Black Mountain Rag
Doc and Merle Watson
Rounder Records
2006
20 tracks
This music takes me back to another time and place when life was simpler, or at least in retrospect appears to have been, and country music was still considered to be folk or hillbilly music. It takes me back to evenings listening with my parents to radio broadcasts like the WWVA Jamboree from Wheeling, West Virginia, and Nashville’s Grand Ol’ Opry or watching my father play and sing country music and call square dances in some great barn in Southern Alberta. This is music that brings back the old times.
Doc Watson, who is only two years younger than my father, has been playing and singing longer than many musicians have been on this earth. During that time, he has influenced the playing and singing of many of the musicians who followed. His incomparable flat-pick guitar playing impressed many young guitarists to play lead acoustic guitar with a flat-pick. While, outside folk and old-time country music circles, Doc Watson has not achieved the wide audience recognition of a Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie, he is one of the important artists of the last century in American folk music.
The 20 tracks on this CD [actually 24 songs if you count the medleys] bring the listener an excellent selection of Watson’s playing and singing. Ably supported by his son Merle and a dozen or so other musicians who appear on various tracks, Watson presents a potpourri of traditional folk songs interspersed with some countrified pop and jazz standards. While the music seems overall quiet and unintrusive, often from across the room a phrase or refrain would suddenly grab my attention and draw me away from whatever I had been doing at the time. What drew my attention was both the familiarity of what I was hearing and the excellence with which it was being performed.
Watson is known primarily for his work as a guitarist and this is where his main influence on younger musicians has been. Less recognized is his vocal style. Watson sings in a warm, dry baritone that brings to his words a veracity that makes him particularly effective as a teller of stories in song. It’s always a pleasure to hear Watson sing a song, as he does on seven of these tracks.
While many of the songs on this release are traditional American folk tunes adapted from the music of England, Ireland, and Scotland, other songs wander off into a variety of genres. On this release can be heard pop standards spanning the last century, jazz classics, and even a bit of klezmer.
“Below Freezing” especially stands out with its unique blend of musical styles. This instrumental has a jumpy contemporary sound that swings from modern jazz to a klezmer clarinet sound that’s purely European, all served up over a bed that keeps it grounded in American country music.
The medley “Liza/Lady Be Good” is a lively jazz piece with some very cool jazz violin complementing Watson’s fine guitar work. Again, the style is eclectic and even quirky. Behind the cool jazz instrumental is a clickety-clack rhythm track that sounds more like skiffle [or perhaps step-dancing] than jazz beats.
Old favourites like “Smiles” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” take the listener back to some comfortable Forties living room listening to a broadcast on the old Victrola. The always lively “Down Yonder” brings that same sense of time gone by but with a definite country edge.
Songs like “Black Pine Waltz” and “Devil’s Dream” [probably my all-time favourite reel] take the listener even further back to a simpler time and place. There are traditional-style folk songs (“Sadie” and “Leaving London”), songs of protest (“Mole in the Ground”), and even humourous tales (Phil Harris’ classic “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke”), adding variety and interest to this set.
If you want to hear one of the finest and most influential of American folk music artists, then this CD should definitely be added to your library. If you just plain love Doc Watson, then this one is a gotta-have album, a compilation of some of his best work.
You can find an extensive biography of Doc Watson at Wikipedia. If you do a search for “Doc Watson” in google or another search engine, you’ll find a wealth of additional information on this important American artist. Go to http://myspace.com/docsguitar to hear four songs by Doc Watson, including the title song of this release, “Black Mountain Rag.”
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