DOC WATSON

Thursday, January 9 – 7pm
Santa Fe, NM
Lensic Performing Arts Center
211 W. San Francisco
with guest John McEuen
from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

Friday, January 10 – 7pm
Albuquerque, NM
Hiland Theater
4804 Central, SE

National Heritage Fellowship recipient Doc Watson is a legendary performer who blends traditional Appalachian musical roots with bluegrass, country, gospel and blues. A powerful singer and a tremendously influential picker, he virtually invented the art of playing mountain fiddle tunes on the flattop guitar. With more than 50 recordings to he credit, Doc is considered one of the towering figures of American roots music.

Born Arthel L. Watson in Deep Gap, North Carolina in1923, Doc's mother, Annie Watson, sang traditional secular and religious songs, and his father, General Watson, played the banjo, which was Doc's first instrument as well. At age 13 he taught himself the chords to "When The Roses Bloom In Dixieland" on a borrowed guitar, and his delighted father bought him a $12 Stella. He later picked up some chords from a fellow student at Raleigh School for the Blind, and began to incorporate material that he heard on records and the radio with the music of his heritage. Back home he played mostly with neighbors and family, among them fiddler Gaither Carlton, who became his father-in-law when Doc married Rosa Lee Carlton in 1947. They became parents of two children, Merle and Nancy Ellen.

It wasn't until 1953 at age 30 that he met Jack Williams, a local piano player, and began to play gigs for money. Doc played with Williams' rockabilly-swing band for seven years, a period and a style that he revisited in the recent album Docabilly. But he continued to play traditional music with his family and with his banjo-playing neighbor, Clarence "Tom" Ashley. In 1960, spurred by the growing folk revival, Ralph Rinzler and Eugene Earle came south to record Ashley and heard Doc Watson in the process. These sessions resulted in Doc's first recordings, Old-Time Music at Clarence Ashley's. A later collaboration with mandolinist David Grisman, Doc & Dawg, returns to this old-time pre-bluegrass style. In 1961 the Friends of Old-Time Music invited Doc, Ashley, Clint Howard and Fred Price to perform at a now-legendary concert in New York City, and one year later Doc gave his first solo performance at Gerde's Folk City in Greenwich Village.

From then on, he was a full-time professional, playing a wide range of concerts, clubs, colleges and festivals, including the Newport Folk Festival and Carnegie Hall. As the late sixties brought a waning of the folk revival, Doc's son Merle provided the musical and emotional companionship that he needed to continue touring. With Merle playing guitar and banjo and serving as partner and driver, the father-son team expanded their audience nationwide.

After working for a while with the band Frosty Morn, they continued to tour with bassist T. Michael Coleman, and brought their music to Europe, Japan and Africa. A series of remarkable recordings, including collaborations with Flatt & Scruggs, Chet Atkins, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, helped make Doc the gold standard among traditional pickers. Although he briefly stopped performing after Merle died in a 1985 tractor accident, Doc (accompanied by guitarist Jack Lawrence) now accepts a limited number of engagements. Thirsty Ear is proud to present one of America's greatest roots musicians.

ODETTA
with guest
ALVIN YOUNGBLOOD HART

Thursday, January 16, 7 pm
Santa Fe, NM
Lensic Performing Arts Center
211 W. San Francisco
Friday, January 17, 7 pm
Albuquerque, NM
Hiland Theater
4804 Central, SE

Odetta named her first guitar "Baby." "Clumpy clump" followed. Five decades later – that's how long she's been at it – Odetta has named her current guitar "007." "She has a license to kill, honey. Without drawing blood." Her laugh sounds like a thundercloud raining molasses. But if her guitar has morphed from timid to intrepid, Odetta's voice was recognized from the beginning as weapon in the protest movement's battle with The Man.

Born Odetta Gordon in 1930 in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Los Angeles, Odetta studied classical voice as a child in the hope of becoming an opera star. Marian Anderson, a black opera singer navigating through hostile white territory in 1940s America, was her idol. But after a realistic appraisal of racism and a stint in the 1947 Broadway production of Finian's Rainbow, Odetta chucked classical for folk.

As it turned out, the folk community was the perfect pack for a political animal like Odetta. First thing she did when she landed on the folk scene was leaflet for the Rosenbergs. Paul Robeson took her under his wing. "My education on several levels started with my getting into folk music," she says in a phone interview from her home in New York. "I started learning history that we were not being taught in school. The 'heroes' that we learned about in school were the ones who garnered money for themselves and had their boots on our necks." Odetta readily admits hatred fueled her early activism and career. While age and spirituality have mellowed the rage, still she growls, "I will not unlearn 'That's not fair.' I will not give over to people who want to crush me. And us."

When she hit San Francisco in 1953 for a residency at the Tin Angel, Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte were waiting for her. She cites both as major influences, along with Anderson, Mahalia Jackson, and Robeson. By the '60s she was a folk fixture on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. Bob Dylan traded in his amps and electric guitar for an acoustic after hearing her first recording, "Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues" (Tradition, 1956). Janis Joplin, Bonnie Raitt, Tracy Chapman, and Joan Armatrading all cite her as an influence.

Though she continued to tour worldwide, the Reagan-Bush era chilled her, as it did so many, when, predictably, the slick, treacly strains of "We Are The World" drowned out authentic protest music. The '90s were friendlier, marking the rerelease of a slew of her early albums. In 1999, Odetta was awarded a National Medal of the Arts at Constitution Hall, the site 60 years earlier of Marian Anderson's shameful exclusion. That was a good year: Odetta's first recording in 14 years, Blues Everywhere I Go, was released to critical acclaim. She says singing the blues again gives her a chance to refute hateful African American stereotypes and pay tribute to an era she reveres. "There were blues songs [in the '20s and '30s] that had to do with everyday living. I dare you to find a blues song today that doesn't have to do with the pelvis area or 'I'm gonna shoot you'...." Rather, Blues Everywhere I Go deconstructs homelessness, unemployment, the WPA's betrayal of the working poor, and the tireless strength of women.

Vanity Fair's November 2000 tribute to musical luminaries honors Odetta as a "Keeper of the Flame," Ramblin' Jack Elliott at her side. Annie Leibovitz's photo captures the singer with her arms upraised, gap-toothed smile broad and eyes likely moist, as if someone just told her a really sad story capped by a dirty joke. On her face grief and mirth mix, old chums. The fuel for keeping the people's flame, it's "the music," she says. "I cannot begin to share verbally what it is that I have learned through the music. The music...it's like being in a most delicious school. I keep learnin' and learnin' and learnin'."

If she once pounded lava, Odetta at 70 sips warm, wise irony, that sweetly potent elixir appreciated almost exclusively by old cultures or, in the case of youth-addled America, old people. And, as on Blues Everywhere I Go, the roar has given way to a rumbling purr punctuated by the well-placed claw. In 1993 Odetta played a benefit concert for a New York YMCA with folk oldies Judy Collins, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Josh White Jr., and others. Seeger said, "The stage is full of ghosts." He strained for the high notes. Ives appeared onstage in a motorized wheelchair; he'd be dead within two years. Still, they flickered. "You've got to keep the tradition going," Odetta says, "because things disappear so fast." But not always.

— Elizabeth Wolf

The Thirsty Ear American Icons Series is a unique program that brings to New Mexico the literal greats of American roots music. Each year Thirsty Ear presents a half-dozen tours by these American masters.

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