A Personal Tribute to Doc Watson

Last year, my two daughters and I spent a large part of our summer relaxing at our home in the Appalachian mountains. 

Though our mountain retreat sits deep in the middle of a plush forest in our gated community, our address bears the name of Deep Gap, N.C.

So it was with some irony when I found out that the man who put Deep Gap on the map was scheduled to appear 15 minutes from my Pennsylvania house, at the Keswick Theater in Glenside, while we were nine hours away in North Carolina.

Arthel Lane "Doc" Watson, the legendary flat-picking and finger-picking guitarist-singer, didn't let the fact he was in his late 80s get in the way of bringing his music to another audience. 

And even though he had been blind since suffering an eye infection as a toddler, Watson was a revolutionary with a guitar, banjo, or harmonica in his hands, sparking a bluegrass revival during the early 1960s and staying around long enough to see this musical genre become even more mainstream in the 21st century.

Watson, who died at the age of 89 on Tuesday night, was still picking for appreciative crowds up until a month before his death. 

In the aftermath of his passing this week, it only seems right that his last public performance was at the MerleFest, the annual Americana music festival in Wilkesboro, N.C. he founded in 1988 to honor his late son, Merle Watson.

Doc Watson grief was so strong, he nearly put away his guitar for good after his son's tragic tractor accident on the family farm. 

But when he returned to the public arena, Doc sparked an event that has grown into one of the country's most important music gatherings. 

Earlier last summer, we found ourselves stuck in a massive traffic jam, trying to get to the regional center of Boone, a few miles away from Watson's homestead. The reason for all of the traffic was that a large segment of Watauga County was trying to get downtown for the unveiling of a statue in Watson's honor.

It would have been one of those most forgettable of days as the battery in our car decided go dead on us. But at least while we waited for a jump start, we were able to listen to one of the world's most influential guitarists in one of his greatest moments of honor.

But for this most humble and unassuming of humans, honors like that had become commonplace. 

In 1997, U.S. President Bill Clinton awarded Watson the National Medal of Arts at a White House ceremony and he was inducted into the International Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2000. 

A seven-time Grammy Award winner, Watson joined a pantheon of stars with the Grammy's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.

The remarkable thing about Doc was that he was probably more comfortable playing for common folk like those of us who were his neighbors than for presidents and kings.

Shortly after my wife Cheryl and I moved to Boone in 1993, some new friends invited us out for dinner on a Saturday night at a small restaurant called Thompson's Seafood, just a stone's throw away from Doc's home. 

To our surprise that evening, our friends Mary Greene and Pat Baker introduced us to a pair of senior citizens. It turned out to be Doc Watson and his cousin, Ora Watson, a noted fiddler and singer of mountain music.

And to our unexpected pleasure, Doc and Ora were getting ready to perform for us and a handful of other patrons.

On this encounter and the several other times our lives crossed paths, I found Doc to be the most gentle and delightful of men. 

This musician's musician always had some of the world's best country and bluegrass stars clamoring to play with him and learn from him, but he also was quick to encourage a young unknown.

Among those paying respects on Tuesday night was heavy metal Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash, who wrote about Watson's influence on Twitter. 

In Wednesday's New York Times, folk guitarist extraordinaire Ry Cooder described seeing Doc perform for the first time in 1963, in front of UCLA's Royce Hall. 

Later that day, Watson stopped to listen as Cooder sat on a bench and played his guitar by himself.

Cooder said that Watson walked by with a prominent folk music club owner named Ed Pearl. Watson stopped to listen and asked "Who's that?"

"That's Ry Cooder, he's a youngster," said Pearl.

"Sounds pretty good," Doc said, as he walked away.

Watson also had the reputation of being the strongest of family men. Doc married his cousin, Rosa Lee Carlton — the daughter of locally-renowned fiddler Gaither Carlton — in 1947 and they spent 64 years as a loving couple. 

My oldest daughter Charlotte attended classes with one of Doc's great-granddaughters, Olivia, at Parkway Elementary School before we moved to Hatboro and it was easy to see what a tight-knit family the Watson clan had.

On a Sunday morning at last month's MerleFest, Doc Watson performed one last set before an adoring crowd. His final tune, ironically, was the classic gospel-folk song "I'll Fly Away." 

Could there have been a more appropriate encore? I think not.