“Watson Blues,” also titled “Watson’s Blues,” is a Bill Monroe instrumental that got its name from Doc Watson. Watson met Monroe on his second trip to California with Clarence Ashley’s group, in the spring of 1963, and the two first rehearsed in the Los Angeles living room of a house where Watson and his wife, Rosa Lee, were staying. Ralph Rinzler, who had worked to bring the two together, wrote that the tune came up at that first rehearsal. When Monroe suggested it, Watson immediately found an introductory guitar run for it. Monroe responded, “Since you’ve added to this, why don’t we just call it ‘Watson’s Blues’?” Rinzler heard in it an old favorite Monroe used to sing, “You’ll Find Her Name Written There,” turned into an instrumental.
Monroe and Watson went on playing it together. A version from Sunset Park in Oxford, Pennsylvania, on 23 August 1964 was released on CD in 2014, and one taped at Tex Logan’s home in Madison, New Jersey, on 26 August 1966 opened Rinzler’s 1993 Smithsonian Folkways collection Live Duet Recordings 1963–1980. Monroe took it into the studio with the Blue Grass Boys on 11 March 1975 at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. That session had Bob Black on banjo, Kenny Baker and Joe Stuart on fiddles and Randy Davis on bass, and the track closed his January 1976 MCA album The Weary Traveler.
Among later players, the mandolinist David Grisman and the guitarist Tony Rice recorded it as a duet in 1993 for their Acoustic Disc album Tone Poems, released in 1994. Rice played it again on Grisman’s Monroe tribute Dawg Plays Big Mon (2012).
