Watson, Doc - At Gerdes Folk City (special)
SKU
02-Sugar Hill 3934
Doc Watson with just an acoustic guitar and his voice, captured very early in his career in 1962-63. This is great American roots music, pure and simple.
"In recent years Doc Watson, whose contributions to American roots music have few equals, has often sounded tired and distracted, his infrequent latter-day recordings hardly among his most inspired. But if Watson's best work appears to be in his past, this marvelous disc documents what a glorious past that was. Here, at the initiation of his career as a solo artist, Watson is bursting with energy and high spirits as he tears into songs, ballads, blues, and instrumentals, all of which he makes distinctly his own. His picking is clean and warm, his vocals clear and affecting. He takes on, in order, such varied material as the comic folk song "Sing Song Kitty," the gothic Child ballad "The House Carpenter," and the rip-roaring fiddle tune "Liberty" and does justice to each. Clearly, long before he became a star of the folk revival, Watson was a natural-born performer. If Ralph Stanley has eclipsed him as the most visible and revered exponent of traditional Appalachian music, this splendid CD shows us that, when he is at his best, Watson is every bit as good."-Jerome Clark