elementary doctor watson

Doc and Merle Watson’s Elementary Doctor Watson, released in 1972, maintains a very deep, special hold on me, and has since I was about eight years old. Though Southbound, released six years earlier on Vanguard, is the superior album — one of the best folk revival albums ever made, in fact — Elementary is one of my father’s favorite records, and I’ve listened to it countless times with him, and over the years he has taught me many of these songs on guitar as well. He has the album memorized — guitar parts and lyrics — from start to finish. Once upon a time, I did as well.

Doc is from Deep Gap, North Carolina, pure Appalachia. I grew up about 150 miles to the north in a similar terrain, and the songs that Doc and his late son Merle play on Elementary are known by any and all pickers who have settled in those hollers. (Go visit the Galax Fiddler’s Convention if you don’t believe me. Check that: visit it, period. It’s amazing.) Doc, who is still living and performs regularly, is a deceptively smooth picker, a man who learned to play from listening to Merle Travis (Doc’s son’s namesake), and who perfected the flat-picking style in a way that makes it sound unbelievably simple. It’s as if there are no motor skills, no moving parts, just little flutters of clean sound that come from his fingers like caterpillar silk.

Merle, who died in a tractor accident about ten years after this record, was maybe even a more skilled player. Whereas Doc stays straight and true, never asserting his prowess, Merle was a good deal flashier, taking the little licks and twirls in every song, his fingers seemingly planted in the highest frets. On Elementary you can hear the father and son come together perfectly in “The Last Thing on My Mind” (for their best moment, try “Windy & Warm,” which you can find on the Vanguard Visionaries collection, which is, start to finish, incredible). Doc takes the open chord finger-picking, and Merle mirrors him in octaves, the two encircling like leaves lifted by the wind, the dance showing the full circumference of the current, the fullness of sound.

My father played “The Last Thing on My Mind” on his Hummingbird so often for years I thought that he had written it, and with lyrics like, “I could have loved you better/ I didn’t mean to be unkind/ That was the last thing on my mind,” I searched in my father’s face for deeper meaning, hopeful and pained, a kid fresh off divorce. “Summertime” evokes the same emotions. There’s no song that my father and I played more often together than this, and I’ve always loved Doc’s version more than any other (everyone else’s sounds wrong to me). Who else can sing about the catfish jumping and make it feel so true? Who else’s soft tenor, so eroded and worn by age and sadness, could make the words feel so genuine, so deeply held? For years I wanted little more than to be able to sing “Summertime” as Doc did. Maybe I still do.

There are playful moments, too: “Worried Blues” and “Freight Train Blues” and “Three Times Seven” (I adore that one). And even “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” with its up-tempo bluegrass jitter, betrays its lyrics with a bit of a bounce, Doc turning his back on the “bad luck all [he's] ever had,” looking up, looking forward, waiting to ditch Saul, become Paul once and for all.

Elementary Doctor Watson is the album that made me a guitar player (since shamefully abandoned), the album that brought my father and I together on so many nights, an album whose presence on eMusic today literally made me yelp with delight. It might not be an album for you, but for me, few will ever have as much meaning.