Doc Watson: A Life in Music 

by Eddie Huffman

University of North Carolina Press, 2025

 

Despite becoming blind by his first birthday, growing up in one of the poorest areas of the nation, and relying on government support until middle age, Doc Watson became one of the most influential guitar players of the twentieth century. Watson could “bridge the gap” between the traditional Appalachian tunes he learned from family and neighbors and the music popular with modern urban audiences. As one early manager explained: “While some [folk] singers yowled like a rusty hinge or a deer tangled in a barbed-wire fence, Doc hummed like a well-tuned engine or a purring cat.” His recordings as both a guitar player and a singer are some of the warmest and most accessible to come out of the revival of interest in traditional American folk music forms that started in the early 1960s. 

 

Eddie Huffman, author of Doc Watson: A Life in Music, is a journalist and self-described “storyteller with a passion for music and history.” Before Huffman began work on this biography, he had one opportunity to interview Watson. After Watson died and Huffman began his project, he interviewed Watson’s surviving friends, family and collaborators. He also relied on the dozens of existing interviews made with Watson while he toured the US and the world, as well as on various articles published during his lifetime.

 

Similar to what other blind rural musicians experienced, Watson’s handicap provided some complications and some compensations. It limited his career options but also provided “the spare time to develop his skills fully” and contributed to his ability to “[become] one of the most influential guitarists the world has ever known,” writes Huffman. Watson “had musical abilities that set him apart from mere mortals,” but “those abilities went hand in hand with limitations—blindness and poverty—that made it extraordinarily challenging for him to fulfill his destiny.” For example, it “severely affected his ability to venture forth from his little mountain community and share his gifts with the world.”

 

The beginning chapters of this biography are the most satisfying, describing Watson’s early life and the loss of his sight, his first musical explorations on homemade banjos and store-bought harmonicas, and his education at a state-run school for the blind in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he began to play guitar. 

 

After ending formal schooling, Watson started a family and survived on a combination of welfare benefits and intermittent musical gigs performing at auctions, fairs, VFW dances and on the radio. His repertoire came from the store of ballads and fiddle tunes that made up the mountain tradition, as well as records and radio performances that encompassed blues, jazz and popular music of his day. His family included several amateur musicians, and his father-in-law was a local fiddler.

 

Watson’s “discovery” by the wider community came in the 1960s, as Huffman points out, when the broader listening public was turning from the first generation of rock and roll music and taking a new interest in folk music. Many older folk and blues musicians were brought out of retirement and obscurity in the South to college campuses and recording studios in the North and on the West Coast. Doc Watson’s first encounter with these new folksong audiences came as a supporting musician to Clarence Ashley, a singer, banjoist and sometime blackface minstrel whose 1920s recordings attracted a good deal of this new national attention. When the organizer of the tour suggested to Doc that he might be able to make a career out of his old-time repertoire, Doc doubted that it would work: “I didn’t understand how people would be interested in the real genuine ethnic or old-time music of the area, and I was skeptical about it, but I thought, ‘Hey I need some kind of vocation to really earn a living for my family’” explained Watson. “And I loved the music so good, I said, ‘Well, buddy, I’ll try it.’ I went to work, got back on the flattop guitar and got to work on the old-timey songs.”

 

Watson welcomed the attention—and the income—from these tours, but he grew weary of traveling alone by bus and sleeping in strange cities. “It was hard to come to the city, green as a green apple,” Doc said. “I was so homesick you wouldn’t believe it.”

 

Fortunately, Doc’s son Merle had come of age and blossomed into a fine guitarist in his own right. The younger Watson became a sideman, driver and tour manager for Doc. Together, the father and son recorded several great albums of music. Merle also brought more blues, rock and country influences into the duo’s performances. Though their relationship was sometimes strained by Merle’s youthful wildness, Doc credits his son with a good part of his success: “Most people, I don’t know why, they want to lay all the credit on the front man. That’s not right. Merle is due as much credit in my success,” he explained. “A handicapped person cannot pay dues without a lot of help.”

 

Huffman’s narrative of triumph over adversity then takes a turn from a tour chronicle to a story of grief when the author explores Merle’s involvement with drugs and alcohol and his increasingly erratic behavior. His life ended in a preventable tractor accident at the age of 36. The loss was a shadow over the rest of Doc’s life: “I was numb emotionally,” Doc said. “I couldn’t cry for a long time. Even when I was by myself, I couldn’t cry. It was unbelievable, so unreal.”

 

When writing about Watson’s later years, Huffman primarily focuses on a series of tours and recording sessions, and the chapters increasingly rely on magazine interviews and articles. Some chapters read like one article summary after another, leading to a fair amount of needless repetition and some orphaned bits of information that might have been better presented elsewhere in the narrative. For example, between sections summarizing articles on two of Doc’s concert appearances in the 1970s is this reiteration of subject matter already addressed in earlier chapters:

 

Newspaper and magazine stories about Doc often stated incorrectly that he was born blind. In an interview with veteran journalist Jack Hurst, Doc set the record straight: he went blind as an infant, and he still had a trace of vision at age fifty-three. “I have a little bit of light perception left,” he said. “I am conscious of bright lights.”

 

Any book about a “life in music” should address both the life and the music. The most significant weakness of this biography is that its author provides very little insight on that latter front. Huffman admits that he is not a musician or musicologist himself, so any examination of Watson’s work comes only in the form of quotes from others. This, along with the author’s reliance on magazine and newspaper sources, leaves a space in the book that could have been filled by some more astute musical analysis. For example, readers get a quote from Doc disparaging his own modest output as a songwriter: “I’ve written so few songs, I don’t know how…. I’ve done arranging, but lyrics don’t rhyme without changing the context of what I’m trying to say in the song. I just never felt that I was a writer. I wished hard I was a good writer.” A musical analysis of these songs work might give readers insight into Doc’s compositional mind. Lacking musical training, a writer should at least be able to analyze the Doc’s lyrics. But Huffman takes no closer look at the quality and nature of that output.

 

This book joins an earlier biography of Doc Watson, the rather eccentric Blind But Now I See by Kent Gustavson. Though Huffman’s study is uneven and at times skates over the surface, it is clear and effective: a welcome addition to the literature of folk music and revival. 

 

 

 

 

 

James Ruchala is a technologist, musician, and reader living in North Carolina.