Doc Watson

Doc Watson (born March 3, 1923, Stony Fork, near Deep Gap, North Carolina, U.S.—died May 29, 2012, Winston-Salem, North Carolina) was an American musician and singer who introduced a flat-picking style that elevated the acoustic guitar from a rhythmically strummed background instrument to a leading role in bluegrass, country, folk, and rock music, notably during the folk music revival of the 1960s.

Watson was blind from infancy. He grew up on a farm, and with the encouragement of his father, he learned to play guitar, banjo, and harmonica, often picking out tunes that he heard on the radio or on old records. After a few years at a school for the blind, he quit and began playing and singing for tips on street corners and at amateur competitions, including some that were broadcast on local radio stations. In the early 1950s Watson joined Jack Williams and the Country Gentlemen, a country-and-western dance band that lacked a fiddler, so he taught himself to play the fast-paced lead-fiddle parts on his guitar. A decade later folklorist Ralph Rinzler recorded Watson with other local musicians and with his family, including Gaither Carlton, an old-time fiddler and banjo player whose daughter Watson had married in 1947.

Though he did not record professionally until he was in his late 30s, Watson quickly rose to prominence with his smooth baritone voice and folksy charm, as well as his masterful renditions of traditional and popular tunes backed by his virtuoso banjo and flat-picking guitar playing. He appeared at the Newport Folk Festival to great acclaim in 1963 and again in 1964. His fan base—and indeed that of many older country musicians—was renewed again when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a country-rock group, collaborated with him and others on the groundbreaking crossover album Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972). In performance Watson was often accompanied by his father-in-law, and he performed for many years with his son, Merle, on rhythm guitar. After his son’s death in a tractor accident in 1985, Watson continued to tour and record, sometimes with Merle’s son, Richard; in 1988 he founded the annual acoustic Merle Watson Memorial Festival (MerleFest) in Wilkesboro, North Carolina.

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Between 1973 and 2006 Watson won eight Grammy Awards, including a lifetime achievement award (2004). He received the National Medal of Arts from U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton in 1997, and three years later he was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor.