doc watson and gaither carlton

​Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton (from the album Doc Watson and Gaither Carlson available on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings)
While still Old-Time music, Doc Watson was still a youngster in the grand scope of Mountain Music traditions. Doc Watson first began recording at the urging of folklorist Ralph Rinzler. The pair met near Doc’s home in Deep Gap, North Carolina when Doc Watson’s guitar work was mostly rockabilly picking on an electric guitar. Rinzler convinced Doc Watson that audiences were interested in the old-time music of Appalachia and soon his name became synonymous with the Roots of Mountain Music. Backed by his fiddle playing father-in-law, the pair offer a self-titled live recording from 1962, Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton. Mountain stories are collected on the album, with working in the mines the topic for “The Dreams of Miner Child” and Civil War songs with “He’s Coming to Us Dead” alongside bright instrumentals (“Billy Low in the Ground”) and Cajun reels (“Bonaparte’s Retreat”).
 
His vocals pining for his home in the hills, Doc Watson sings “The Blue Ridge Mountain Blues”, the sorrow felt in his goodbye to a lover for “My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains”. Echoes of sea shanties can be heard in the music of the mountains from “Handsome Molly” and the banjo/guitar picking attack in “Groundhog”. The duo open the album partnering their guitar and fiddle for the instrumental “Double Fire” as they intone tradition with the timeless call out for love in “Corrina” while Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton float on the beautiful ebb and flow of mountain vocals captured in “Willie Moore”.
 
Listen and buy the music of Doc Watson and Gaither Carlton from AMAZON
 
For more information, please visit Doc Watson website
 
 

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