Doc Watson died today in a North Carolina hospital. He was 89, and had recently undergone abdominal surgery. His real name was Arthel Lane Watson, but I didn’t know that until today. Blind since the age of 1, he was still the master of bluegrass and country guitar, and the Supreme Flatpicker. He had a lovely, mellow voice as well.
I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to his music, but it’s a lot. I’ll miss him, but we’ll always have his music. Here are two pieces. The first is one of his most famous, “Deep River Blues” (this version is from 1991):
And here (from a television documentary) is an impromptu performance of “John Hardy” with Earl Scruggs, who also died this year. There are snippets of two other songs. It must be lovely to have so much talent that you can just sit down and instantly produce music of this quality.
Watson shows his proficiency at flatpicking beginning at about 1:30, and again at about 5:07.
Thanks for posting this, Jerry. I had the privilege of seeing Doc and Merle Watson perform live at Wesleyan University about 40 years ago – it was wonderful.
Another one gone. A shame.
Shame? With that life and legacy? Hardly. He hit the greatest possible jackpot in the best lottery imaginable, and that’s cause for joy, not sadness.
b&
Don’t go all joyful on me. It is sad when great ones die.
I guess you are half joking but it reminds me of a line from the Garrison Keillor Prairie Home Companion movie, “It’s not a tragedy when an old man dies.” I too believe that a life so well lived as Doc Watson’s should be celebrated and not mourned. His music will hopefully live for a long long time. Perhaps in 500 years musicians will study and copy his style.
The hardest thing about music is making it easy. The greatest musicians work the least.
I’ve still got a loooong way to go to figure out how that works, exactly, but I am playing easier these days than I was a few years ago.
It takes several steps, I think. First is making it sound easy, which is damned hard. Next is pretending that it’s easy while making it sound easy, which is nigh on impossible. Sometime after that comes it actually being easy…or, at least, that’s my theory. Not sure I’ll ever get there.
Doc and Earl, I suspect, have hardly been working at all for several decades, and that really blows my mind.
Cheers,
b&
I don’t know that it ever becomes easy. I think the better a musician gets, the more he tries to do. There’s no limit to music and musical complexity. The first video here led me to a Leo Kotke/Doc Watson duet on youtube. I’ve been playing guitar for 35+ years and I have to admit that sometimes I don’t know what it is they are doing. I may go back to youtube and go from viseo to video for the rest of the night. Endlessly entertaining to me and yet there seems to be a small audience for great guitar, banjo and yes, fiddle music. The only time you might see it on television is when PBS is looking for money. Now that’s a shame.
I’ve seen Leo Kotke live!
And you’re exactly right about Leo pushing himself, because the very first thing he did was to come out and tell the audience “Here’s something I’ve been working on…” — and then he proceeded to play a tune of a complexity simply astonished. It sounded like he was playing three guitars simultaneously.
One of the best displays of guitar prowess I’ve ever been privileged to see.
“a tune of a complexity that simply astonished.”
(Dag nab it.)
I LOVE guitar and banjo music… but we simply GOTS to have a fiddle, too.
Here’s a monster fiddle for ye. I saw this guy in a tiny bar here in Colo Spgs about 5 years ago. Working on a Building Absolutely astonishing.
I should’ve mentioned “this guy” is Casey Driessen.
Now THAT was some fiddle-playin’ !!!
Wow, singing and playing fiddle at the same time cannot be easy. And I loved the scenery passing by as the rode in the gondola.
Thank-you, sasqwatch !
Glad to be of service!
Ain’t it nice to know there are young uns hopping in there, bringing new innovations to the art form? Casey really is bringing it on. Keeping it alive.
Such great lyrics, especially Milk Cow Blues and Matchbox Blues… so much more.
Losing Chet was bad enough…
“Windy and Warm” is my favorite of his tunes:
I always liked the way he did “Bottle of Wine”.
Seeing Doc Watson in my teen years at “The Main Point” in Bryn Mawr, PA was one of the highlights of that era. He was never quite the household name that Joni Mitchell & James Taylor were, but we found him just as charming and inspiring and talented.
Thanfully the music never dies
Thankfully the music has beautiful insight and the message lives on.
How sad.. (BTW, the link to WaPo article actually links to a story about Sam Harris, not Doc Watson).
RIP Doc.. a first class picker.. x
I fixed the link; it’s now to the New York Times obit. Thanks!
In the early ’70s, the ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’ LP brought bluegrass to a new generation, and his participation on that is high among the milestones of his legacy.
Another friend of ours found this comment somewhere last night: “I grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains not too far where Doc lived. My wife and I spent our honeymoon in Boone, N.C. (where he liked to play) many years ago. Doc’s gone now and so is my wife. Only difference is Doc’s dead; my wife took up with another fella. Another difference is I’m really sad to see Doc go”
Great comment!!
The ‘Circle’ album is as good as it gets. Virtuoso performances by Doc, Earl, Vasser Clements, Maybelle Carter, and others. After fifty years of listening to all kinds of music, the genuine-ness of that album keeps it near the top of my favorites list.
Highly recommend the NYT obit. Re: his father making a banjo head from the skin of a recently deceased family feline pet. [I trust that Dr. C would not consider that taboo, all in the service of Doc Watson music.] Re: the “make do or do without” mindset that necessarily operated in much of the Appalachians (and certainly anywhere on the planet where a local lives on $1-2/day). Re: his arduous labor in felling trees on the farm.
Playing on WUNC 91.5 FM’s “State of Things” as I type, one can hear a brief excellent remembrance.
This morning, having stayed overnight with my father-in-law (a big Doc Watson fan and, regrettably, himself quickly approaching hospice status), I went to the parking garage and “played” some on my guitar. (I took it up to stay in my autodidactic 40’s, having very briefly toyed with it as a thirteen year-old but quit once those fingertips started getting unavoidably sore and, anyway, was more interested in basketball and motorcycles.)
One goes from:
– “How does anyone do this? to
– “I see where to put my fingers, but I can’t make them go there!? to
– “I can’t place the fingers without looking at the neck!” to
– “How can I possibly play and sing at the same time?!” to
– “How can anyone possibly play with his eyes closed?”
But, this a.m. I’m in the parking garage playing – albeit pretty much just rhythm – but my fingers seem to “know” where to go of their own volition – with my eyes closed – and while playing I contemplate what it takes for a blind person to learn and excel at a musical instrument, or most anything else where eyesight is so incredibly taken for granted. whether it’s Doc Watson, George Shearing (“Lullaby of Birdland”), Ray Charles, Marcus Johnson (? Blues, Stride, Ragtime), Ronnie Millsap (who like Doc Watson attended the NC School for the Blind), Jose Feliciano, and others I ought to remember.
In contemplating two equally gifted guitarists, but one can see and the other can’t, it would seem that the latter’s accomplishment is the more notabler.
One occasionally hears of a guitar student looking for a new instructor, the student and instructor allegedly not having “clicked,” when it is quite more likely that the student is not all that interested.
I think of Doc Watson – who essentially taught himself to play – and his “true grit” and work ethic in perservering and surmounting the circumstances of his youth, and compare his situation and mindset to those of way too many whining youngsters in contempary American life, in full possession of their eyesight and other faculties (and iPods, cellphones, etc.) but afflicted with short attention span, low boredom threshold, insufficient self-discipline, and heightened sense of entitlement. (It’s like a man limping from a sprained ankle complaining about it to a permanently wheelchair-bound paraplegic.)
As Doc Watson once said on WHYY’s “Fresh Air” regarding learning to play the guitar, “I had to work awful hard at it!” If we love what we do we’ll work hard at it. As I heard during initial U.S. Navy training, “Prior Proper Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.”