‘Life’s Work: A Retrospective’ by Doc Watson Review: More Than Just a Brilliant Picker

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A 101-track, career-spanning, cross-label compendium reveals the guitarist’s incredible breadth of talent.

Bill Monroe and Doc Watson at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival

Photo: Getty Images

 

From the point that he found wide recognition during the early ’60s folk revival and through the landmark 50-year performing and recording career that followed, Arthel “Doc” Watson was granted maximal respect from fellow music makers and high musical honors. Nine years after his death at age 89, his matchless, fluid fingerpicking and fast fiddle-influenced flat-picking on acoustic guitar remain the first things mentioned when his legacy is recounted. They were when he received the National Medal of Arts, the Grammy’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the nation’s highest folk-music honor, the “living treasure” National Heritage Fellowship.

But that emphasis on the dazzling guitar work has tended to leave his more wide-ranging talents and contributions under-recognized. Doc Watson was a gifted vernacular vocalist, with his blues singing especially notable. He gleefully engaged with material from old-time country and folk, more modern country and bluegrass, blues, jazz, rock, and the classic American pop songbooks. A modern version of the vaudeville-era “songster,” he regularly performed those numbers in distinctive personal styles. That boundary-crossing adventurousness made him a knowing, active promulgator of Americana music as a musical field; he founded one of its largest annual events, North Carolina’s Merlefest, in the process.

A new 101-track, career-spanning, cross-label compendium, “Life’s Work: A Retrospective” (Craft Recordings, digital Nov. 12, CD Dec. 3), includes more of his body of work and historic collaborations than any previous Watson collection, and it’s all the more revealing and entertaining for it. Accompanied by a photo-filled, informative 88-page book by noted music historian and liner-note author Ted Olson, this is the set Watson’s innumerable fans have longed for.

Merle Watson and his father, Doc, performing in 1985

Photo: Getty Images

The tracks largely proceed along chronological lines, accentuating the ever-expanding nature of the repertoire and Doc’s ease with whatever he took up. While he was introduced to the folk revival audience as a backwoods, amateur picker of old-time tunes handed down in his family, the truth was that he’d been playing electrified rockabilly in bars for some time and had to learn many of those old folk songs from records supplied by his managers. So we hear Doc in 1954, sounding much as he always would, vocally, in his friend Jack Williams’s rockabilly band, performing a number he wrote (“Pharaoh”) before we get to the old songs that wowed them at the Newport Folk Festival and in Greenwich Village (“Darling Corey,” the Carter Family’s “Storms Are on the Ocean” in a duet with folk heroine Jean Ritchie ). A 1976 recording of “The Cuckoo Bird,” one of the chestnuts he recorded early, is included in that ’60s sequence because that later version, with his son Merle—also gifted on strings—on banjo, is such a strong performance.

Father and son recorded together regularly from the mid-’60s on—until Merle’s death, in a 1985 tractor accident, at age 36—their dual guitars becoming increasingly entwined, often mind-bogglingly so. Over 50 of their performances together are included here; the cross-generational teaming appears to have spurred Doc’s guitar and song-choice explorations further. For example, Merle (for whom Merlefest would be named) was particularly taken with the syncopated rags and blues picking of Mississippi John Hurt, a style then embraced by father and son (“Spikedriver Blues”).

The remarkable lineup of Doc Watson collaborators performing with him in the collection marks how far he traveled across the roots-music spectrum. They include Bill Monroe on the sorts of duets he’d done in the pre-bluegrass Monroe Brothers act (“What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul”), and such outright bluegrass luminaries as Flatt & Scruggs (“Nothing To It”), Tony Rice and Norman Blake (“Salt Creek”), and Alison Krauss and Ricky Skaggs (“Down in the River to Pray”). In blues, there’s the hoary “How Long Blues” performed with James Cotton on harmonica. There are sessions with Nashville’s Music Row “A Team” (on his hero Jimmie Rodgers’s “Peach Pickin’ Time in Georgia” and W.C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues”) and, famously, with country rock’s Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on “Tennessee Stud.”

In all these matchups, the camaraderie and shared excitement is manifest. That’s aural evidence, too, of the strong opportunities Watson, blinded from infancy on and refusing to be stymied by it, found in musical alliances.

His open-eared, ever-updating material choices charm in themselves. In folk, he moves from ancient tunes (“Little Omie Wise, ” “ Matty Groves ”) to just-arriving songs from Bob Dylan (“Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright”) and Tom Paxton (“That Was the Last Thing on My Mind”). If his takes on rockabilly, such as the Everly Brothers’ “Bird Dog,” will still surprise some, his crooning turn on the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” shows him much further up the road in rock—and comfortably so. Within pop, there’s room for jazzy guitar-vocal takes on Gershwin’s “Lady Be Good” and “Summertime” here, too.

As Mr. Olson comments in the notes, “To think of Doc as a ‘human jukebox’ would miss the point, because his repertoire was larger and more diverse than that found on any jukebox machine Doc would have encountered.”

It was extraordinary that Doc Watson mastered all of these things. It is extraordinarily fortunate that we can now hear that array in one place.