\u00a0 \u00a0When he was 6, he learned to play the harmonica. At 11, it was a banjo, its head made of the hide of his grandmother’s late and aged cat, his father’s practical handiwork.
\n“Music, from the time I can remember, was a centerpiece in my life,”\u00a0Watson\u00a0said. “It was something I dearly loved.”
\nHe got his schooling in Raleigh, N.C., at Governor Morehead’s School for the Blind. There he learned to play a few chords on a friend’s guitar. Soon after, he bought his own.\u00a0Guitar won out over the banjo before\u00a0Watson\u00a0started making money at the end of a crosscut saw.<\/div>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0When he was in his early 20s, he married Rosa Lee Carlton, daughter of an old-time fiddle player and the “sweet wife” he says still reminds him of a girl. They had two children, Nancy and Eddy Merle.
\nDoc\u00a0Watson\u00a0was making his living in music by then – first by tuning pianos and then by playing electric guitar in a dance band.\u00a0“If I could see, music would have been a hobby,”\u00a0Watson\u00a0said. “I would have had a job where I could go home at night. But whatever fate the good Lord puts in your hands, you use it.
\n“I may have been a haughty, mean rascal if I didn’t have the handicap. I guess I have been part of my life anyway.”
\nIt was during the dance band years that\u00a0Watson\u00a0began to create his signature sound, taking fiddle tunes and arranging them for guitar.
\nHe played fingerstyle – and still does – but for these tunes he used a flat pick to create a rolling line of notes. The sound drew national attention in the early 1960s after musician and folk collector Ralph Rinzler, founding director of the Smithsonian’s Office of Folklife Programs, convinced\u00a0Watson\u00a0to switch to an acoustic guitar and bring his mountain music north.
\n“I hesitated,”\u00a0Watson\u00a0said. “I didn’t think people would sit and listen to that. I got me a big, pleasant surprise.”
\nThe audiences at folk conventions and on college campuses were large. “I had a bit of stage fright, let me tell you,” said\u00a0Watson, who was 39 at the time.
\nBut he played and started life on road in earnest. Other musicians listened and learned.
\n“Doc\u00a0was the first one who really popularized the single note, melodic style of playing,” said Dan Miller, editor of the Pulaski-based Flat Picking Guitar Magazine.
\nOther people had experimented with that musical style, but it was\u00a0Watson\u00a0who gave it appeal. “His modesty and country charm and wisdom and all that came to forefront,” said Miller, who has written about\u00a0Watson\u00a0extensively. “Anybody I interview these days from Tony Rice on down lists\u00a0Doc\u00a0as a major influence.”
\nWatson, a storyteller as well as a singer, embraced all types of music, from old-time, folk and bluegrass to blues and jazz. “He’s soulful,” Miller said. “Whatever he plays he makes it his own because it comes from inside. People can feel that.”
\nBecause the notes don’t fill every space, the music sounds best with accompaniment.
\nFor 20 years,\u00a0Watson\u00a0found that accompaniment in his son, Merle, who started playing and recording with his dad in ’64, then joined him full on in ’66. “There were a lot of dues to paid in the music business, and Merle and I paid, before it became lucrative at all,”\u00a0Watson\u00a0said. “He did hundreds of thousands of miles of driving. It went into the millions, I think.”
\nConversation naturally turns to Merle, laid to rest in a small family cemetery near Watson’s home.\u00a0Doc\u00a0sometimes refers to his wife, whom he still thinks of as a girl, as “Merle’s mother.” Merle was his right-hand man. He had his own guitar style and the two toured America and built a following.
\nBut in the fall of 1985, Merle was killed in a tractor accident.\u00a0Doc\u00a0thought about quitting music, but didn’t, choosing instead to perform with friend Jack Lawrence as his musical partner.
\nWilkesboro Community College, a few winding turns from Deep Gap, asked permission a few years after Merle’s death to hold a festival in his honor featuring musicians who were friendly with and influenced by the Watsons. The family agreed. Nicknamed “Merlefest,” the concert spans four days on the last weekend each April and has grown in attendance from 4,000 people to 45,000.\u00a0At that festival, Richard\u00a0Watson, who resembles Merle in appearance and demeanor, joins his grandfather on stage. He now plays with\u00a0Watson\u00a0and Lawrence at engagements close to home. He will join them in Radford.
\n“I sure missed Merle when he left us,”\u00a0Doc\u00a0Watson\u00a0said. “When Richard first started playing, I don’t know that a grandfather could have been any gladder about it. Somebody asked me, ‘Are you a great grandpa?’ after [Richard’s daughter] Candace was born. And I said ‘Nah, just average.’
\n“It really has been a wonderful thing for Richard to come up and sit down and play those licks that are flavored an awful lot like his dad played.”
\nRichard\u00a0Watson, who recorded “Third Generation Blues” with his grandfather last year, helps out at home, too. He will take care of the mowing when the grass grows ankle-deep.\u00a0Doc\u00a0Watson\u00a0is in charge of the mechanics. He spoke recently on a break from repairing the family lawn mower. “You have to winterize the doggone things,” he explained, and then make new adjustments come spring. “I was just hooking up the battery when you hollered.”
\n“He’s very mechanically minded,” said Lawrence, who knows Watson’s playing nearly as well as his own. “Ten or 12 years back he built his own utility building, cut all the lumber himself and pounded every nail. He’s able to do anything he wants to do, but see.”
\nLawrence, who does the driving on their tours (“Doc\u00a0drives too fast,” he joked) has seen his partner’s influence on generations of guitar players.
\n“He’s probably been the biggest influence on me in my playing,” said Wayne Henderson, a Rugby guitarist and guitar-maker. “I’d say he’s influenced more people than probably anybody, especially in our kind of music. He’s definitely a pioneer.”
\nLawrence felt the influence himself at 15, when he came across an Earl Scruggs album that featured\u00a0Watson\u00a0on guitar.\u00a0Now they play together.\u00a0Watson, his eyes winking, sets the tone and strums chords that tell Lawrence what they’ll play next.<\/div>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0“It’s like we’re sitting down in our living room playing,” Lawrence said. “I like that about it.”
\nWatson\u00a0has always contended he’d rather be remembered as a decent human being than anything else.
\nThat’s likely how he will be remembered, said Dan Miller, the magazine editor. “That’s the most important part of being\u00a0Doc\u00a0Watson.”<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
STILL AT HOME ON STAGE From April, 2000 Roanoke Times Madelyn Rosenberg \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0If he had his way,\u00a0Doc\u00a0Watson\u00a0would never stray far from Deep Gap, N.C. \u00a0 \u00a0“I love a good audience,” said\u00a0Watson, a guitarist and singer who has recorded more … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":16,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1574","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1574"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1577,"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1574\/revisions\/1577"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.squealermusic.com\/madclips\/wordpress2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}