Annie Watson

She had a repertoire of fifty to seventy-five traditional secular songs, besides sacred music, and Doc’s father, General Watson, picked the banjo.

Ralph Rinzler, Eugene Earle, Archie Green and Peter Siegel made the recordings that Folkways issued as The Watson Family (FA 2366) in 1963. Her track is “The House Carpenter,” the ballad numbered 243 in Child’s collection, with Carlton, Doc’s father-in-law, on fiddle. She had learned it as a very young child, and her version is a short form of the common American type, in which nothing suggests that the returning lover is a ghost.

In July 1964 she sang hymns with Doc and his wife, Rosa Lee, at the Newport Folk Festival, among them “Lights in the Valley,” “I Heard My Mother Whispering” and “I Want to Love Him More.” Vanguard issued those performances in 1991 on Treasures Untold. She also sings with Doc and his brother Arnold on “The Faithful Soldier,” on the family collection The Watson Family Tradition.