'Something to Say About Life's Sweet Desperation'

I’d been listening to the flat-picking guitarist Doc Watson for decades by the time I met him in 1988. He was playing in a small club in Troy, N.Y., where he sat in the corner a few feet from his nearest listeners and played two sets without a microphone. He wore blue jeans that sagged in the seat and a blue work shirt. I interviewed him between sets in the room behind the bar where they stacked the empties. 

His answers were polite but terse. He was sixty-five and looked tired. Doc had been blind since before his second birthday. Three years earlier his son and musical partner, Merle Watson, had been killed in a tractor accident on their farm in North Carolina, and I heard that Doc had never shaken his depression. Things were not going well until I asked about his earliest memories of hearing music. He brightened and talked about the tube radio his father bought the family. And who did he listen to?

 

“Louis Armstrong!” he said. “He was my favorite. He was the big time! Still is.” A white boy, born in 1923 in Deep Gap, N.C., grew up loving a black singer-horn player, and the memory had the power, more than half a century later, to reanimate a tired, unhappy man for a few moments. Doc played “St. James Infirmary” during the second set. (Armstrong's version.) Here is the set list from his performance that night.

The poet R.T. Smith published a villanelle titled “Doc Watson on the Cicada Concert” in Brightwood (2003):

 

“They seem to think they have something to say,

those locusts high in your circle of pines.

I wish they’d get tired of tuning and play.

 

“I can't tell if it’s murder or chivaree.

You know it’s mountain. Listen at the whine.

They seem to think they have something to say.

 

“You think they’d hurry; they live about a day

to marry and leave a hollow shell behind.

I wish they’d get tired of tuning and play.

 

“‘Shady Grove,’ ‘Omie Wise,’ ‘Gypsy Davy,’

anything with blue chords and a sober shine.

They seem to think they have something to say

 

“about life’s sweet desperation. The way

they hover, praying whilst they die and dine,

I wish they’d get tired of tuning and play

 

“a ghost song or ballad. If you ask me,

an old time melody's not hard to find.

They seem to think they have something to say.

I wish they’d get tired of tuning and play.”

 

Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson was born one-hundred years ago, on March 3, 1923, and died on May 29, 2012 at age eighty-nine. Listen to him and Merle perform Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”