Self-Taught Folk Music Icon Doc Watson Dies At 89

May 30, 2012
Originally published on May 30, 2012 4:06 pm



A treasure of American folk music has died. Doc Watson passed away yesterday in Winston-Salem, North Carolina at the age of 89. He was born in Deep Gap, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains in a three room house that he shared with eight brothers and sisters. During a long and productive career, he revolutionized not just how people play guitar but how people around the world think about mountain music. NPR's Neda Ulaby has this remembrance.

NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Doc Watson went blind when he was only about one-year-old from an untreated eye infection. He told WHYY's FRESH AIR his dad made him a banjo when he turned 11.

DOC WATSON: One day he brought it to me and put it in my hands and said, son, I want you to learn to play this thing real well. Some of these days we'll get you a better one. He said, might help you get through the world.


WATSON: (Singing) My name is Georgia Buck, never had no luck. Always been treated this way, boy, always been treated this way.

ULABY: Doc Watson's parents made sure young Arthel Lane Watson had the tools he needed to face life without sight or money. His dad traded a week's worth of pay at the sawmill for a hand-cranked phonograph that came with 50 records, including country, blues and jazz. Watson incorporated those sounds into the Appalachian music surrounding him.

He worked on his father's farm, cutting trees and saved up enough to buy a mail-order guitar. He played on street corners and on the radio and in the 1950s started touring with a square dance band that lacked a fiddler. So Watson figured out how to play those parts on his guitar.

WATSON: One of the first things I learned to play successfully that was a fiddle tune was "Black Mountain Rag."


DAVID HOLT: Doc never played anything the same way once.


ULABY: That's musician David Holt, who played with Watson for decades.

HOLT: There was just something about his rhythm that was just so driving and so - I don't know - it just - you could not not tap your toe. You just had to.


ULABY: Holt says you could hear the determination of a blind, self-defined man in every note Doc Watson played.

HOLT: Doc was fierce but not fierce in a bad way. Just fierce in a determined way. So that came out in his music. I wish I had my guitar here, I could play an example, but he learned a tune from Merle Travis called "My Blue Bell." And Merle Travis plays it really just sort of beautifully and gently.


HOLT: And then if you hear Doc's version, it's just very driving and, you know, he's just punching the notes. And that's the way Doc was - very intelligent, very intense.


ULABY: Doc Watson was as good a singer as he was a guitar player. Just listen to how he inhabits his song's stories and their characters.


WATSON: (Singing) Now John comes home all in wonder, he rattled at the door just like thunder. Who is that, Mr. Henley cried? 'Tis my husband you must hide.

ULABY: That song was recorded in Doc Watson's living room in 1960 by Ralph Rinzler. He was a Smithsonian folklorist who stumbled on Watson while looking for another musician. As Watson told NPR in 2002, Rinzler persuaded him to hit the folk circuit blossoming across the country at the time.

WATSON: Well, I was skeptical. I said Ralph people ain't going to sit and listen to me play this old time stuff. Yeah, they will too. He said, Now you've got something to offer in the way of entertainment and the folk revival, we want get you out there and get you heard. So, oh, you wouldn't believe the lonesome trips I did on that old big Trailways bus, all the way to New York by myself.


ULABY: Within a few years Watson was joined by his son Merle, who eventually became an accomplished guitarist too. But Merle died in a tragic tractor accident in 1985. Watson, devastated, almost gave up performing.


WATSON: (Singing) When the storms of life are raging, stand by me. When the storms of life are raging, stand by me. When the world...

ULABY: Perhaps Doc Watson's greatest contribution was fusing all of his influences in a way that gave audiences around the world access to the culture of the mountains of western North Carolina.

Again, David Holt.

HOLT: He's one of the few people that could take an old song - a really old song - and make it sound new song to a modern audience, or take a new song and make it sound old.

ULABY: Because some things aren't about old or new: hurting, keeping on, the rush of faith, lies, little pleasures. Doc Watson's picking and singing pulled it out.

Neda Ulaby, NPR News.

