To support himself and his family, Doc tuned pianos and then, in the ’50s, played a Les Paul in a rockin’ country dance band. “Jack Williams & the Rail Riders,” Doc clarifies. He is meticulous about details, his memory sharp. “They later changed it to the Country Gentlemen before some bluegrass group coined that. We played VFW halls, dances, rod and gun club picnics where we could make a few, as Jack put it, ‘sheckles’.”
Does Doc miss that mix of rockabilly and swing? “No, not really,” he says. “I enjoyed doing it a little bit occasionally. But if I went back to it I’d play an amplified acoustic. I wouldn’t mess with the electric guitar. I don’t really like one that good. Just occasionally I pick one up for the fun of it. The acoustic guitar amplified, if you have a good amplifier that has a lot of EQ, you can get what you need out of it. You don’t need an electric guitar to play good rockin’ music. And I don’t care a thing in the world about hard rock. I cannot relate to it.”
Country music history, when you get down to it, has no fixed logic; it’s often a crap shoot of contingencies. So much we take for granted as the “natural” or “authentic” sound of country was forged through the collision of diverse and disparate cultures, the result of accident, fluctuating commercial imperatives, chance meetings.
Doc Watson’s emergence as the seminal flattop guitarist is one such story of chance. Folk revivalist Ralph Rinzler headed down to North Carolina in search of one old-time legend, but another came to light. He and Watson built a relationship that would transform the sound of country music.
“He was one of the best friends I ever had,” Doc says, his voice serious and tender. “The first time I met Ralph was in 1960. He and Eugene Earle, they were both from Passaic, New Jersey. Eugene Earle had a huge 78 collection….They came down looking for the late Clarence Ashley, who was still living at the time. They came to Union Grove…and Clarence Ashley told Ralph about me, and he came to my house. When he heard me play, he persuaded me that I had something to offer in the folk revival.”
Doc didn’t even own an acoustic guitar at the time, and, in Ralph Rinzler’s words, “the traditional music of Doc’s childhood…was only a memory.” “At the time I thought he was crazy,” Doc says. “People wouldn’t want to hear that old-time stuff. I hadn’t been out there; I didn’t know what was going on. I found out people loved it. I was under the opinion that folks up to then had always wanted flashy stage shows…they wouldn’t want to hear someone just sit down and play old-time music. It was a wonderful and unbelievable surprise when I started on the concert tour, that you could sit down and play a bunch of the good old-time music, and people would sit and listen and you could hear a pin drop. It was unbelievable.”
If the classic performances that make up the early Smithsonian Folkways recordings were the music of memory, rather than what the local communities wanted to hear, it certainly hadn’t vanished. “I didn’t throw away the old music,” Doc says. “I kept it in the repertoire. I learned a lot of later things too. Most of the younger people don’t know the old music. They don’t hear it unless they happen to go to a show where it’s played. And there are very few of those.
“It was a little hard on the fingers,” Doc continues, “switchin’ over to the flattop from the electric guitar. I hadn’t forgotten the old music; I had to brush up on it. I just added to it. If I liked a song I’d learn it….People would give me records or tapes. Most of the music I brushed up on I got from Eugene Earle, the collector. He would send me lots of recordings on tape off the old records. In the ’60s when I was learning old, new material, some of it was new to me, and some of it was stuff we had on records at home when I was little.”
I ask Doc if he ever wonders what it would have been like if he hadn’t ever met Rinzler and participated in the folk revival. “I hadn’t really thought about it,” Doc says, “but I’ll tell you this: If I had of had good sight, I’d have played music, but it would have been a hobby. I would have been a carpenter or an electrician, or whatever. I hate the road. I love a good audience, and I love to play the music. But I don’t like the road. Anybody in his right mind I don’t think would.” He laughs, but he’s dead serious.
“That’s the hard part of the job, to travel, and being away from home. Oh I’m sure I would have played; I don’t know what kind of success I would have had. But Ralph Rinzler helped me an awful lot in the beginning. He traveled a bunch with me. And I traveled a whole lot by myself. When he’d set up, as they say nowadays, ‘gigs,’ he’d always have somebody meet me at the other end of the bus line.”
It’s fashionable these days to dismiss the folk revival as some corruption of a “real,” “living” country tradition that was doing fine on its own. Leading revivalists such as Lomax, Seeger and Rinzler, critics say, romanticized and distorted the music according to an ideology of folk purity. Some measured criticism may be valid, but it’s not a perspective likely to sit well with Doc Watson. “You don’t find many Ralph Rinzlers in this world,” Doc says, “that’ll befriend somebody that needs to get started and make a career in music.”
Doc Watson has shown himself to be more than a flatpicker par excellence. He’s a consummate songster, a musician bound by few aesthetic prejudices. “The lyrics and the music together — it takes both to get me interested in a song,” he says. “If the song has something to say and a pretty melody, I’m liable to learn it.” Inspired by material he heard via the folk revival, Doc has added to his cache gems such as Dan Fogelberg’s “Along The Road” (among Doc’s strongest vocal performances) and Tom Paxton’s tribute to Mississippi John Hurt. He also rediscovered material virtually dormant since childhood. One of his most delightful banjo performances is the traditional “I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground,” which appears on Red Rocking Chair (Flying Fish, 1981).
