Doc Watson

[laughs] So, uh, also we got Arrogance from Chapel Hill, rock band, uh, Barry Poss from Durham, who is the founder of Sugar Hill Records, so that's pretty cool.

Worked with some amazing, um, artists such as Doc Watson, Ricky Skaggs, Dolly Parton.

Um, so just a amazing talent.

And then Billy Strayhorn from Hillsborough.

For sure.

He would literally sit you down, like, all right, listen to Doc Watson, Bill Moreau, Lesser Flat.

You really got the most, now listening to it, the most technical, hard-to-play stuff at a very early age.

He sat you down, right? Like, you need to listen to this.

Yeah.

The David Grisman Quintet.

The Essential, Doc Watson.

So is that like a greatest hits?

It's important to emphasise that Dylan was hardly the first white singer to be influenced by the blues.

Folk performers like Doc Watson, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie embraced the form and composed many songs in the idiom.

The blues provides the musical structure for jazz, swing, rhythm and blues, and later rock and roll, reggae and hip hop.

Jimi Hendrix even extended his range into psychedelia, while British rock acts like the Rolling Stones, the Animals, John Mayer's Blues Breakers, Cream and Led Zeppelin were all deeply grounded in its ethos.

In sum, 39 episodes were filmed.

Of the many people who Pete interviewed and hosted, these included but were not limited to Tom Paxton, Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers, Puerto Rican musicians Rosa Valentin and Rafael Martinez, Elizabeth Cotten, Yiddish folklorist Ruth Rubin, Jean Ritchie, Bernice Reagon, Doc Watson with Fred Price and Clint Howard, Grant Rodgers, a Catskill dweller who appeared with Norman Studer, the former camp director of Camp Woodland, Malvina Reynolds, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Sonia Malkin, Theodore Bikel with Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein, British folk musician Donovan, Irish folk musician Sean Phillips, the Reverend Gary Davis, Patrick Sky, female singing group the Pennywhistlers, bluegrass group the Greenbriar Boys, Judy Collins, Kentucky banjo player and high lonesome singer Roscoe Holcomb, Scottish singer Jean Redpath, Canadian and Indigenous songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, as well as June Carter and Johnny Cash.

If you're wondering about the title for the show, it comes from a line from Pete's song "Oh, Had I a Golden Thread," a tune about how all the variety in the world should give us strength and wisdom, which appeared on Seeger's 1960 Folkways album titled Rainbow Quest.

[folk music][singing] Oh, had I a golden thread and needle so fine, I'd weave a magic strand of rainbow design, of rainbow design.

Then I fell in love with Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, Jimmy Martin, all that stuff.

Doc Watson, Clarence White, Don Reno.

Hmm.

No actual square dancing, just changing your whole life through watching a band.

So this came about about two years ago.

I'm born and raised about 30 minutes outside of the Watson stage at Merlefest.

So I grew up right there with Merlefest, and about two years ago, I went to the team, and I was like, hey, I want to be a part of Merlefest in some way.

I've always loved music, so I was like, I just want it to be a part of my life.

Exactly.

Did TikTok that first year, and I became Merlefest's best friend, and that became my image.

I was not the face of Merlefest because, I mean, I'm leaving that to Merle and Doc Watson, but I became a friendly face around the festival, and people just came to know me, and I just became the best friend of Merlefest.

So my love for bluegrass, I've always loved bluegrass, but my love just, like, grew.

And then concurrently, I was also into kind of, um, kind of Americana guitar work, bit of Phil Keaggy, um, for those of us who are old enough to know Phil Keaggy well.

But anyway, some Phil Keaggy and also some kind of Ry Cooder, Doc Watson-style Americana.

So it, it was like th- that's music that's kind of malleable in that way and draws that and can, I don't know, be deep and contemplative but also musically pliable and harmonically interesting, I guess.

Right.

Okay, yeah.

And he was... revolutionary player on the acoustic and the electric, and he inspired me a lot, as well as, you know, Doc Watson, Tony Rice, Bill Monroe, Stanley Brothers, you know, kind of some deep cuts, but these mostly guitar players and stringed instrument players who did kind of groundbreaking things with those instruments.

That's what I look toward.

And if anybody out there hasn't listened to The Birds, especially their early stuff, I strongly encourage you to go do it, because, yeah, I mean, The Birds are...

We'll have you do one now.

Cover, original, what you got lined up?

Yeah, this is like a fiddle tune that kind of comes from Doc Watson.

This arrangement comes from Doc Watson and Clarence White, but I'm going to kind of play it my own way.

PineCone has a wonderful jam leaders and lots of jams that happen in the community, and our jam leaders are coming to lead jams in those tents, so bring an instrument for sure.

If you're a book lover, we've got a book event, um, with Alice Gerard, Eddie Huffman, who wrote a book about Doc Watson, with, um, [clears throat] David Macone.

And, um, on ...

Right, we also have an artist interviews happening.