Mac, Doc & Del/ Doc & Merle Watson – Home Sweet Home

Among traditional American country blues singers and guitar players, Doc Watson is without peer. When he sings in his unadorned baritone, it is as if the entire Anglo-Saxon folk tradition had been fermented in the Appalachian Mountains only to be channeled through him.

Doc has been recorded and honored more than just about anyone else in Americana music, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for another recording or two. Sugar Hill has given us just that: one recent session with two other distinctive old-time voices, and one recording with a peculiar and highly technological back story.

First, Mac, Doc & Del teams up Watson with bluegrass legends Del McCoury and Mac Wiseman, as well the rest of the McCoury clan and their close associates. McCoury takes the tenor, and I mean way-up-there tenor. He has a miraculous ability to emote and shape phrases at a register many men can’t hit even in falsetto.

Del’s usual band — son Ronnie on mandolin, son Rob on banjo, fiddler Jason Carter, and bassist Mike Bub — are all here. Two tunes, “Beauty Of My Dreams” and “I’ve Endured”, feature the Del McCoury Band straight up on tunes Del has cut before.

Like McCoury, Wiseman is a Bluegrass Hall of Famer. While he tended in his solo work toward a folky, sentimental sound, he sang with Flatt & Scruggs, the Osborne Brothers and Bill Monroe. Now over 70, his voice is as warm as a Cremona cello.

Other guests include Alison Krauss, dobroists Gene Wooten and Jerry Douglas, and guitarists Terry Eldridge and Jack Lawrence.

I’m not sure why producer Scott Rouse felt compelled to dress the first cut up as if it were heard on a scratchy 78, but the rest of the record’s 13 cuts are tight, brightly recorded, and locked on. The voices are huge, and Doc and Del’s rhythm guitar work synched with Bub’s bass is a clinic in good time and tasteful drive. Standouts include “I Wonder Where You Are Tonight”, a bluegrass standard, and Arthur Smith’s “More Pretty Girls Than One”, featuring two guitars, three voices, and Byron House on bass. This is stripped-bare country music as well as it can be done.

Sugar Hill’s other Doc release captures and revives an otherwise moribund home session with his late son Merle on banjo. Regular Doc bass man T. Michael Coleman found the tape, recorded at home in 1967 on stereo reel-to-reel tape by Doc’s wife. Then he did an audacious thing. He arranged to flesh it out with overdubs of mandolin, fiddle, vocals and bass.

Doc picked the sidemen: Marty Stuart, Sam Bush, Alan O’Bryant (of the Nashville Bluegrass Band), and Coleman. By copying and pasting Doc’s rhythm passages from Merle’s solos on a computer, Coleman was able to lengthen each cut and make space for additional instrumental solos. By getting the 1990s band to record far away from their mikes, he was able to duplicate the ambience of a living-room session. He even managed to throw in little details such as Stuart tuning with Merle while they listen to Doc pick the next song to play.

Yeah, it’s gimmicky, but it works remarkably well. The songs are mostly bluegrass standards, which Doc, for all his associations with bluegrass players and festivals, has never made the focal point of his singing. We hear “Listening To The Rain”, “Down The Road”, A.P. Carter’s “I Wonder How The Old Folks Are At Home”, and “Train That Carried My Girl From Town”, a traditional tune that Doc made his own over the years.

The performances are lively and, to Coleman’s credit, Doc and Merle are meticulously kept in front of the band. Merle, here a teenager, had only been playing banjo five months at this point, but the only clue to that is his unflinching precision on a number of difficult tunes. Merle would soon become Doc’s regular touring and recording partner and a great guitarist in his own right. He seems to have taken to banjo just as naturally, but he hadn’t at this point achieved the ability to let go and play with abandon.

No problem. It’s a great record, a fascinating project, and most of all a loving look back at a musician who, killed in an accident in 1985, was taken away too young.