ALBUM REVIEW: Willie Watson Has New Tricks Up His Sleeve

Willie Watson has always operated on the periphery. Even in the making of his own story. First, he was harmonizing on early versions of “Wagon Wheel” in high school, as a founding member of Old Crow Medicine Show. After he left the band in 2011, he drifted into various projects with The Watkins Family and David Rawlings and Gilian Welch. He even showed up in the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, both on-screen and on the film’s soundtrack, singing “When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings.” As a solo artist, he’s released two albums, both produced by Rawlings and both titled Folk Singer. Comprised of traditional songs and re-interpreted tunes, those records have earned him a reputation as one of the preeminent contemporary interpreters of the traditional songbook. 

Watson doesn’t reject this identity outright on his self-titled debut. A third of the songs here are still covers. The album opens with one, “Slim and the Devil,” a rapid fire, vamped-out adaptation of Sterling A. Brown’s poem “Slim Greer in Hell.” This and the other two traditionals, “Harris and the Mare” and “Mole in the Ground,” are all high points. These are old songs in general and long familiar to Watson’s ragged tenor. He carries them easily.

The strongest of his originals, most of which Watson co-wrote with Morgan Nagler, are the long-simmering ballads “Real Love” and “Already Gone.” 

Each reflects his time spent with Rawlings and Welch uniquely. The former borrows from their penchant for stripped-down choruses. The latter nods to the duo’s distinctly resonant acoustic interplay. Both stretch out amidst the open space provided by The Punch Brothers’ bassist Paul Kowert and violinist Gabe Witcher, alongside guitarist Dylan Day and drummer Jason Boesel. “Sad Song,” meanwhile, has a  simple folk-blues structure and must have arrived to Watson while he was making his own clothes. (He’s also a tailor.) 

The final track is “Reap ‘Em in the Valley,” an eight-and-a-half-minute combination of talking confessional and self-mythology. Watson recounts first discovering music in his youth, playing at a graduation party, and singing “Tennessee Waltz” with a man named Ruby Love. “Where I come from/It’s really easy to believe in God,” Watson sings toward song’s end, then belts out a final chorus from “Sow ‘Em on the Mountain.” 

As a coda it’s a pure metaphor: a musician caught between his own time and place and his old-time, folk-singing ways.

Willie Watson’s self-titled album is out Sep. 13 via Little Operation Records and Thirty Tigers.