Appalachian music reviews

Doc Watson, the Vanguard Years has to be one of the all time great Recording Collection. It was done at a time when Folk Music was getting out to the general public, and there is no greater Folk Guitarist and Singer than Doc Watson.

Here is Doc at his very best, alone on the first three discs. His Intoxicated Rat is so funny. Deep River Blues is great finger style guitar, along with Doc's singing.

13. Country Blues 14. Black Mountain Rag 15. Doc's Guitar

These cuts are some of the most wonderful solo guitar playing you have ever heard.

13. Streamline Cannonball 14. Old Camp Meeting Time 15. I'm Thinking Tonight Of My Blue Eyes

Great old country, so old they are really folk music. And Doc singing, his guitar playing, just him alone, you will never forget.

7. Brown's Ferry Blues 8. Spike Driver Blues 9. Roll On Buddy 10. I Am A Pilgrim 11. Wabash Cannonball 12. Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms

If you missed Doc Singing and picking these songs, you would have missed so very much.

Doc Watson is one of the most gifted musicians of our times. His musicianship is showcased in a combination of his picking and singing.

Doc is not just a country boy, though he is that. Doc listened to all kinds of music, including Black Blues singers and big bands. He can play the country tunes with such great feeling, and he can play very sophisticated Jazz.

I saw Doc Watson with Doctor John in University City Missouri. They were great as solo artists, then they played a show together, country, blues, and jazz. It was pure artistry. To bad these two great artists have never recorded together.

Though Doc Watson is good with a large band, he is in my opinion the best when he is solo, which he is on three of these disks. Someone at Vanguard saw his great artistry as a solo act and exploited it, to its utmost degree, in these three great CDs. Thank goodness, for this great exploitation. What would we have done without these recordings?

I bought the Vanguard album, "Doc Guitar," before 1965. All the songs on that album are in these three CDS that you get with the boxed set.

With these three solo CDs, you get Doc with his son Merle, named after Merle Travis, Doc's most admired Guitar Player. Doc and Merle traveled together, after Merle grew up. Merle flew a private owned plane, owned by Doc. This way the two could jump around the Country without being on the Road all the Time.

Merle was killed a few years ago while driving a tractor on his farm. Doc grieved much, but he went on. Doc has a music festival each year named for his beloved son, Merle Watson.

Doc Watson now appears with a two other musicians: another guitar player who Doc swaps licks with; a bass player. Doc does little Solo Work on Recordings anymore. Vanguard preserved the great solo work of Doc Watson for all time. If you love old time Country Music, great flat picking, and/or great finger style guitar, order this four CD set today. You will love it.

By the Dobroman in Denver

In many ways he is more like the Skip James of old time banjo than the Robert Johnson, particularly if you listen to the haunted original recordings James made in the 1930s. In fact in the 1960s when he joined the folk revival and performed along with a lot of the old blues musicians who had similarly been "rediscovered" Dock Boggs said if he had to do it all over again, he would have learned to play guitar and sing the way Mississippi John Hurt played and sang!

The bluesiness of this all may be more pronounced in Boggs' work, but it was really typical of the white Southern banjo players of his era. They are playing an African instrument, transmitted into their area by African Americans, their repetoire ranges into blues, their musical styles on the instruments even in non-blues are influenced by blues music. They lived in a society where the formal racial separation of Jim Crow Segregation and Lynch law existed because of the actual integration of the lives and cultures of white and black workers and farmers and above all musicians was greater than what we have today.

Dock Boggs was quite explicit. He recalled the names of the black banjo players he saw in childhood who played banjo finger style, rather than in the claw hammer style that his brothers played. From childhood he wanted to play like them. Many of the tunes he recorded he said he got from listening to Black blues records. Anyone who cares to read the many interviews with Boggs that have been published or listen to the cds and lps of his memories can learn about this.

Bogg's skills as a singer, as a banjo player, and, above all, as a performer who throws himself entirely into his songs,are unique. But the mixture of African and European American music he represents is hardly unique.

He may collide with the rather false, sometime boring, washed white fantasies about old time white country music nourished by folkies and post folkies and with what white racists who cling to as something purely "white," but Boggs' bluesyness is part of being real old time and not a suburban 60-90s fantasy of old time life.

What about the other great finger picking discovery of old-time banjo playing, Roscoe Holcomb. When he was rediscovered though Holcomb's repetoire included all kinds of music played on banjo, guitar, harmonic, and fiddle, he said he was a blues singer and one of the better ones around his area of Kentucky!

The mixture is real. If you go back and listen to say the Carter family (whose guitar style came from a black man Leslie Riddle who performed on several of their cuts) or to Bill Monroe (who along with fellow western Kentuckian Merle Travis learned much of his music from Black bluesman Arnold Schultz) they sound so much blusier, so much more black influences, than the Allison Krauses and Nickel Creeks reared in suburbia and not the world of racial cultural mix that Dock Boggs comes from.

Just a point of fact, Bogg's banjo style is closer to bluegrass than most other banjo players of his time. Most of Boggs contemporaries were frailers of various kinds, whereas Boggs was a finger picker for the most part. Bluegrass banjo involves precisely adding in the bluesier licks and sounds to the music in an systematic fashion. It is a finger style with just the kind of synchopation that Boggs was a master at.

Particularly the initial bluegrass recordings of Bill Monroe at the end of WWII are obviously a reaction to the rhythmns of Swing. The setup of the tunes, playing the melody first and then opening for improvisational solos by virtuosi musicians, comes from the combo swing and bop then prevelant and has nothing to do with how old time music functioned. As the greatest Bluegrass Fiddler Kenny Baker said, to play Bluegrass Fiddle you need to think like playing Jazz.