Doc Watson at Gerdes Folk City [Live]

Amazon.com
This flashback to Doc Watson's very first solo performances--1962 and 1963, in the heart of New York City's folk revival--is most remarkable, perhaps, for its lack of surprises. Despite the fact that the soft-spoken man from Deep Gap, North Carolina, didn't even own an acoustic guitar to bring to the gig and had, as the liner notes attest, "a belly full of butterflies," everything that has made Watson a legend of traditional music was already in place: the warm, unvarnished singing; the folksy humor; the awesomely clean and precise guitar work (in this set, more Merle Travis-style fingerpicking than Watson's trademark flat-picking); the effortless segues from ballads to blues to old country hits... Surprisingly well recorded and richly annotated by Peter Siegel, this is a welcome addition to the Doc discography. --Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

Tracks:

Little Sadie
Blue Smoke
St. Louis Blues
John Herald Introduction
Sing Song Kitty
The House Carpenter
Liberty
The Old Wooden Rocker
Milk Cow Blues
Tragic Romance
The Dream Of The Miner's Child
The Wagoner's Lad
Cannonball Rag
The Lone Pilgrim
The Roving Gambler

Amazon.com

This flashback to Doc Watson's very first solo performances--1962 and 1963, in the heart of New York City's folk revival--is most remarkable, perhaps, for its lack of surprises. Despite the fact that the soft-spoken man from Deep Gap, North Carolina, didn't even own an acoustic guitar to bring to the gig and had, as the liner notes attest, "a belly full of butterflies," everything that has made Watson a legend of traditional music was already in place: the warm, unvarnished singing; the folksy humor; the awesomely clean and precise guitar work (in this set, more Merle Travis-style fingerpicking than Watson's trademark flat-picking); the effortless segues from ballads to blues to old country hits... Surprisingly well recorded and richly annotated by Peter Siegel, this is a welcome addition to the Doc discography. --Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

Customer Reviews:

What a treat!.......2001-10-30

From the moment the CD started to the end, I had a smile on my face in happy recognition of the performances I heard many years ago. This record brought me right back to those days when I would hang out in Gerdes night after night to hear Doc Watson. play. Mr. Siegel's production has nothing of a creaky historical document and everything of a you-are-there live performance.

Peter Siegel's superb production is absolutely amazing. I have no idea of the technical legerdemain that must have gone into making a set of 40 year old tapes sound like a live performance but that is what he has accomplished. You will feel you are once again sitting there listening to this wonderful music five feet from the performer.

The liner notes with detailed historical information and contemporaneous photos add immensely to the value of this work. It surely must have been a work of love to put all this together. I hope there are more such works coming from Mr. Siegel. He is so good at what he does in making valuable historical material sound like an excellent live club performance you went to yesterday.

greatness retouched.......2001-10-26

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.

Music Album:

Music Album