Arthel Lane Watson was born in the town of Deep Gap, North Carolina in 1923. He lost his vision as an infant due to an eye infection. Watson, who acquired the performance nickname “Doc” due to the awkwardness of his given name Arthel, played guitar …
Arthel Lane Watson was born in the town of Deep Gap, North Carolina in 1923. He lost his vision as an infant due to an eye infection. Watson, who acquired the performance nickname “Doc” due to the awkwardness of his given name Arthel, played guitar and banjo, and other minor instruments like the jew's harp.
Doc Watson was paired by musicologist (((Ralph Rinzler))) with Appalachian folk musicians Fred Price, Clint Howard, and Clarence Ashley. Clarence Ashley (1895-1967) had a brief recording history dating back to the late 1920s with his band The Carolina Tar Heels that was cut short because of the Great Depression.
The group of musicians created a landmark folk music recording during the height of the Folk Music Revival in 1961-- Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley's. This recording is replete with traditional Appalachian folk songs reflecting the Anglo-Saxon and Scotch-Irish musical heritage of the Appalachian people played in the Old Time Mountain Music style with songs expressing the full range of human emotions and narrative stories about the human condition that extend from human love to the spiritual, to songs about work reflecting the times of the Industrial Revolution as well songs containing the humor and wit of man. This album, published by (((Moses Asch's))) Folkways Records, was followed in 1963 by Old Time Music At Clarence Ashley's - Part 2, which in my opinion is even better than the first album.
Doc Watson, along with Clarence Ashley, were truly some of the greatest modern American folk musicians that ever lived. The quality of their singing and ability to play this music is extremely impressive. They not only know and perform the songs but they have lived the songs as well. These are songs and tunes they knew since childhood and to hear them sing and play them is to hear the emotional part of the soul and heart of Western European Man expressed in music created by common European people.
Doc Watson passed away at the age of 89 in 2012 at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Georgia Buck is originally a humorous Negro song about death and dying (Georgia Buck is dead / The last words he said / were: don't put no shortening in my bread) but in Doc Watson's masterful hands and voice, the song is performed as a serious song and mortality itself seems present as Doc sings the story of Georgia Buck.
As far as I know, the photo of Doc Watson, Clarence Ashley, and Gaither Carleton used in the thumbnail is part of the Federal Goverment's collection and is in the public domain.
