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Michael Coleman, and brought their music to Europe, Japan and Africa. After working for a while with the band Frosty Morn, they continued to tour with bassist T. With Merle playing guitar and banjo and serving as partner and driver, the father-son team expanded their audience nationwide. From then on, he was a full-time professional, playing a wide range of concerts, clubs, colleges and festivals, including the Newport Folk Festival and Carnegie Hall.Īs the folk revival waned in the late 1960s, Doc’s son Merle provided the musical and emotional companionship that he needed to continue touring. In 1961 the Friends of Old-Time Music invited Doc, Ashley, Clint Howard and Fred Price to perform at a now-legendary concert in New York City, and one year later Doc gave his first solo performance at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. His recording with David Holt, entitled Legacy, received the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Recording of 2002. In his later years, Doc returned to this old-time pre-bluegrass style in collaborations with David Grisman and David Holt. These sessions resulted in Doc’s first recordings, Old-Time Music at Clarence Ashley’s. In 1960, spurred by the growing folk revival, Ralph Rinzler and Eugene Earle came south to record Ashley and heard Doc Watson in the process. He also continued to play traditional music with his family and with his banjo playing neighbor, Clarence “Tom” Ashley. In 1953 at age thirty, he met local piano player Jack Williams, and he spent seven years playing gigs with Williams’ rockabilly/swing band. Back home he played mostly with neighbors and family, among them fiddler Gaither Carlton, who became his father-in-law when Doc married Rosa Lee Carlton in 1947. He later picked up some chords from a fellow student at Raleigh School for the Blind, and began to incorporate material that he heard on records and the radio with the music of his heritage.

At age thirteen he taught himself the chords to “When the Roses Bloom in Dixieland” on a borrowed guitar, and his delighted father bought him a $12 Stella. His mother, Annie Watson, sang traditional secular and religious songs, and his father, General Watson, played the banjo, which was Doc’s first instrument, as well. He recorded more than fifty albums over the years and received much recognition for his work, earning the National Medal of Arts, a National Heritage Fellowship, the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award, seven Grammy Awards, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He was also a wonderful singer, and he played a two-finger banjo style that is traditional in the region. Doc virtually invented the art of playing mountain fiddle tunes on the flattop guitar, influencing countless musicians. Guitar Music Bluegrass Band Banjo Oldtime Historic Artists Harmonicaīorn in Watauga County in 1923 into a musically rich family, Arthel “Doc” Watson spent a lifetime as a performer blending his traditional Appalachian musical roots with bluegrass, country, gospel, and blues creating a unique style and an expansive repertoire.