Episode 6: Sitting on Top of the World

VMP Anthology

In this episode, we cover the fifth album in your box, Doc Watson’s self-titled debut album. Doc was somewhere in between Joan Baez and Skip James, in terms of his age and novelty in the folk revival. Losing his eyesight at age 2, and spending his days and nights absorbing generations of Appalachian folk tunes, Doc was “discovered” in his late 30s by Ralph Rinzler, who recognized Doc’s unique talents, and realized he’d do well on the coffeehouse and folk circuit. Through a rare quirk in the bands he was in, in order to be heard properly in the outdoor venues he often played, he transposed the main instrument of Appalachian folk — the fiddle — to an acoustic guitar, developing a flat picking style, where he both plucked and picked at his guitar strings, playing dexterous, complicated riffs that rang through the clamor of a get down.

In this episode, we talk with Elijah Wald, who, in addition to being a blues and folk writer and historian, admires Watson as a guitar player, as Wald has played in traditional blues and folk bands inspired by him. Here we talk about Watson’s unlikely rise to folk fame, why his guitar playing stood out and the mechanics of flat picking.