Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson at Folk City was issued by Folkways Records in 1963 as FA 2426. George Pickow recorded it on location at Folk City in New York City and also took the cover photograph. The pairing was the idea of the folklorist Ralph Rinzler. In the notes Joe Wilson wrote for the 1990 reissue, he says Ritchie and Watson had never heard of each other until Rinzler introduced them. Wilson describes two Appalachian family traditions meeting on the stage of a Greenwich Village nightclub: Ritchie’s from a coal-mining area and Watson’s from the tobacco-farming Blue Ridge, two hundred miles apart.
The fifteen-track LP alternates between the two singers and brings them together at either end. Watson opens by asking Ritchie up to sing “The Storms Are on the Ocean” with him, introducing it as a Carter Family song. They close with “Amazing Grace” sung without accompaniment, joined by Roger Sprung and the audience. Ritchie sings “Go Dig My Grave,” “Hiram Hubbard” and “The House Carpenter” with Watson on banjo, and she accompanies herself on dulcimer for “Pretty Polly.” Watson’s solo turns include Mississippi John Hurt’s “Spike Driver Blues,” “Willie Moore” on banjo, and “Wabash Cannonball” on guitar and harmonica. Sprung plays fiddle behind Ritchie’s dulcimer on “Don’t Mind the Weather” and “What’ll I Do With the Baby-O?” and banjo with Watson’s guitar on “Cripple Creek.”
Ritchie wrote the notes for the original insert. For several songs she explains where her versions came from: her father, her uncle Jason Ritchie, her older sister Una. Verve Folkways reissued the album in 1966 as FV-9026. In 1990 Smithsonian Folkways brought it out again as SF 40005, a seventeen-track edition with four previously unreleased performances: “Over the River Charlie,” “East Virginia,” “Blue Ridge Mountain Blues” and “Pretty Saro.” That edition also includes “Swing and Turn Jubilee,” and it does not list three of the LP’s titles, “Don’t Mind the Weather,” “Sugar on the Floor” and “Cripple Creek.”
Tracklist
- 1 Storms are on the Ocean alt version 3:26
- 2 Go Dig My Grave 3:50
- 3 Spikedriver Blues 2:40
- 4 Over the River Charlie 1:14
- 5 Soldier’s Joy alt version 1:34
- 6 Jubilee alt version 2:13
- 7 East Virginia Blues alt version 2:35
- 8 Hiram Hubbard 3:50
- 9 Where Are You Going? 2:00
- 10 Blue Ridge Mountain Blues alt version 3:21
- 11 Pretty Polly alt version 3:33
- 12 Willie Moore 3:24
- 13 What Will I Do with the Baby-O? 2:10
- 14 Pretty Saro 1:49
- 15 Wabash Cannonball alt version 2:36
- 16 House Carpenter alt version 4:27
- 17 Amazing Grace alt version 2:57
