” he says in the CD’s liner notes, and he sings with a gentleness and a wisdom that has come from a long life of overcoming hardships. By all accounts, the life of Doc Watson is fascinating and instructive, and the “Legacy” CDs are a treasure as much for the music as for the testimony of this remarkable man.