In every great performer’s life there are watershed concerts, events that forever alter the rest of the career from what has gone before. For Doc one of these came in 1963, when he was brought to the Newport Folk Festival by the folklorist Ralph Rinzler. Doc was forty-one years old. He sang about blackberry blossoms, shady groves, houses of the rising sun, and the sad fatalism of sitting on top of the world. When he began, he was an unknown guitarist with a pleasant baritone, on a long and winding road from Deep Gap, North Carolina. When he was helped from the chair and led from the stage, he was on his way to a contract with Vanguard Records, and he had reinvented forever the way folk musicians approached the guitar.
As has been said, there are more than a hundred performers here, and there are no slouches. These are the heavy hitters and brand-name pickers of bluegrass, everyone from hardshell traditionalists to the avant-garde, folks who through virtuoso playing and infusions from jazz are moving bluegrass into new and uncharted territory.
But no one questions what this thing is all about.
The Texas singer-songwriter Guy Clark usually performs his song Dublin Blues during his sets, a song that has the quatrain:
I have seen the David
I’ve seen the Mona Lisa too
I have heard Doc Watson
Play Columbus Stockade Blues
At the mention of Watson’s name there is an outbreak of applause, thunderous and spontaneous. It happens the same way before different audiences each time Clark performs the song.
When Doc is led up the wooden steps to the stage, he approaches from the rear, and the first thing you see is his silver hair. At the first sight of it, the audience erupts. Doc is guided across the stage to where folding chairs have been positioned before the microphones. He is assisted into a chair, and he feels for the guitar in the open case beside his seat. He takes the guitar and sits cradling it, his face turned toward the crowd he can feel but not see, waiting until the applause dies down.
A stocky young man with a black beard has seated himself in the chair beside Doc’s. He has taken up a guitar as well. He touches Watson’s arm, and Watson leans toward the microphone.
This is my grandson Richard, he says, and he’s going to help me out a little here. This is Merle’s boy.
The crowd erupts again. The torch has been passed.
Doc’s guitar kicks off a set of country blues, old Jimmie Rodgers songs, and the song Clark referenced. The third generation holds his own with ease, as if perhaps guitar playing was simply a matter of genetics.
Between songs Doc jokes easily with the audience, tells a couple of stories. The audience eats it up. They’re eager to laugh at his stories, and maybe they’ve heard them before; their laughter anticipates the punch lines. They love him. He could sell them a used car with a blown transmission, a refrigerator that keeps things warm instead of cold. His voice is comforting and reassuring. He could be a neighbor sitting on the edge of your porch, or rocking right slow in the willow rocker.
Except for the playing. The picking is impeccable; it’s what you expect Doc to do: the hands sure and quick, the notes clean and distinct, and the absolute right note to go where he picks it. Those cannot be seventy-six-year-old hands, the audience is thinking.
Maybe they are not of a mortal at all; maybe they are the hands of a king, a god.
And with the guitar clasped to him and his fingers moving over the strings, he is a god, the king of what he does. They are the hands of a man sitting on top of the world.
But every set has to end, and when this one does, and Doc begins to rise, his hand reaching for the hand that without seeing he knows is reaching for his own, and the hands touch, the illusion shatter: The audience sees that he is not a god at all but a mortal with frailties like the rest of us, and this somehow is more endearing yet.
The applause erupts again.
Chet Atkins is the best guitar player in the world, Doc said.
I figured you’d say Merle Travis.
Well, Merle was a great influence on me. I named (my son) Merle after him, and we finally met when we did that Will the Circle Be Unbroken record. But Chet’s the best. He can play anything.
That’s what people say about you, I said.
I’m slowing down a little. I’m getting older, and I can feel my hands stiffening up. I don’t tour as much as I used to. I can feel myself slowing down, some of the runs are slower.
Close-up, Watson’s face is pleasant, ruddy, the silver hair a little thin but waved neatly back, every strand in place. He does not wear dark glasses, as most blind performers do, and in fact, it is easy to forget that he is blind: The lids are lowered, the eyes just slits, and he looks almost as if he’s just squinting into strong sunlight.
Where’d you come up with the picking on Sitting on Top of the World?
Watson laughed. I made that up, he said, that’s my arrangement. I heard it off that old Mississippi Sheiks record. You might not have heard of them. But I changed it. I just played it the way I wanted it.
What do you think about the way MerleFest has grown? It’s pretty big business now.
Well, it’s good for the music. It’s good for Merle, to keep people thinking about him. And people have to make a living, have to sell records. It’s good to know so many people love this kind of music enough to come way down here to hear it.
Do you think it’s changing? Music, I mean?
Music is always changing, Doc said. But it’s all music, just people getting together and playing. One thing I noticed though, somebody told me there were some complaints about one of the performers using some pretty rough language over the mic during his show. I don’t care for that. This has always been a family thing, women and kids, and that young fellow needs to remember where he is.
It was almost dark, and gospel music was rising from the tents when I walked down the road toward the parking lot. It was Sunday, the last day of the festival, and gospel was mostly what today had been about. There had been Lucinda Williams, of course, but mostly it had been gospel, like Sundays on old-time radio when the Sabbath was a day of respite from the secular.
Off to the right were the campgrounds. You could see the RVs, but they were hazy and ambiguous through the failing light, and music was rising from there, too the plinking of a banjo, a fiddle sawing its way through some old reel.
What you could see best were the campfires scattered across the bottomland, and for an illusory moment, time slipped, and it could have been a hobo camp or a campground for Okies on their way to the Golden State. There was a gully beyond the camp area. It was shrouded with trees, and fog lay between the trees like smoke, and it was easy to imaging Tom Joad slipping through them like a wraith, fleeing the vigilante men on his way upstate to organize the orange pickers. Or Woody Guthrie himself might ease up out of the fog, his fascist-killing guitar strung about his neck, a sly grin on his face that said all the world was a joke and only he was in on it. He’d warm his hands over the fire, for the night had turned chill, and he’d drink a cup of chicory coffee before heading down one of those long, lonesome roads Woody was always heading down.