Roots Music

Music back in the 1960’s was a curious choice for us teenagers. We had the radio. . . the Motown sound with Otis Redding, The Four Tops. . . we had the radio buzz with Elvis, then the Beatles and all that followed. . . but I was a folky, learning how to play guitar. My friend Johnny showed me a record album that his brother in the Navy had brought from Europe or somewhere. It was a record by Joan Boaz, with her singing old ballads from times long gone. . . Mary Hamilton, Jackaroe, Henry Martin. The liner notes on the back cover were written by a fellow named Bob Dylan. He had written something about when he first heard Joan’s voice and. . . sitting by railroad tracks. . . In 1969, I finished high school and moved to the south side of Baton Rouge to attend LSU. The folk music genre was expanding widely into protest anthems, including songs like Crosby Stills Nash and Young had sung. . . “four dead in Ohio”. Somewhere in all that 1960’s-’70’s confabulation, Doc was brought into the public domain. Doc and Dylan were singing together at the Newport folk festival.

In the midst of all that counterculture passion and intensity, along came a flash from the past: Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a retro-type album by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. My memory of that album always goes back to hearing the voice of a good ole boy from Deep Gap, North Carolina. . . Doc Watson. Doc was an ole feller with a God-given gift for singin’ and pickin’ the guitar. . . a true folk singer who had had no dreams of fame and fortune when he did sing and flat-pick his acoustic until the cows came, or. . , the rest the listening world heard that deep gap sound comin’ out of them thar hills of the Blue Ridge. As Providence would have it. . . for I had never planned what later happened. . . Pat and I moved to Boone, North Carolina, just a stone’s throw from Deep Gap, where Doc, Merle and Rosalee had lived all their lives. We still live there. . . three grown young’uns later. . . about ten miles from Doc’s old homestead in Deep Gap. Around these parts, Doc is a legend. He used to play in downtown Boone and now there’s a bronze statue of Doc “sittin’ on top of the world”, (as the ole bluegrass tells the tune). As you can see, I took the liberty of visiting Doc on the bench.

Doc was the incarnation of authentic, old time, folk music, the born again entrance of authentic, old time, old school FOLK music. . . the real thing! to accompany the new wave of Baez and Dylan and Peter Paul and Mary the Kingston Trio . . . When I was in living in Asheville in the ’70’s, I met David Holt, a scholarly music historian who also had a great talent for playing the banjo, what the mountain folk call a banjer. David plucked his banjo, the old frailing style, on the Life’s Railway to Heaven track of my Revelation 5:9 album in 1979. Somewhere in time, David visited Doc in Deep Gap and interviewed him. Also somewhere in time. . . must have been in the ‘80’s, I was singing a few songs with my guitar, at the Watauga County fair, when Doc’s wife, Rosalee was listening. At the end of my set, she expressed appreciation for my songs. That was a golden memory, coming from Doc Watson’s wife! Still yet later. . .while attending a meeting of the High Country Writers, I met Patricia Payne, who had fancied Merle, back in the day. But her romantic hopes for Merle had never never been fulfilled. I had talked with her, listened to her story, which she had wanted to publish, but that never happened. She passed away. Soon thereafter, I was summoned to a lawyer’s office in Boone, only to discover that she had bequeathed this desk/ bookshelf to me.

And that’s as close as I ever got to the legend of Doc Watson. We do, however, pass the tiny borough of Deep Gap whenever we drive eastward out of Boone. I always gaze out the car window, trying to catch a glimpse of Doc’s place, the house that Patty Payne had showed me before she passed, the homestead where Doc and Merle used to pick their guitars in the Blue Ridge air, the place where authentic folk music had roots deep in Appalachian soil. That’s my Roots Music story and I’m a’stickin’ to it. King of Soul