The Three Doc(k)s: White Blues in Appalachia
by William E. Lightfoot
Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 23, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 2003), pp. 167-193
THE THREE DOC(K)S: WHITE BLUES IN APPALACHIA
WILLIAM E. LIGHTFOOT
WILLIAM E. LIGHTFOOT, Professor Emeritus of English at Appalachian State University, is a folklorist and jack-leg drummer who has written on Merle Travis, Etta Baker, Lulu Belle and Scotty Wiseman, Brother Dave Gardner, Charlie Parker, and the Prairie Ramblers. Formerly of the Fabulous Ducktones, with guitarist Barry Lee Pearson, Lightfoot has played with assorted local groups, including those of John Higby and Todd Wright.
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In his 1961 discussion of the Carter Family's recording of "Coal Miner's Blues," folklorist Archie Green (1961, 231) asked an important question: "How did [the blues] penetrate the Southern Highlands and sink into the consciousness of white singers grown up with traditional musical patterning of their own, centuries old?"
After noting that white mountain singers had incorporated blues into their repertoires since the beginning of hillbilly recording in 1923, Green pointed out that the "puzzling story of the musical borrowing and interaction of race and hillbilly singers has
yet to be demonstrated" (231). Over forty years later, the puzzle is still incomplete, but several pieces have been suitably placed. We know, for example, that white Appalachian musicians admired African-American folk music immensely and readily included it in their performances, borrowing not only blues but also ragtime tunes, religious pieces, breakdowns, reels, and other types of songs, as well as both vocal and instrumental techniques. And while white mountain musicians assimilated
rags and religious music well enough, their adaptations of the blues displayed a rather dim understanding of the form, with only certain elements- structure, harmonic patterns, lyrical content, and tonality weathering the transition; Appalachian pickers have indeed rarely performed in the so-called primary blues tradition. This process can be documented quite clearly in the music of three representative white Appalachian performers-Dock Boggs (1920s), "Doc" Carter and his family (1930s), and Doc Watson (1940s on).
An exploration of the influence of African-American blues on Appalachian white blues should begin with solid definitions that establish
some bases for comparison. The jury is still out on the nature of white
blues,1 but there have been many attempts at defining black blues.2 The
problem with defining blues precisely lies in the fact that several diffused
and dispersed subgenres have developed from the original form over the
past hundred years, making it difficult to focus on a single definition.
Some of these subtypes include, for example, jump/up-tempo blues,
rhythm and blues, hokum blues, barrelhouse blues, blues reels/breakdowns,
blues rags, comic blues, risque blues, gut-bucket blues, blues ballads,
boogie-woogie blues, and on and on. Most blues scholars would
probably agree, however, that a kind of core blues served as the paradigm
for all of these other forms. For example, the folklorist Norm Cohen
(1996, 273) characterizes the album Mister Charlie's Blues (1926-1938)-
white musicians playing black music-as presenting "some of the most
heavily African-American-influenced ... of the hillbilly white blues artists
of their day ... [and] may offer the most listenable introduction to the
genre for pure blues aficionados." The implication here is that there is
something impure about white blues that distinguishes it from pure black
blues. We may assume, too, that pure blues are to be distinguished from
the qualified kinds of blues listed above. One of the earliest authorities on
the blues, the white scholar Abbe Niles, a perceptive critic who wrote the
introduction and song notes to W. C. Handy's Blues: An Anthology (1926),
also perceived a difference between "pure" blues and other forms:
Many verses in the folklore are in the blues spirit, yet are excluded from the
blues form,. . . [which is] the singers' own distinction. In this usage, it was
only the verses that could be fitted to the three-cornered [three-line] tunes
like JoeT urner[ perhaps the archetypicalb lues song] that came to be called
"blues," and, conversely, they would say of a new melody to which they
could not sing one of their three-line verses: "That ain't no blues!" (Niles
1972, 17)
For purposes of comparison, then, it seems useful to put forth a description
of what can be thought of as core or primary blues: "basic," "fundamental," "being the first in order of time and development," "of first importance" (Webster's 1966).
When one thinks of blues in this way, several songs come to mind: Billie Holiday's "Stormy Blues," Elmore James' "The Sky Is Crying," Charles Brown's "Drifting Blues," Bessie Smith's "Backwater Blues," Lightnin' Hopkins' "Blues Is a Feeling," Blind Blake's "Bad Feeling Blues," Ray Charles' "A Fool for You," Ivory Joe Hunter's "Since I Met You Baby," Muddy Waters' "Burying Ground Blues," Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell's "Blues before Sunrise," T-Bone Walker's "Stormy Monday," and Joe Turner's "Chains of Love." These songs are all good examples of primary blues. What they have in common may be thought
of as the primary blues aesthetic, which can be analyzed according to its basic folk nature. The blues emerged as a kind of African-American folk music sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, and in important
ways, it continues to function as folk music. Consequently, core blues
can be conceptualized according to the basic elements of a folkloric event:
text, texture, and context (Dundes 1964).
Primary blues texts are melancholic-"mournful, depressed," "pensive"
(Webster's 1966)-expressions of musicians' personal experiences
with life's problems, performed in such a way as to elicit responses from
their listeners that together with their creative discourses could perhaps
lead to catharsis, understanding, and peace of mind. The songs, whether
supplications, laments, protestations, or exhortations, function individually
and collectively as ways to deal with human suffering. Indeed, Abbe
Niles (1972, 207) insisted that any impression that the blues "are brave
efforts of optimism, will be corrected for such as may hear with what desolate
sadness they are invested by their high priestesses [the "classic"
blues singers], who do not sing, but suffer the blues" (emphasis in original).
These songs are pretty serious business and do not lend themselves
to broad comic humor. Although there is some humor in primary blues,
it is understated and wise, not raucous and goofy; what "gaiety" there is
is usually ironic. Niles believed that in African-American blues, "it is the
gaiety that is feigned, while in the white, it is the grief" (17).
The harmonic structure of basic blues texts is fairly simple, moving
usually in a I-IV-V-I progression: that is, from the first degree of the scale
(the tonic) to the fourth degree (the subdominant) to the fifth degree (the
dominant) and back to the tonic. Slight variations of this pattern occur
occasionally, but they do not violate the music's harmonic clarity.
The formal structure of the text in primary blues is also relatively simple
but is absolutely crucial to its function: a series of three four-measure
lines in I time that provide an opportunity for antiphony. Typically, the
singer articulates a problem in the first two bars of the first two lines,
170 BMR Journal
leaving the remaining two measures of each open for a responsorial voice
that can come from listeners, from the singers themselves, or from various
instruments. The third line generally offers a comment on the problem,
often taking the form of a recommendation-an attitude to cop, a
course of action to take, a piece of advice to consider-and also leaves
space for group comment. As one scholar put it, this antiphonal "pattern
became a rigid one, almost a ritual, but neither this rigidity nor its apparent
simplicity has ever seemed to restrict the blues" (Blind Lemon Jefferson
1974). This ritualization of the give-and-take dynamics of the blues experience
is directly related to the contexts of the performances.
While blues singers no doubt derived consolation from expressing
their emotions privately, they also felt a need to communicate with others;
consequently, the social context of a blues performance became a critical
element in the experience. The listeners who are engaged in the performance
are encouraged to respond to the singer, especially during the
last two measures of each line; those who do so spontaneously co-create
the song. It is this antiphonal process that has become ritualized:
"Scholars often point out that African-American genres, like their West
African antecedents, resist the European cult of personality: they tend to
take the form of a collective ritual, not of a declamation by a charismatic
star to a passive crowd" (Ross 2003, 92). As to the matter of cooperative
creativity, Barry Lee Pearson (2004, 260) has suggested that antiphony
provides the group support necessary for improvisation, that it allows
self-expression "within a communal or participatory context, setting
boundaries for individual creativity within traditional norms."
Improvisation, he writes, "connects with antiphony, as the call and
response form suits the criteria of collective participation" (260). Abbe
Niles, in fact, believed that the competition between musicians filling the
two-bar response breaks in the blues was the very foundation of jazz:
spontaneous, competitive improvisation. Much more than a simple folkway
or custom, the antiphonal reflex became a well-prescribed practice
with important cultural significance, that is, a ritual. The twelve-bar formal
structure of the blues by its very nature cradles and nurtures this ritual;
the eight- and sixteen-bar blues forms, on the other hand, provide too
little space and time for the antiphony to develop.
The texture of blues performances-the manner, or style, of expression-
is as important as the text and context. Niles (1972, 207) begins his
annotations to Handy's section on blues, for example, with this admonition:
"A note on blues at the piano [for which Handy's published blues
were intended]: 1) they should be played slowly; 2) but in meticulous
time." The tempo factor seems reasonably obvious: fast is simply not sad.
Lady Day, for example, performs "Stormy Blues" at a fraction under sixty
Lightfoot * The Three Doc(k)s 171
beats per minute (bpm); Blind Blake's "Bad Feeling Blues" is at about
fifty-five; and Elmore James' "The Sky Is Crying" is around fifty-four.
These tempi of course vary somewhat both internally and from performance
to performance, as most musicians lack a mechanical metronomic
sense. Even so, the pulse of primary blues regularly falls somewhere in
the ranges of Largo (40-60 bpm), Larghetto (60-66), and Adagio (66-76).
A tempo beyond, say, eighty propels the music into a different mood, a
different feel, a different texture; for example, a common tempo of the
sexy Chicago-blues shuffle beat, a g-ish humpty-dumpty groove that by
no means suggests unhappiness, is around eighty-five bpm. Time is
"meticulous" when all the notes, measures, and strains of a song are
given their proper metrical value, a quality frequently absent in the white
blues of Appalachia.
Another critical textural ingredient of the blues is sound, which supports
sense in songs as well as in poetry. The sound of the blues is based
on what has been called the "blues tonality" or "blues scale," which
comes from partially flatting the third, seventh, and less often, the fifth
notes of the European major scale. Some scholars believe, in fact, that the
flatted third is the most distinguishing characteristic of the blues. Rather
than attacking these notes directly, blues musicians approach them
aslant, sliding either up or down until they settle on a final pitch. These
subtle glides are known as portamento when employed as a vocal technique
and glissando when performed on an instrument. This sliding to
and from notes is not limited to the blue notes but is used on other notes
as well, creating a legato effect in which groups of notes are seamlessly
connected. Furthermore, certain notes in the scale are "blued" or "worried"
in that they are bent into microtones appropriate to African scales,
sounds produced vocally and by playing two adjacent notes together on
a piano, or by pulling or pushing a fretted guitar string. Another vocal
technique used by many blues singers is melisma-florid, embellished
vocalizations-which involves the use of a cluster of different notes
attached to a single syllable. These textural techniques are all a kind of
creative playfulness that ironically endorses and intensifies the emotions
expressed in the music. For example, Pearson (2004, 260), discussing
African music, points out that in "contrast to European preferences for
clear tones, African musicians draw on a wide tonal range both instrumentally
and vocally, using sounds derived from the community soundscape
to reflect and express life through sound ... [and that this auditory
range of sound adds] up to a tactile aesthetic often described in terms
of feeling." The sounds chosen for blues music represent sighs, moans,
wails, cries, groans, and screams and are achieved through deft intonational
fluidity, clearly a textural requisite for the form.
172 BMR Journal
These textual, textural, and contextual traits seem, indeed, to define the
basic, primary blues form. But what do we then call later developments
that clearly omit some of these traits? Handy and Niles (1972) recognized
this problem, dividing their Anthology into three parts: "The Background"
(precursors of the blues), "The Blues," and "Blues-Songs," including in
this category such pieces as "John Henry Blues," "Atlanta Blues (Make
Me One Pallet on Your Floor)," and "Long Gone" ("Long Gone John from
Bowling Green"). One encounters a good many other such terms:
"bluesy," "near-blues," "blues-like," "blues-related," "blues-influenced,"
"blues-based," "blues-flavored," "blues-tinged," all of which can be
applied accurately to the white blues of Appalachia. Which elements of
primary blues were retained and which were discarded by white mountain
musicians can be determined by comparing the "ideal type" of
blues-a slow, twelve-bar, melancholic song characterized by the presence
of the blues scale, fluid intonation, meticulous timing, and antiphony-
to the music of Dock Boggs, "Doc" Carter, and Doc Watson.
Dock Boggs
Archie Green's (1961, 231) hypotheses regarding black-white musical
exchange in Appalachia are confirmed by the experiences of the Norton,
Virginia, banjo-playing coal miner Moran Lee "Dock" Boggs (1898-1971):
"Were these blues carried into the hills by early Negro railroad laborers
and river boat roustabouts and given to white mountain singers directly
... [or] did hillbilly blues blossom only in the 1920s when race records
disseminated this form widely and inexpensively?" Boggs' enthusiasm
for black music is documented in the many stories that he told to performer-
scholar Mike Seeger, who began working closely with Boggs in
1963.3 For example, when Boggs was a small boy, he became fascinated
with the music of a black man named "Go Lightening" (probably
"Golightly"), who would walk along railroad tracks playing his guitar.
3. In the early- to mid-1960s, Mike Seeger interviewed Boggs extensively, acquiring valuable
information that he has generously made available through the years. In 1983, he and
Barry O'Connell produced an excellent album of Boggs' earliest records (Dock Boggs: His
Original Recordings), which included a superb essay and song notes by O'Connell (1983) that
relied heavily on Seeger's field notes and taped conversations. More recently, Seeger and
O'Connell produced a two-disc compilation featuring Boggs' later recordings: Dock Boggs,
His Folkways Years, 1963-1968. The liner notes include O'Connell's original essay, although
abbreviated, along with Mike Seeger's personal notes on his friendship with Boggs, a careful
description of Dock's picking style, and good song notes. Also useful is the music critic
Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (1977), in which Boggs' life and
music are the subjects of close but unusually abstract analyses. Barry O'Connell's good
work is curiously uncredited by Marcus, although his name appears in the index.
Lightfoot * The Three Doc(k)s 173
Young Boggs would follow the man and beg him to play: "and I'd follow
him ... a lot of times to get to hear him play two, three, four pieces and I
a lot of times heard him play 'John Henry' and I learnt it partly, learnt
some of the words from him" (quoted in O'Connell 1983, 6). This experience
may have been Boggs' first exposure to the open-tuned slide guitar
style, the way in which "John Henry" is usually played; he would have
been unable to apply the style to his music, however, because a slide
implement does not work very well on a banjo.
Boggs did, however, learn his finger-picking banjo style from an
African-American man. When he was twelve years old and already working
full-time in the mines around Norton, Boggs attended a dance in
Dorchester, a mostly black coal town. The all-black band consisted of a fiddler,
a guitarist, a mandolin player, and most striking to young Boggs, a
banjoist. Dock was much impressed with the banjoist's finger-style technique:
"I heard this fellow play the banjo ... [and] I said to myself, I want
to learn how to play the banjo kinda like that fellow does. I don't want to
play like my sister and brother [who frailed in the old "clawhammer" or
"knockdown" style]. I am gonna learn just how to pick with my fingers"
(6). What developed from this experience was Boggs' personalized banjo
style, which combined the minstrel thumb-lead clawhammer technique
with up-picking: his thumb thumped melody notes down on the lower
strings while his fingers sounded both melody and accompanying notes
on the two upper ones, his index finger on the second string and his middle
finger on the first, with both picking up.4 Although her fingers were
doing different work (i.e., brushing down and up), it was this basic thumblead
style that young Maybelle Addington was applying to her Stella guitar
some twenty miles southeast of Norton in Nickelsville, Virginia.
Green's suggestion that white Appalachians may have absorbed
African-American music through records also applies to Dock Boggs. His
sister Laura was married to a Holiness preacher named Lee Hunsucker,
who owned a record player and around 300 records (9-10). Boggs' brother-
in-law taught him a great many sacred songs from both the Holiness
and Old Regular Baptist traditions; O'Connell estimates that about one
fifth of Dock's repertory was learned from the Reverend Hunsucker (10).
Boggs also learned secular songs either directly from Hunsucker's record
collection or from the pastor's live versions of the songs, either way, an
odd juxtaposition of religious music and the worldly blues tradition, a
situation that apparently presented no major conflict of interest for either
man.
4. Boggs' unique finger-picking banjo style may be observed on the video Shady Grove:
Old Time Music from North Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia (Snow et al. 1997). Dock plays his
famous "Country Blues," the haunting "Pretty Polly," and the parlor love song "I Hope I
Live a Few More Days."
174 BMR Journal
Indeed, three of the four songs Boggs recorded that came close to the
blues were learned from records made by African-American women. His
best-known effort is "Down South Blues," which he remembered hearing
in the early 1920s and which featured a black woman vocalist with piano
accompaniment (13). Alberta Hunter recorded the song twice in May
1923, once with Joe Smith on cornet and Fletcher Henderson on piano
and once with Henderson only.5 But Hunter could not have been Boggs'
source; although the melody is similar, her lyrics differ radically from
Boggs'. Tony Russell (1970, 51) believes that the singer was Clara Smith,
whereas Marcus (1977, 162) and O'Connell (1983, 13) favor Rosa
Henderson as Boggs' source. It could well have been either woman.
Smith's record was cut on June 27, 1923, and Henderson's, the day after;
Fletcher Henderson played piano on both (Rust 2002, 291, 1570). The two
versions are almost identical-a brief piano introduction, a sixteen-bar
vocal introduction, and four twelve-bar stanzas (Henderson's has five
stanzas) that express a woman's dissatisfaction with northern life, fickle
men in particular, and a determination to go back to her southern home
where things were better. Fletcher Henderson's two-bar response passages
on Smith's version drag somewhat, but he perks up considerably
on the next day's recording of Rosa Henderson's version, probably
because the tempo is pushed up from 72-77 bpm to 97-100; the result of
this shift is a performance closer to ragtime than blues, a texture supported
by Fletcher Henderson's bouncy, syncopated breaks. Although
not exactly primary blues, these performances, especially Smith's, are
close: a genuine complaint, expressed slowly, with blue notes, a fluid feel,
vocal ease, good timing, and antiphonal play.
Dock Boggs' 1927 recording of "Down South Blues" is quite different
from those of Smith and Henderson (see Dock Boggs: His Original
Recordings). Rather than evoking a legato approach to the song, for example,
Boggs punches out each note, both vocally and instrumentally, in an
aggressive staccato attack. He clips off his words abruptly rather than
playing around with them. Moreover, as Seeger (1998, 26) points out,
Boggs turns the "three-cornered" blues of the women into two-line stanzas,
about six bars each. He also rushes impatiently from line to line, cutting
measures short, precluding any kind of call-and-response activity.
Boggs seems to want to get through the song as quickly as possible; the
tempo hovers around 114 bpm, and the performance is intense. The most
unsettling feature of Boggs' blues, however, is the singer's sense of time,
5. Henderson, who along with Joe Smith appeared on several of Bessie Smith's recordings,
later became a successful orchestra leader and arranger, preparing charts for white
swing bands of the 1930s and 1940s, including those of Charlie Barnet, Tommy Dorsey, and
Benny Goodman.
Lightfoot * The Three Doc(k)s 175
which gets derailed right from the beginning and never gets back on
track. Unlike the many blues and jazz musicians who play with meter
like they play with melody notes, lagging a little here, anticipating there,
or playing against the beat (e.g., three against two), Boggs plays apart
from the beat as though it has no relevance in his song. There is a huge
difference between the controlled polyrhythms of black blues players and
Boggs' out-of-time music. These differences are due not so much to the
latter's misreading of the women's performances as to a less-than-complete
reading; certain important elements of the blues that Boggs heard
simply did not register solidly in his consciousness. Boggs' so-called
receptive competence for African-American music, in other words, was
compromised by culturally determined factors over which he had no
control. While he sang the song's bluesy lyrics (which make little sense
from a man's perspective) and threw in a few scattered flatted thirds,
Boggs clearly did not understand the blues that he had heard sung. On
the other hand, Smith and Henderson would perhaps not have absorbed
fully the grainy power and mystery and edginess of some of Boggs' most
artful songs, such as "Sugar Baby," "Pretty Polly," "Oh, Death," "Prodigal
Son," and "Prayer of a Miner's Child."
Of Boggs' early recordings-eight in 1927 and four in 1929-"Down
South Blues" is the only one that is remotely blues-like. His popular
"Country Blues," for example, is a reworking of the old folksong
"Darling Cory," known as "Hustling Gamblers" by the man from whom
Boggs learned the song. "Hard Luck Blues" is a comic lyrical song that
Boggs called "Brother Jim Got Shot" on a later record. "False Hearted
Lover's Blues" is "Country Blues" with different (and banal) lyrics composed
by a variety store owner named W. E. Myers, who produced
Boggs' 1929 session. Myers was also the culprit behind "Old Rub Alcohol
Blues," which, despite the lines "Blues creepin' over my body, / Queer
notions flyin' to my head" and "Soak up the old rub alcohol, / Ease the
troubles all off my mind," is an eight-bar comical sob story. Finally,
Myers' "Lost Love Blues" is a parlor song in waltz time. Affixing the
word "blues" to the titles of nonblues songs was apparently quite common
in the mid-1920s; Niles (1926, 293) complained that the occasional
use of a blue note "furnishes most white writers with their only excuse
... for having ever used the title 'The ... Blues.' There are not enough
pedants, however, to preserve the integrity of the word at this late date."
Niles understood that the title "blues" was "commercially valuable" and
that, even with Handy, the term was "not always an index to what follows"
(293). For example, "Loveless Love" is a largely eight-bar tune
based on "Careless Love" with decidedly nonblues lyrics: "Love, oh love,
176 BMR Journal
oh loveless love, / Has set our hearts on goalless goals, / From milkless
milk, and silkless silk, / We are growing used to soulless souls."
Boggs hoped that these twelve recordings would lead him out of the
mines and into a career as a professional musician, but this prospect
never materialized. He soon gave up and put music aside for thirty or so
years, even going so far as to pawn his banjo. He began playing again in
the early 1960s, encouraged by Mike Seeger, who arranged for Boggs to
record some sixty titles for Folkways Records. Because two of Boggs'
songs-"Country Blues" and "Sugar Baby"-had appeared in the early
1950s on the much-revered Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by
Harry Smith, Boggs was not unknown to the folk-revival subculture that
was founded on the basis of a shared appreciation of authentic old-fashioned
American folk music, both black and white. He was thus finally
able to enjoy some popularity beyond his region. Boggs rerecorded
"Down South Blues," this time avoiding much of the metrical anarchy of
the earlier rendition-perhaps because of Mike Seeger's steady rhythmguitar
work, although Boggs' original accompanist, Hub Mahoffey,
seemed relatively stable. Both, however, must have had to scurry to keep
abreast of the vagaries of Boggs' playing. Boggs also recorded three more
blues-like songs during the period: "Mixed Blues," which he himself
assembled, and two that he remembered hearing on records in the early
1920s by black blues musician Sara Martin-"Mistreated Mama Blues"
and "Sugar Blues."
In pre-rock and roll 1950s, popular music was often jazz-like: for example,
Ralph Marterie's "Skokiaan," Jimmy Dorsey's "So Rare," and Clyde
"Wah-Wah" McCoy's6 huge instrumental hit "Sugar Blues." The lastnamed
was McCoy's signature theme and featured the trumpeter's
growling "wah-wah" effects produced by a movable cup (rather than
plunging) mute and industrial-strength chops. McCoy first recorded the
song in 1931, and it became so popular that it "went straight to number
two on the pop charts, causing a sensation among record buyers. It reputedly
sold several million copies in the days when a phonograph was a
luxury item and not readily found in many homes" (Ritz 2000, 1). Ella
Fitzgerald recorded the song in 1940, as did the composer Johnny Mercer
in 1947, whose rendition went to number four on the charts. "Sugar
Blues" enjoyed its highest level of popularity with McCoy's rerecording
in the early 1950s.
Dock Boggs had learned the song some thirty years earlier from Sara
Martin, whose version was recorded on October 17, 1922, with the com-
6. Born in Ashland, Kentucky, McCoy may have been related to the feuding family of
Pike County a few miles to the south; he never confirmed or denied this possibility (Ritz
2000, 1).
Lightfoot * The Three Doc(k)s 177
poser of the song, Clarence Williams, on piano; the lyrics, which express
a woman's point of view, were by Lucy Fletcher (Lissauer 1991, 794). The
earliest recording of "Sugar Blues" was by Leona Williams and her Dixie
Band in 1922 (794); Leona Williams may well have been married to
Clarence, which would suggest that her version would stand as the firform
on which Martin's and all other renditions were based.
"Sugar Blues" as performed by Sara Martin is not at all serious; the
singer is obviously in no real pain. Rather, it is clever, playful, and "cute,"
and as Abbe Niles would have grumpily insisted, blues are certainly not
"cute." The singer confesses that she is sad and unhappy and "all confused"
because her "sweet" man-her "sugar"-has turned "sour," leaving
her with the "blues," which are, oddly, "sweet, sweet." The song's
musical structure supports this light-hearted tone: piano introduction, a
twelve-bar vocal introduction (but not blues bars), and three eight-bar
stanzas, two of which follow a I-V-I harmonic pattern. The second and
last stanzas are identical, using the ubiquitous "circle of fifths" progression-
I-VI-II-V-I-that is typical of innumerable ragtime and popular
songs. The last stanza ends with a four-bar tag that repeats the progression,
retarded slightly, known as the old without-no-pants-on ending,
usually milked shamelessly in a corny, over-the-top manner. The mockserious
tone and the pop chord changes reminiscent of ragtime keep
"Sugar Blues" out of the core blues category; Clarence Williams, however,
infuses his song with a nice twelve-bar piano solo that by all means
qualifies as blues.
The closest cover of "Sugar Blues" was done by Monette Moore,
Clarence Johnson on piano, some three months later, in January 1923
(Rust 2002, 1183). This rendition is almost a word-for-word, nuance-fornuance
copy of the Martin disc. Johnson plays a longer lead-in passage
than Williams and two twelve-bar blues breaks, perhaps because Moore's
version is a bit peppier (106-109 bpm) than Martin's (91-94 bpm). During
the second twelve bars, Moore shouts "Play that thing, boy!" obviously
enjoying Johnson's improvisation.
Seeger (1998, 30) writes that Dock Boggs put his version of "Sugar
Blues" together in the mid-1960s, based on an early 1920s record by a
female African-American singer, along with piano back-up, that Boggs
thought was Sara Martin. It of course could have been Monette Moore or
someone else, but it does not matter a great deal in either case. Boggs first
picks out the melody of the twelve-bar introduction, then repeats it while
adding his voice to the banjo part, missing a little time. He sings the first
verse in fair melodic and metrical alignment, but he flounders going into
the second (and last) stanza, becomes confused, and garbles the words,
while the meter and melody spin out of control. Moreover, Boggs whirls
178 BMR Journal
right by both the ragtime chord changes and the four-bar tag ending that
are the most prominent features of the women's performances (Moore
does the tag ending both times), the song's musical "hook," as it were. As
with "Down Home Blues," Boggs seemed oblivious to certain key elements
of the music he so much admired; indeed, his adaptation of "Sugar
Blues" further reveals a conceptual blind spot that blocked his ability to
understand fully African-American music.
Like "Sugar Blues," Sara Martin's "Mistreated Mama Blues" (Okeh
8086) is about having the blues but is not itself a blues. Recorded on July
27, 1923, with Clarence Williams at the piano, the song is clearly not
melancholic; it is an eight-bar tune with cute lyrics: "First he took my
peaches from off my tree, / Now he's only handing back the seeds to
me." Her papa's "mean, triflin"' behavior leaves the singer with the "mistreated
blues." Moreover, the song relies on pop/ragtime chord changes
(I-IV-II7-V7-I), including two stop-time sequences common in rag-type
tunes (especially in the music of Blind Blake): I-I7-IV-VI7 (or some similar
substitution). These chords give the otherwise fluffy performance a bit
of charm and character, as does Williams' lilting piano solo.
Boggs' rendition of the song is lyrically close to Martin's, although lines
like "Once he said my kisses was all so good" seem thoroughly anomalous
for a rough-hewn, gun-toting male coal miner to be singing. But
Boggs once again ignores the harmonic charm of the song, sticking strictly
to a simple I-V-I pattern, which indicates that, for the most part, he
had missed the point of Sara Martin's music.
The only other song approaching the blues that Boggs recorded was
"Mixed Blues," one that he himself put together using both original and
traditional lyrics ("The train I ride is sixteen coaches long..."). The song
tries to be blues-it has three-line stanzas--but Boggs compresses the
lines in such a way that twelve bars essentially become nine. For example,
instead of beginning the second line on the first beat of the fifth bar,
Boggs barges in impatiently on the fourth beat of the third bar, thereby
scuttling the metrical integrity of the piece as well as allowing no room
for antiphony. There is no portamento here, or melisma, or legato phrasing;
Boggs instead pounds the notes emphatically, each one alone and
clear and unadorned, at a forceful pace (119 bpm). This gusto and good
will show Boggs' affection for African-American music, especially for
what he thought was the blues. Tony Russell (1970, 51) has written that
Boggs heard "black music sympathetically," and indeed he did. But what
Russell rightly called "Boggs' vivid, unusually melodic conceptions" (51)
did not have much to do with the blues.
Lightfoot * The Three Doc(k)s 179
"Doc" Carter
June Carter Cash once wrote that when she was a small child, she
would sit in front of a tall "magic box" and listen to her mother, Maybelle,
"playing the guitar and singing with Uncle 'Doc' and Aunt Sara. All you
had to do was crank the box, and they were there" (Carter 1967, 6). Young
June was but one of thousands and thousands who for many years also
cranked the box in order to evoke the music of her family, southwestern
Virginia's iconic Carter Family: A. P. "Doc" Carter (1891-1960), his wife,
Sara Dougherty (1899-1979), and his sister-in-law and wife's first cousin,
Maybelle Addington (1909-1978).7 The group began in 1926 as an informal
front-porch trio that also sang in church, with Sara singing a deliberate
lead and playing autoharp and rhythm guitar, Maybelle providing an
alto part and a strong lead guitar, and Doc filling in with a low part that
drifted between baritone and bass. (Often overlooked are Maybelle's softer
harmony singing and Sara's solid hand-brush second-guitar work.)
Within a short time, the Carters developed into a superb Victorian parlormusic
ensemble and a state-of-the-art hymn-, spiritual-, and gospelsinging
trio; their version of "Church in the Wildwood," for example, is
the very apotheosis of southern white religious harmony singing. Indeed,
the Carters, rightly generally called "the patron saints of traditional country
music," never performed "country" or "hillbilly" music, although
their musical approach and repertoire served as the foundation for the
genre.
The Carters shared essentially the same (sub)regional culture as their
fellow Scott Countian Dock Boggs. Both Sara and Maybelle grew up near
Nickelsville, scarcely twenty miles southeast of Norton. Doc Carter was
from Maces Springs (now Hiltons), some ten miles farther south, on the
opposite side of Clinch Mountain. Their repertoires were similar-folksongs,
sentimental parlor tunes, sacred music, experiments with the
blues-and their performance styles were almost identical: a deliberate,
nearly aggressive attack with notes hit squarely and clearly, and a flat,
nondemonstrative delivery that displayed a total disregard for histrionics,
tricks, gimmicks, or other "show business" techniques. Like Boggs,
7. In addition to the liner notes on numerous albums, a particularly good source of information
on the lives and music of the group is The Carter Family: Old Time Music Booklet no.
1 (Atkins 1973b), which contains excellent essays by John Atkins on the history of the
Carters, Bob Coltman on A. P. Carter, and Kip Lornell on Leslie Riddle, as well as a valuable
discography compiled by Alec Davidson with the help of Atkins, Richard Weize, and Tony
Russell. A later version of Atkins' essay appears as a chapter in Stars of Country Music
(Malone and McCulloh 1975, 95-120). Another surprisingly useful source is Michael Orgill's
Anchored in Love: The Carter Family Story (1975). Mark Zwonitzer's Will You Miss Me When
I'm Gone? (2002) came to the author's attention too late to be used in the preparation of this
article but should be considered an important addition to the Carter Family literature.
180 BMR Journal
the Carters did not use African-American textural features such as portamento,
glissando, melissma, and legato. They did, however, perform
music that was influenced by African Americans, particularly shown in
their instrumental techniques, spiritual and gospel songs, and a handful
of blues.
One of the major features of the Carters' music was Maybelle's paradigmatic
guitar playing, which involved applying a banjo technique to
her guitar.8 Often referred to as the "Carter scratch" or "the church lick,"
the method consisted of a thumb lead and accompanying brushes down
with (mainly) the index finger. The technique of playing the melody on
the low strings with the thumb was the one used by Dock Boggs on the
banjo, which was surely derived from a minstrel style known as "thumbing"
or "thumb-lead clawhammer."9 Mike Seeger has identified four variants
of the "Carter scratch": (1) a two-beat "thumb-brush," (2) a banjo lick
in which the index finger brushes back up ("thumb-brush-a," or quarter
and two eighth notes), (3) a "thumb-brush-a, brush-a" pattern, and (4)
combinations of the three (Seeger, Carter, and Smith 2000). Maybelle, who
also played the banjo, worked out these skills when she was a teenager.
Perhaps she had heard Boggs during visits to Norton; perhaps she had
even heard the black man from whom Boggs had copied the style.
Maybelle also played three other kinds of lead guitar: Hawaiian, in
which she placed her Stella-open tuned with the nut raised-flat in her
lap, using a pocketknife to fret the strings, as did her teacher, the black
musician Leslie Riddle;10 flat-picking with a plectrum rather than with
her usual thumb and finger picks, a style that she acquired in the late
1930s from her younger brother, Doc Addington; and a ragtime fingerpicking
method, also learned from Riddle, a highly popular style among
8. Mike Seeger, along with Doc and Sara's daughter Janette, expertly demonstrates
Maybelle's picking on the video Guitar Styles of the Carter Family (2000).
9. For "thumb-lead clawhammer," consult the performances and notes of Bob Winans
and Bob Carlin on the compact disc Minstrel Banjo Style.
10. Leslie Riddle(s)-mountain people are wont to bestow the letter s on certain wordsknown
fondly as "Esley" to the Carter family, was an African-American songster from
Burnsville, North Carolina, who spent time in the 1920s in Kingsport, Tennessee, where in
1927 he met Doc Carter at the home of another black musician, John Henry Lyon(s). Doc
Carter was an avid collector who constantly looked for tunes to add to the group's inventory,
and he was visiting Lyons in search of music. Riddle soon became Doc's colleague and
for almost five years helped Carter mine the mountains for songs to sing, teaching him
about fifteen songs (mostly religious) from his own repertoire, as well as some instrumental
techniques. His strong influence on the Carters-and consequently, American country
music--has been documented nicely by Kip Lornell (1973a, 1973b) and Barry O'Connell.
With the help of Mike Seeger's fieldwork, O'Connell (1993) has written the definitive
assessment of Riddle's life and music, "Step By Step": Lesley Riddle Meets the Carter Family-
A Biographical Essay with Notes to His Recordings, a thirty-eight-page document written to
accompany the album Step By Step and available from the author.
Lightfoot * The Three Doc(k)s 181
mountain and Piedmont musicians, consisting of an alternating bass pattern
played with the thumb and a melody picked out on the treble strings
with the forefinger.11 Three of the four lead-guitar styles that formed the
basis of the Carter Family's music can therefore be identified as being
African American in nature: the most prominent banjo-derived thumblead
finger-scratch method, the ragtime finger-picking style, and the
open-tuned slide-fretted technique.
The Carter Family's biggest debt to African-American culture was in
the area of religious music-spirituals and gospel songs. A rough estimate
puts the Carters' repertoire at 19 percent folksongs and novelty
tunes, 40 percent parlor music, and 40 percent sacred tunes, with half of
that coming from black religious expression. Representative songs
include "Little Moses," "When the World's on Fire," "Lonesome Valley,"
"On the Rock Where Moses Stood," "There's No Hiding Place Down
Here," and "Fifty Miles of Elbow Room," which, as Bob Coltman (1973)
has suggested, was probably learned from the Reverend F. W. McGee's
1931 recording. Their version of "Motherless Children" in all likelihood
derived ultimately from the Texas street singer Blind Willie Johnson's
1927 "Mother's Children Have a Hard Time," probably learned from
either Riddle or John Henry Lyons, who both played it (O'Connell 1993,
22-23). Similarly, the Carter Family's "I Wouldn't Mind Dying" was probably
based on Johnson's "Bye and Bye I'm Going to See the King" of 1929.
(My colleague Fred Hay believes that Blind Mamie Forehand's 1927
recording "Wouldn't Mind Dying If Dying Was All" was more likely the
family's source; a Johnson sound-alike, Forehand may well indeed have
been the inspiration behind the Carters' and Johnson's versions.) Just as
the melody of "When the World's on Fire" was used in "Little Darling Pal
of Mine" (or vice versa) (and later in Woody Guthrie's anthem "This
Land Is Your Land"), the tune of "Bye and Bye" was, ironically, the
melodic basis of "Coal Miner's Blues." The Carter Family clearly loved
African-American sacred music and made it a strong component in their
inventory of songs.
The remaining 1 percent of the above estimate consists of the blues,
which the Carter Family understood only slightly better than did Dock
Boggs. But before an analysis of the Carters' "blues-songs" (Handy 1926,
172-202) can be undertaken, four so-called blues titles must be swiftly
dismissed. "Worried Man Blues," for example, is the old African-
American spiritual "Do, Lord, Remember Me" with different words and
the elimination of four bars, which results in "twelve bars" (i.e., the
blues), but not really; it is a conventional sixteen-bar song. (The Kingston
11. Maybelle can be seen cheerfully using this technique on "Cannonball Blues" in John
Cohen's short 1967 film Sara and Maybelle.
182 BMR Journal
Trio restored the missing measures in their much-later version.) Another
nonblues is "Carter's Blues," a lyric lament that was perhaps so named
because of what someone has called Sara's "non-yodel"; she sings the
notes in the low register only, her voice never breaking into falsetto. "East
Virginia Blues" is the old ballad "East Virginia," recorded by the white
mountain singer Buell Kazee in 1929. The Carters used different words,
as did the Appalachian protest singer Jim Garland in "All I Want," better
known as "I Don't Want Your Millions, Mister." All of these variants
probably grew out of the folksong "Green Back Dollar," a version of
which can be heard on Favorites of Clint Howard and Doc Watson. Kazee's
song, as transcribed in Anthology of American Folk Music (Dunson and
Raim 1973, 80-81), zig-zags between i and 9 and is nowhere near a blues.
Finally, "The Cannonball" (1930)/"Cannon Ball Blues" (1935) is also certainly
not blues. It is, rather, a variant of the ballad "White House Blues,"
a story about the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901.
Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers recorded the song in 1926
in twelve measures of i, which would be only six in a (see Dunson and
Rain 1973, 56-57). Moreover, although it has a basic I-IV-V structure, the
patterns are not the same as in blues. The tune begs to be finger-picked in
the soft Piedmont style, which Maybelle did masterfully. Closely related
songs are Etta Baker's "Railroad Bill" and, although she adds a III chord,
Elizabeth Cotten's "Freight Train" and "Oh, Babe, It Ain't No Lie."
Although Maybelle learned both the picking style and words from Leslie
Riddle (O'Connell 1993, 31-34), "The Cannonball," like the other three, is
by no means a blues.
Among the Carters' songs that come closest to the blues are "Hello,
Stranger," "Jealous Hearted Me," "Coal Miner's Blues," "Bear Creek
Blues," "Lonesome Homesick Blues," and the best of the lot, "Oh Take
Me Back." "Stranger," another learned from Riddle, is a kind of "gateway"
song into the Carter Family's blues repertoire. It features a delicate
finger-picked feel like those above, yet it is (ostensibly) a twelve-bar song
with a I-IV-V-I pattern and lyrics that express a man's sorrow at his true
love being taken away to prison. The three-line structure, however, is
made up of two lines of three bars and one of four, two shy of twelve.
Also transcribed in the Anthology (Dunson and Raim 1973, 114-115), the
song has a meter that vacillates between I and i at 100 bpm, thereby eliminating
space that could be used for antiphony (the singers trade two-bar
phrases but do not call and respond).
On the preprinted handbills that Doc distributed before the Carter
Family's personal appearances was the statement "The Program is
Morally Good"; chances are good, therefore, that the group seldom performed
"Jealous Hearted Me" in concert. Indeed, the piece is practically
Lightfoot * The Three Doc(k)s 183
salacious, with Sara singing lines like "Takes the man I love to satisfy my
soul," "I need a Papa to turn my damper down," and "You can have my
money, you can have my home, / But for Goodness sakes, women, let my
man alone." (Either Sara or Maybelle softly giggles "Hee, hee, hee" after
the last note sounds, an obvious expression of guilty pleasure.) Bob
Coltman (1973) has suggested that the family's source was the 1927
record "Jealous Hearted Blues," by the Atlanta musician Charley Lincoln.
But an African-American source, blues tropes, and a kind of three-line
form notwithstanding, the song is not really blues. Its i meter, comic elements,
and thirteen-bar structure (5, 4, 4) do not conform to the primary
blues aesthetic. A strong feature of the performance, nevertheless, is
Maybelle's boogie-like flat-picked guitar breaks, although they contain
very little playful improvisation and consequently sound exactly alike.
According to Coltman (32), "That black picking styles had a pervasive
long-term effect on [Maybelle's] playing is incontrovertible on the evidence
of many sides. 'Coal Miner's Blues' and its shadow 'Bear Creek
Blues' show the black influence fairly clearly, but combine it with ideas
from other sources as well, including the kind of flatpick lead that was
beginning to be heard in Western Swing, jazz and pop music." It is
axiomatic that there was a "black influence" on these three genres, so
Coltman must mean that these "other sources" exist apart from the blues,
rendering "Coal Miner" and "Bear Creek" as something other than pure
blues. Indeed, these two songs, like the others, are good examples of
near-blues, blues songs, or Appalachian white blues. Archie Green (1961,
235) discusses "Coal Miner's Blues" primarily in terms of its lyrics, calling
it "a graphic and poignant statement of five or six decades of ... work
lore compressed into a single rhythmic song." The same can be said about
Merle Travis's "Sixteen Tons" and "Dark as a Dungeon," but such
laments are not in and of themselves blues songs. "Coal Miner's Blues,"
for example, owes its melody to "I Wouldn't Mind Dying," a perfect sixteen-
bar gospel song, a far cry from the blues. The Carters again omit four
measures so as to make it into blues, but the timing is off with the guitar
breaks spread into nine bars. This erratic timing precludes any attempt at
antiphony, which is absolutely vital to the blues. The same is true for
"Bear Creek Blues," a faster version of "Coal Miner" with identical flatpicked
breaks but with rather insipid lyrics.
"Lonesome Homesick Blues" is a hard-driving near-blues about someone
rushing to Maces Springs on a train in hopes of reviving a relationship
with a long-missed lover. In keeping with the (nonblues) lyrics, the
tempo is a crisp 1 (107 bpm), sped along by Maybelle's in-your-face
straight-picked runs and her use of a left-handed closed-chord "sock"
grip on the guitar neck. The melody alludes to "The Nine Pound
184 BMR Journal
Hammer"-recorded in 1927 by its composer, Charlie Bowman with Al
Hopkins and His Buckle Busters from nearby Gray, Tennessee-and
shares that tune's sixteen-bar form. While not blues exactly, the performance
indicates that the Carter Family-especially Maybelle-was
understanding more and more about the genre.
Barry O'Connell (1993, 5) has written about an impressive coterie of
African-American musicians living in and around Kingsport (twenty
miles from Maces Springs) during the early 1920s: John Henry Lyons,
Leslie Riddle, George McGhee and his sons Brownie and "Sticks," Harry
Gay, and the most accomplished of them all, Steve Tarter, who served as
the center of the group; Riddle, in fact, once met Blind Lemon Jefferson at
Tarter's home. It was almost certainly from this consortium that the
Carter Family learned "Oh Take Me Back," their best attempt at the blues.
O'Connell reports that Maybelle told Mike Seeger that she borrowed her
break in the song from Riddle's "Red River Blues" (29). Coltman (1973,
32), on the other hand, suggests that the break is "remarkably like that of
the 1928 Tarter and Gay recording 'Brownie Blues,"' which is in the "Red
River Blues"/"Crow Jane" family of "East Coast" songs. The instrumental
approach was obviously in the Kingsport communal tradition and
was surely the source of the Carters' musical text. Coltman refers to "Oh
Take Me Back" as the "most conventional, yet probably most exciting
blues the Carters recorded" (32), and indeed it was. The song is not, however,
in the primary blues category; it is, rather, a typical example of
white blues, with some elements firmly in the tradition and others clearly
not, a kind of "blues lite," as it were. The song's lyrics, for example, are
solidly in the blues idiom, as are the three-cornered stanzas, Maybelle's
twelve-bar flat-picked breaks, and Sara's portamento notes that end the
first lines of each stanza. But the rapid tempo, restrictive i meter, fivemeasure
lines, and lack of playfulness are not at all consonant with core
blues.
These six songs, then, like those few of Dock Boggs', are constructed
out of bits and pieces of the blues-harmonic patterns, a certain amount
of melancholy, and occasional use of the blues scale. They generally do
not have a twelve-bar structure of t time, are certainly not slow, are not
meticulously timed, do not use fluid intonation, and are absent any kind
of antiphonal activity. Like Boggs, the Carter Family never recorded a
pure blues song. While their sound and repertoire relied substantially on
African-American traditions, the blues was, in the end, incidental to their
music.
Lightfoot * The Three Doc(k)s 185
Doc Watson
"It's amazing how many people here in these mountains loved
blues at that time [mid-1930s]."
-Doc Watson (Watson and Holt 2002)
If one were to strike out on the Daniel Boone Trail (U.S. 421) headed
southeast from Maces Springs, he or she would cross the Great Valley and
eventually arrive in Boone, North Carolina, at the crest of the Blue Ridge
Mountains, where old-timers have for years pointed out that "back
before Doc was a folksinger, he could really play that guitar!" They were
of course referring to Arthel "Doc" Watson (b. 1923), the now-legendary
folk musician from Deep Gap, eight miles east. What they meant was that
they had heard Watson play swing, Western swing, rock and roll, rockabilly,
and other types of popular dance music on an electric guitar years
before he encountered folklorist Ralph Rinzler, who encouraged Watson
to begin again playing the "old-time stuff," that is, the folksongs that he
learned from his family and neighbors when he was a young man.
Having been blinded at an early age, Watson became a world-class listener,
and his repertoire was nothing if not eclectic-a kind of pre-postmodernism
at play in the mountains.
Watson first heard music in church, where his brother Arnold was the
song leader.12 In 1929, when he was six, Watson's father brought home a
wind-up Victrola and fifty records by such African-American performers
as Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, Cannon's Jug Stompers, and the
Memphis Jug Band. There were also 78s by white artists like the Carter
Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Uncle Dave Macon, Riley Puckett, and the
Skillet Lickers, as well as Dixieland discs and popular songs by Vernon
Dalhart and Gene Austin, on whose "My Blue Heaven" Watson heard his
first guitar music, as he remembers it.
Watson's first instrument was a harmonica, a Christmas gift when he
was five. He got his hands on a homemade banjo at eleven (1934) and a
Stella guitar at thirteen; the first song that he worked out was the Carter
Family's "When the Roses Bloom in Dixieland," without, at this early
stage, Maybelle's now-famous "church lick."
In 1936, the Watson family got a Crosley radio that brought still more
music to Deep Gap. Doc remembers hearing J. E. Mainer's Mountaineers,
12. The biographical information here is taken from Watson's responses to David Holt's
questions on the award-winning set of compact discs Legacy. The set also contains a seventy-
two-page booklet with additional comments by Doc and his family and friends (Watson
and Holt 2002), along with some outstanding old photographs and helpful notes by Holt
that supplement the interviews.
186 BMR Journal
the Monroe Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys, the Delmore Brothers, and the
jewel in the crown, Merle Travis. As Watson recalls, he first heard Travis
in 1939 on Cincinnati's WLW playing with Grandpa Jones and the
Delmore Brothers, Alton and Rabon, in what was possibly the best white
gospel quartet ever, the Brown's Ferry Four. Travis's patented thumbstyle
guitar cast an almost magical aura over the music, especially when
he played his lilting four-bar turnarounds between verses. Watson
remembers hearing the nongospel Travis as well; indeed, Watson almost
certainly borrowed the opening midneck chords on "Deep River Blues"
from Travis's "Cannonball Rag," the anthem of Travis-pickers.
Watson had all along been learning chords from friends like Paul
Montgomery, blues licks on the harp from his cousin Spencer Miller, and
finger-picking from Olin Miller, from whom he learned his first blues,
"Memphis Blues." Watson also remembers hearing the Nashville cats
Hank Garland and Grady Tate on the radio and being impressed by their
ability to play fiddle tunes (e.g., Garland's "Sugarfoot Rag") on the electric
guitar. He decided to learn to do the same on his acoustic guitar, a
useful skill when he began performing professionally.
For the next few years, Watson continued listening and practicing and
began playing both banjo and guitar on the streets of Boone and
Wilkesboro for quarters and half-dollars, often spending his money on
records at Richard Green's music store in downtown Boone. In his late
teens, Watson began accompanying the old-time banjoist Clarence Tom
Ashley-the Mountain City, Tennessee, native who had done some
recording in the 1920s-at local land auctions. Watson honed his ear and
supplemented his income by working as a piano tuner; he also began
playing on radio stations in Boone, Hickory, and Lenoir.
After woodshedding for several years, Watson began playing for
square dances at the Boone American Legion Hall, with Charlie Osmond
on guitar and Gerald Little on either fiddle or bass. When Little picked up
the bass, Watson played the fiddle part on the guitar for dancing sets that
lasted for thirty or forty minutes at a time. Watson continued paying his
dues, in 1953 becoming a member of Jack Lawrence's dance band The
Country Gentlemen, which featured a piano, electric guitar and bass, a
drummer, and a woman vocalist. With no fiddle in the group, Watson
once again picked songs like "Beaumont Rag" on the guitar. But the
Gentlemen also played rockabilly ("Blue Suede Shoes"), outright rock
and roll ("Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"), and all sorts of other dance
music. Watson played in this band from 1953 to 1962, so when he
"became" a folksinger in 1960 he really could play that guitar.
During this period, Watson's friend Tom Ashley had added fiddler
Fred Price and guitarist Clint Howard to the group. When Rinzler
Lightfoot * The Three Doc(k)s 187
approached Ashley in 1960 about recording, Ashley insisted that they
add his old land auction partner Watson to the band, and they did exactly
that. Watson had to put his electric guitar aside to fit in with the oldtime
acoustic musicians, but playing folk music was not a stretch for him;
he had been surrounded by it growing up. In 1961, the band played some
gigs in New York, and Watson's career was off and running.
Unlike Dock Boggs and the Carters, Watson apparently experienced
very little black music firsthand when he was growing up; he says nothing
about it on Legacy, on his three blues compact discs, or anywhere else
as far as I can determine. He speaks fondly on Legacy of Jerry Ricks, a
black guitarist with whom he stayed for a month in 1964: "I learned a few
blues licks from Jerry." And it was Ricks who showed Doc's son Merle
some keys to John Hurt's playing. One can imagine too that Watson
heard and perhaps jammed with musicians like Hurt, Robert Pete
Williams, the Reverend Robert Wilkins, and Fred McDowell backstage at
Newport and other folk festivals. But there were no living blues in his
musical nurture. Moreover, Doc's concept of the blues is profoundly liberal.
For example, when he kicked off the 2004 MerleFest, a festival honoring
his late son, he finger-picked Bob Dylan's classic "Don't Think
Twice, It's All Right." His grandson Richard then came on stage, with Doc
suggesting that they do some blues, saying "Blues is our middle name"
and pointing out that the Dylan tune was "a contemporary blues kind of
thing." Next was Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Matchbox Blues"-itself not
pure blues but a kind of boogie-moan-pre-blues-with a pretty close text
(although the Watsons changed "manager" to "good man"), lots of
string-stretching, flatted thirds and sevenths, and a playful break by
Richard, but practically none of Jefferson's gleeful instrumental responses,
which are a major component of the performance. The brief set ended
with still another "blues": "Don't You Monkey Around with the Widder
While I'm Gone," which, even with Richard's bluesy break, has very little
to do with the genre. This set can be seen as representing the whole
white blues phenomenon: a deep appreciation of the blues, attempts at
replicating the form that use certain key elements, the omission of equally
important elements, and an amorphous notion about the fundamental
nature of blues music. One gets the impression that any song dealing
with what Watson called "lonesomeness" qualifies as blues in Watson's
mind, as well as in the minds of many others.
For example, on the Watsons' first all-blues album, Pickin' the Blues, Doc
sings the old popular standard "Stormy Weather," which is based on the
"We Want Cantor" harmonic pattern (I-vi-IV-V7), the same pattern used
in "Blue Moon" and "Heart and Soul." The song is gloomy enough, but
it is not a blues, nor are the Chet Atkins-influenced instrumental "Windy
188 BMR Journal
and Warm," the sixteen-bar reels "Jailhouse Blues" (Delmore Brothers),
"Freight Train Blues," "Blue Ridge Mountain Blues," Jimmie Rodgers'
"Hobo Bill's Last Ride" (which Watson extends to eighteen measures), or
"Honey Babe Blues," a variant of Dock Boggs' "Sugar Baby," which
Watson learned from Tom Ashley. Doc Watson (1985) says of "Honey
Babe Blues," "There's something about that good old modal sound that
you can apply to the guitar and turn it right into the blues," which shows
his liberal take on the genre. "St. Louis Blues" features some fine Travispicking,
but the metrics are awry (phrases of 5, 4, and 4 measures), and
the Latin intermezzo section is not played as such. The instrumental
"Carroll County Blues," which the Prairie Ramblers recorded as the great
"'D' Blues," is here largely a two-chord puzzle.
The songs in Pickin' the Blues that come closest to the blues are three uptempo
shuffle-like pieces: "Mississippi Heavy Water Blues," "Sittin' Here
Pickin' the Blues," and "I'm a Stranger Here." "Water," learned from a
Barbeque Bob recording, moves right along but is metrically uneven.
"Pickin"' puts forth solid twelve-bar verses, but curiously, the chorus
omits the eighth measure, resulting in only eleven bars. The tune, however,
features some nice response phrases from the best blues musician of
the bunch, fiddler Sam Bush. The album's best effort is "Stranger," the
highlights of which are Doc's responsorial harmonica passages (probably
overdubbed), Bush's fiddling, and Merle Watson's use of bent notes and
glissando on the guitar. There is even a verse from Dock Boggs' "Down
South Blues" that brings the song full circle.
The Watsons' next all-blues record (with Merle's son Richard) was
Third Generation Blues. Or was it? Of the fourteen tunes on the album,
only three are blues-like; the others include Tim Hardin's "If I Were a
Carpenter" (a pop hit for Bobby Darin), the Kingston Trio's "South
Coast," Pat Boone's "Moody River," Mel Tillis's "Walk On, Boy," the
Gershwins' "Summertime," the Child ballad "Gypsy Davey," and the
gospel songs "Uncloudy Day" and "Precious Lord Take My Hand."
There are a few blues-related songs as well: Darby and Tarlton's
"Columbus Stockade Blues," Jimmie Rodgers' "Train Whistle Blues," and
"House of the Rising Sun," all of which are played at a peppy pace. While
not a blues exactly, the eight-bar ballad "St. James Infirmary" displays
remarkable blues singing by Doc, one of his most fully realized black-like
vocal performances. The bluesiest tunes are Bukka White's "Honey,
Please Don't Go" (originally recorded by Big Joe Williams and later popularized
by Muddy Waters as "Baby, Please Don't Go") and Kokomo
Arnold's "Milk Cow Blues." Both are in a shuffle mode that creates a
bouncy rockabilly groove. It seems clear indeed that Doc Watson's best
Lightfoot * The Three Doc(k)s 189
blues performances are up-tempo tunes that "rock," charged by the driving
flat-picking that he had perfected in his dance-band days.
Perhaps the best indication of Watson's blues repertoire is the retrospective
album Troublein Mind: TheD oc WatsonC ountryB lues Collection
1964-1998, with some useful notes by Bruce Winkworth. Winkworth
(2003, 3) points out that the "blues run deep through Doc's music and
color his performance regardless of the song he's playing" and that "of all
the influences in Doc's music, none is more prevalent, more pervasive or
more powerful than the blues." This album provides a good cross-section
of the various sources that have informed Watson's music through the
years. For example, Dock Boggs is represented by "Country Blues"; Tom
Ashley, by "Honey Babe Blues" and the ballad "Little Sadie"; Jimmie
Rodgers, by "Anniversary Blues (Blue Yodel #7)" and "Never No More
Blues"; John Hurt, by "Stackolee" and the hammer song "Spikedriver
Blues" (Winkworth suggests that "Worried Blues" is also from Hurt, but
it is more likely from Frank Hutchison's version); the Delmore Brothers,
by "Deep River Blues" and "Gambler's Yodel" and by their harmonica
player Wayne Raney's "Lost John"; Henry Whitter, by the piece "Rain
Crow Bill"; Roy Harvey of the North Carolina Ramblers, by "White
House Blues" and by Doc's father's dance tune "Georgie Buck"-all of
these songs near-blues, if that. Doc learned the Mississippi Sheiks' "Sittin'
on Top of the World" and W. C. Handy's "Memphis Blues" from his
friend Olin Miller. The best blues on the album, and perhaps the best that
Doc has recorded, is the eight-bar "praise" song "My Little Woman,
You're So Sweet," a Blind Boy Fuller tune that Doc learned from his
father. But even this performance is not core blues; Doc Watson is a highly
accomplished musician whose guitar picking is as clean and pure and
graceful as a Kentucky fast break, but he simply does not do primary
blues. And since he has absorbed a great many songs from white musicians-
Boggs, Harvey, Hutchison, the Delmores, Rodgers, and Travis-
Watson stands, in all respects, as a champion, an emblem, of Appalachian
white blues.
The argument here has been that primary, quintessential blues is a kind
of M6bius strip of sound consisting of equal parts certain formal (textual),
emotional (textural), and social (contextual) elements and that music
that lacks one or more of these elements is clearly something else. White
Appalachian musicians have been able to tap into such slivers of the
blues as lyrical content, harmonic patterns, tonality (the blues scale), and
although with much difficulty, the twelve-bar formal structure. They generally
have not, however, been able to internalize such fundamental qualities
of the genre as slow and meticulous timing, fluid intonation, and
most important, antiphony. Rather than arbitrary "rules" or "laws," these
190 BMR Journal
components work together organically to support the music. The twelvemeasure
structure is important inasmuch as it nurtures call-and-response
dynamics (although, for that matter, if such literary forms as blank verse,
heroic couplets, haiku, the different kinds of sonnets, and the villanelle
have nonnegotiable formal and metrical integrity, then why not the blues
also?). Indeed, Appalachian whites have not seen or felt the need to
engage in antiphony, the ritualistic playing out of mythic requisites
involving community and creativity that can, yet cannot, be explained.
And without these things, their music is not really "blues." Extending the
definition of blues to include God-knows-what serves no purpose at all.
Abbe Niles (1972, 17) had it right: "Extend a name to cover everything,
and it soon means nothing." Of all the recordings of Dock Boggs, the
Carter Family, and Doc Watson discussed here, and the dozens of songs
on five of the compilation albums listed in the discography (White
Country Blues, Mister Charlie's Blues, Old-Time Mountain Blues, Old-Time
Mountain Guitar, and East Virginia Blues), not one performance can take its
place among the twelve primary blues tunes mentioned at the beginning
of this article-not one. The question that began this article, therefore, is
in fact a begged one; blues did not, as it turns out, "sink into the consciousness"
of white Appalachian singers.
Some of Archie Green's questions have been answered, but others have
taken their place. Why, for example, did Boggs' coal-mining contemporaries
in Western Kentucky seem to have grasped the blues experience
superlatively? Mose Rager (1911-1986), for example, from Muhlenberg
County, Kentucky, performed excellent versions of Bessie Smith's
"Backwater Blues," Charles Brown's "Merry Christmas Baby" and
"Changeable Woman Blues," and everyone's "Love Is Like a Faucet,"
which appears as a verse in Dock Boggs' "Down South Blues." Mose and
his buddy Ike Everly, who were both influenced by another white coal
miner, Kennedy Jones, were the major mentors of Doc Watson's idol,
Merle Travis. Jones was in turn taught by the extraordinary black musician
Arnold Shultz, also a major influence on both the Prairie Ramblers'
Tex Atchison and the "Father of Bluegrass," Bill Monroe. All of these men
played better blues than the three Doc(k)s.
This state of affairs probably had to do in part with a confluence of geographical
and cultural circumstances.13"F or example, Muhlenberg and
Ohio counties have always enjoyed a strong river culture-the Greenthat
brought coal barges and showboats to the region and, with them, lots
of folksongs and minstrel/vaudeville entertainments. The region was
also connected to several good-sized cities-Owensboro, Bowling Green,
Evansville-and enjoyed a wide variety of radio stations: Nashville,
13. For example, see Lightfoot (1990).
Lightfoot * The Three Doc(k)s 191
Memphis, and Louisville, which broadcast such great African-American
groups as the Louisville Jug Band and the Ballard Chefs. Moreover, the
region experienced quite a bit of black-white musical interaction, with
folks jamming frequently at company stores and railroad crossings.
Southwestern Virginia and the mountains of North Carolina, on the other
hand, were much more isolated, with fewer cultural opportunities available
in the area-no river culture to speak of, fewer types of radio broadcasts,
and perhaps fewer outstanding black musicians with whom to jam.
One suspects that research into the relationships between land and lore
will provide promising pieces for Archie Green's puzzle.
When folks heard Mose or Ike or Jonesy perform, they thought "blues"
not "white blues." Indeed, there are blues, part-blues, and nonblues, no
matter who is playing them. "White blues" is a term more suited to
Jimmie Rodgers' "Why Did You Give Me Your Love, Dear (If It Lasted
Only a Day?)," K. T. Oslin's "Still on My Mind," Doc Carter's quivery
"One Little Word," George Jones' "A Picture of Me (without You)," Vince
Gill's "When I Call Your Name" (with the sublime Patty Loveless), and
one of the most heartbreaking blues that one is ever likely to hear, Frank
Proffitt's "Poor Man": "There's not a thing for a poor man in this world.
Lord, have mercy."
Many thanks to Fred Hay for calling to my attention numerous resources and for making
available to me important recordings and documents from his personal collection.
Thanks also to Barry Lee Pearson and James Winders for providing helpful suggestions on
early drafts of the essay.
DISCOGRAPHY
Anthology of American folk music. Smithsonian Folkways 40090 ([1952] 1997). Compact disc.
Boggs, Dock. Dock Boggs: His Folkway years, 1963-1968. Smithsonian Folkways 40108 (1998).
Compact discs.
. Dock Boggs: His original recordings. R&F Records RF654 (1983).
Carter Family. Jealous hearted me. In the shadow of Clinch Mountain. Bear Family Records
BCS 15865 LK (2000).
--L. onesome homesick blues. In the shadow of Clinch Mountain. Bear Family Records
BCS 15865 LK (2000).
. Oh take me back. In the shadow of Clinch Mountain. Bear Family Records BCS 15865
LK (2000).
East Virginia blues: The Appalachian roots of honky tonk. BMG 82876 60085 2 (2004).
Henderson, Rosa. Down South blues. Vocalion 14635 (1923).
Hopkins, Al, and his Buckle Busters. The nine pound hammer. Brunswick 177 (1927).
Howard, Clint, and Doc Watson. Favorites of Clint Howard and Doc Watson. Old Homestead
RR-3010 (1988).
Hunter, Alberta. Down South blues. Paramount 12036 (1923).
192 BMR Journal
Martin, Sara, and Clarence Williams. Mistreated mama blues. Okeh 8086 (1923).
- . Sugar blues. Okeh 8041 (1922).
McCoy, Clyde. Complete Clyde McCoy on Columbia: Sugar blues. Collector's choice 152 (2000).
- . Sugar blues-1951. Circle 82 (1996).
Mercer, Johnny. Sugar blues. Capitol B448 (1947).
Minstrel banjo style. Rounder CD 0321 (1994). Compact disc.
Mister Charlie's blues (1926-1938). Yazoo L-1024.
Moore, Monette. Sugar blues. Paramount 12015 (1923).
Old-time mountain blues: Rural classics, 1927-1939. County CD 3528 (2003).
Old-time mountain guitar: Vintage recordings, 1926-1931. County CD 3512 (1998).
Riddle, Lesley. Step by step. Rounder CD 0299 (1993).
Smith, Clara. Down South blues. Columbia A3961 (1923).
Watson, Doc. Legacy. High Windy 1258 (2002). Compact discs.
. Pickin' the blues. Flying Fish 352 (1985).
Third generation blues. Sugar Hill Records SHCD 3893 (1999).
. Trouble in mind: The Doc Watson country blues collection 1964-1998. Sugar Hill CD 3966
(2003).
White country blues, 1926-1938: A lighter shade of blue. Columbia/Legacy C2K 47466 (1993).
Compact discs.
VIDEOGRAPHY
Sara and Maybelle. 1967. Directed and edited by John Cohen. Newton, N.J.: Shanachie
Entertainment.
Seeger, Mike, Janette Carter, and Alexia Smith. 2000. Guitar styles of the Carter Family.
Woodstock, N.Y.: Homespun Video HL00641470.
Shady Grove: Old time music from North Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia. 1997. Distributed by
Rounder Records. Cambridge, Mass.: Vestapol.
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FOOTNOTES:
1. Some relevant discussions include Finn (1986), Oliver (1986), Cohen (1996), Webb
(1988), Wolfe (1993b), and liner notes by Wolfe (1993a), Fleder (1998), Blech (2003), and Calt,
Perls, and Stewart (n.d.).
2. The list of scholars who have written intelligently on the blues is much too long to present
here, although such a list would certainly include Abbe Niles, Harold Courlander, Paul
Oliver, Sam Charters, Charles Keil, Bruce Bastin, David Evans, Jeff Todd Titon, and Barry
Lee Pearson. I have relied most heavily here on the earliest of these scholars (Niles 1926,
1972) and the most recent (Pearson 2004), especially for the discussion on blues texture.