Doc Watson – Way Down Watson
“[‘Mole In The Ground’] is a children’s song and not a children’s song,” Doc explains. “I always pictured an old boy who had to walk to the railhead. They were building the line, or had to walk to the railroad track rather, and he had a hill to climb, and he hated to leave little Tempe at home. He didn’t like that much, but he had to go to work. If he was a mole in the ground, he’d root that darn hill down, and then he could see her for a lot longer time, instead of going over the hill to the railroad. Always have a little picture with whatever song…There’s some more versions of that than Bascom [Lamar Lunsford’s].” Really? I ask. “Oh, yeah. I don’t know how many more. I remember Burl Ives sang it. It’s probably an old, handed-down folk tune. It may be P.D. [public domain]. There’s no telling how old it is.”
Two years ago, Doc released Docabilly, ostensibly a return to his pre-revival rockabilly roots. While jaunty and skillful, it doesn’t swing as it might — if Doc had his druthers. “I don’t know why they want to call it rockabilly.” He sounds a tad peeved. “To me it’s just ’50s music, mainly rhythm & blues. The only really rock thing on there — there’s two: ‘I Love You A Little Too Much’ by Ricky Nelson, and ‘Shake, Rattle And Roll’. The others to me aren’t really rockabilly; for instance, there are a couple of good old country songs…one is called ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’. That’s rhythm & blues if it’s played in that style. I wanted to do it that way, but they didn’t want to do it. They wanted to do it more or less the way the music would have gone with Patsy Cline when she sang it….The other one was Marty Robbins’ ‘Never Felt More Like Singing The Blues’. That’s country.”
Of the latest Nashville country, Doc is less than sanguine. “I’ll put it this way: There’s maybe 15%, I doubt if there’s over 15%, that I like and would enjoy listening to. And that’s a fact. The other stuff coming out of Nashville, I could take it or leave it…There’s an awful lot coming out of there. And there could be a good bunch of it, but it’d be a small percentage of the whole. I’m not really familiar with all the names. There’s too many of them. I like Alan Jackson, he’s fairly new. Don Williams. I like Randy Travis.” He laughs again, low and rolling, when he recalls the Travis title “Digging Up Bones”.
There’s always been a soothing humor, a joyous spirit running through Watson’s picking: the way the melodic figures twirl and skip on an old country blues like “Sitting On Top Of The World”. His playing is always instantly identifiable — the speed and lightness of touch, the intricate warp and woof of melody and rhythm. If Doc wasn’t the first acoustic guitarist in bluegrass or old-time music to foreground lead figures, he raised high the stakes. Tony Rice, Norman Blake, Clarence White — all are Watson’s musical heirs.
That beauty developed unconsciously, out of the different contexts in which Doc found himself. “That dance band I played with didn’t have a fiddler,” he explains. “They’d always want to do one or two square-dance sets during the four hour period…and I’d have to play lead guitar. I knew in my head quite a few of the old fiddle tunes, so I buckled down and learned to play them. I put ’em back on the acoustic guitar in the ’60s, that’s where the flatpick style started; I guess people picked up on that. The style just happened. I’m not going to elaborate on it because technically I don’t hardly know how to explain it. I do know that you have to learn how to pick an even stroke up and down, instead of trying to play all the notes down like some try to do with a pick.”
At 74 years wise, Doc still illuminates the wide prism of his abilities and catalog, but he has relaxed some from touring. In 1997, he released Doc & Dawg (on the Acoustic Disc label) with David Grisman. “That was just a jam session, it wasn’t intended for an album,” Doc says. “It was just done for fun, and we recorded it to see what it sounded like. David kept it all in his tape files and something inspired him to put it out as an album. Now there’s a couple of cuts that were done in the studio, when I helped him with the material for an album called Home Is Where The Heart Is. It’s bluegrass, except for four cuts, the old-timey things that Charlie and Bill Monroe did…[Doc & Dawg] is kinda informal, which is the reason people love it so good.”
He’s less enamored of the infamous Groovegrass Boys, a funky dance/bluegrass project that featured Watson, Mac Wiseman and the Del McCoury Band plus a guest appearance by Bootsy Collins of Parliament/Funkadelic. “Oh Lord,” Watson says. “I don’t know why I ever agreed to help do sessions on that. Some of it’s crazy. Scott Rouse, the producer, is a good friend of mine, I guess that’s why I did it. I haven’t heard the whole record. I’ve heard playbacks of some things we did. I didn’t know it had been released. It was meant to be fun and foolishness.”
What has sustained Doc Watson over three decades of touring, playing his heart’s desire, but traveling on a road he found hard? For a time, it was blood ties. “I’m not going to elaborate on this,” Doc begins, “I’m not gonna tell you all the details, but I’ll tell you something: In 1967, Merle said, ‘Dad, I believe I’ll go off the road for a while and do something else.’ I offered him half the profit of whatever we could make out of it, if he would stay, and he decided to stay. If it hadn’t of been for Merle I probably wouldn’t be talking to you on an interview now. I would probably have quit. It was too tough out there for a handicapped person. And the thing Ralph was doing, he’d gotten into other work, he couldn’t help me…
“Merle was the other half of the musical team, almost from the time he first started. He was a fine musician in his own right, as good as I’ve ever gone on the stage with. Because he was versatile. He could play whatever instrument he picked up: banjo, guitar in any style, fingerstyle, flatpick. He could play slide better than anybody I ever heard in my life. Without his help, as a business partner, as a road manager, and a fine musician, I would not have made it. Most people don’t realize that. He’s never had the credit he deserves, and it’s a damn shame he didn’t get it while he was here.”
Merle Watson was killed in a tractor accident at the age of 36. There’s a grand festival named after him held every spring in Wilkesboro, N.C. Doc invites me to come down to it. “I hope you can make sense out of all this chattering,” he says, a cue that he needs to go. I don’t want to hang up, know that I have to, and ask him one last question: His favorite recordings from his catalog? “My two favorites are Southbound and Doc And Merle On Stage. I like all the records we did, but those might be the ones I was the proudest of when they came out.”
Roy Kasten writes essays, stories and songs in St. Louis. He agrees with Guy Clark that the David, the Mona Lisa, and Doc Watson’s “Columbus Stockade Blues” are more than worth mentioning in the same breath.