The Watson Family

The recordings grew out of Ralph Rinzler’s search for Clarence “Tom” Ashley. Rinzler met Ashley at the Union Grove fiddlers’ convention, and through him met Doc. On his first visit to the Watson home he played the family records from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, and Gaither Carlton remarked, “That’s the old music.” Music had been part of the household for a generation. Doc’s father, General Dixon Watson, played the banjo and sang and was the first to teach Doc the instrument; his mother, Annie, sang around the house from a stock of fifty to seventy-five songs, “The House Carpenter” among them.

Other relatives joined in. Doc’s brother Arnold played banjo and harmonica, and his cousin Willard Watson, also a banjo player, taught Doc “Cousin Sally Brown.” Arnold’s mother-in-law, Sophronie Miller Greer, was the widow of Columbus Triplett, one of the men in the ballad “The Triplett Tragedy,” which she sang for the recordings. Dolly Greer, a distant cousin, was another keeper of old ballads. Gaither Carlton, Doc’s father-in-law, played fiddle and banjo, and Rosa Lee contributed “Your Long Journey,” a song she made up while sweeping the house one Sunday morning; Doc helped with the music and sang it with her.

The Watson Family (Folkways FA 2366) drew on field recordings made by Rinzler, Eugene Earle, Archie Green and Peter Siegel between 1960 and 1963. Its fifteen tracks include “Ground Hog,” with Doc on autoharp, Arnold on banjo and Carlton on fiddle; Annie’s “The House Carpenter”; the duet “Your Long Journey”; “Darling Corey”; Sophronie Miller Greer’s “The Triplett Tragedy”; the instrumental “Muddy Roads,” with Rinzler on guitar; and two hymns sung by the whole family, “When I Die” and “The Lost Soul.” Folkways reissued it in 1968 as The Doc Watson Family. Smithsonian Folkways’ 1990 CD of the same name added eleven tracks, among them five more pieces from Carlton and four from Doc with his son, Merle, closing with Merle’s “Southbound.”

The family also performed away from home. In 1962 Doc took a group to New York for a set of concerts for the Friends of Old Time Music, where they found a quiet, listening audience very different from the dance halls back home. At the Newport Folk Festival in July 1964 Annie, Rosa Lee and Doc sang hymns such as “Lights in the Valley,” Carlton fiddled behind Doc on “Hicks’ Farewell,” Doc and Arnold played “Reuben’s Train” on two banjos, and Merle, then fifteen, played guitar; Vanguard issued that set in 1991 as Treasures Untold.

Rinzler and Daniel Seeger recorded the family again in September 1964 and May 1965. Those tapes, with spoken passages by Doc recorded by A. L. Lloyd in 1976, became The Watson Family Tradition, produced by Lloyd and Rinzler and released in 1977 by Rounder in the United States and Topic in Britain. Songs from the Southern Mountains (Sugar Hill, 1994) gathered further early-1960s recordings by Eugene Earle and D. K. Wilgus, from Deep Gap, the Ash Grove in Los Angeles and Newport, with three tracks recorded in Deep Gap in 1973, including duets by Doc and Rosa Lee on “A Tiny Broken Heart” and “Just a Friend.” Its liner notes were written by Doc and Rosa Lee’s daughter, Nancy. Gaither Carlton died in 1972.