Jim Watson

Watson took up old-time and bluegrass music in the mid-1960s, and in 1968 he joined the circle around the Hollow Rock String Band, with Tommy and Bobbie Thompson, Alan Jabbour and Bertram Levy; he plays on the band’s second LP. In 1972 he formed the Red Clay Ramblers with the banjo player Tommy Thompson and the fiddler Bill Hicks. In his fourteen years with the band he played mandolin, guitar, autoharp and bass and sang, and recorded nine albums with them for Folkways, Flying Fish and Sugar Hill.

Since leaving the Ramblers he has worked with Robin and Linda Williams, appearing with them regularly on the radio show A Prairie Home Companion. He has also played string bass with the bluegrass band the Green Level Entertainers, performed with Duke LaCrosse and Pinky Wyoming, Rebecca Newton and Leroy Savage, and for more than twenty years hosted a Christmas show at the Cave in Chapel Hill. His own albums are Don’t Tell Me, I Don’t Know, Willie’s Redemption and This World Would Be All Sunshine (2008), and with his old bandmates Mike Craver and Bill Hicks and the songwriter Joe Newberry he made You’ve Been a Friend to Me.

He played string bass on Alice Gerrard’s album Pieces of My Heart (Copper Creek, 1994), recorded at Overdub Lane in Carrboro, and he plays mandolin, guitar and bass with Gerrard, Cliff Hale and Chris Brashear in the Piedmont Melody Makers on Wonderful World Outside (Vigortone).