Doc Watson's Last Tour
by Judith Broadhurst

It's five o'clock in the afternoon in Deep Gap, North Carolina. The leaves have already turned, and the sky is dark above the Blue Ridge foothills, because there's a heck of a storm coming up. Doc Watson can tell you about the storm only because of the thunder. He's been blind almost since he was born in these mountains 67 years ago. He knows what time of year it is because he's been out picking walnuts and shucking them from the thick, rough hulls, the way you peel an orange.

"I got the stains off my hands," he says, "but I can't get the smell off." He made a similar statement one time, years ago, about the cat. Yes, he remembers.

Watson's dad had made him his first banjo out of groundhog hide. But it didn't sound so good. The Sears, Roebuck catalog was advertising the Joe Rogers cat skin banjos, so that gave them the idea to make the cat into a banjo.

"My grandmother had a poor old cat, and the cat got where it couldn't see and couldn't walk. There was no such thing as a local vet in those days, so she gave one of my brothers a quarter to put it out of its misery.

"We tackled the job, and I won't go into details on that," he says, mercifully, "but it made a fine banjo. It was thinner, much stronger. It was almost like vinyl. You could just about read through it. It was a beautiful thing."

This was about 1930 in the Appalachians, way before people thought much about animal rights, you understand. And this was Deep Gap, as far removed from what passes for civilization as a body has a right to be. Deep Gap is about equidistant from Boone, Blowing Rock and Miller's Creek, across the borders from Tennessee and Kentucky, in the neighborhood of dots on the map with names like Pigeon Forge and Independence.

Watson doesn't need to know all that, because his sense of place is as much a part of him as it is for one of those distinctive Southern writers. Watson's heritage comes out in his songs and on the guitar he plays in that backwoods style known as flat-picking. He's one of the last and always has been one of the best flat-pickers. He has four Grammys to show for it, stuck here and there around the house as though they don't mean much to him. They don't. He would rather have been an electrical engineer, had he not been blind.

But blindness didn't keep him from building a utility shed and rewiring his whole house, by himself. He could tell the difference between the black wires and the red ones by the textures of the pigments in the vinyl, he says. Watson made the best of it all, all right, but it comes from deep in the heart when he sings the Delmore Brothers' words: "Life is full of misery. tears, so many I can't see. Seems, somehow, I never can be free. Blues, why don't you let me be?"

The blues can haunt you, Doc says, and his family's had its share. In the last five years, he and Rose Lee, his wife of 44 years (whom he married when she was 14 or 15, even the family isn't sure) have lost a mother, a brother and a son. His son, Merle, was crushed to death by a tractor. It was the most painful of all Doc's losses. They'd been music and road partners since Merle was in his teens.

"You don't ever get over it," he says, and you can hear it in the mournful tone of his voice. "It caused Rosa Lee to have two severe heart attacks. We almost lost her." And the tragedy broke Doc's heart. His dream was to build a new house down the road about a mile, in the woods, at a grove Merle had found. And he dreamed of doing a radio show with his son. He built the house, despite Merle's death. But he can't face doing the radio show without him. Instead, he looks forward every year to the Wilkes Community College Merle Watson Memorial Festival. He goes there, every spring, to play and teach, and to honor his beloved son's memory.

He admits he's never been much on teaching. "I wasn't well-blessed with patience, I reckon. And it's awfully hard to teach a sighted person." So the festival's the only chance anyone's going to have to learn some of what was passed down to him.

"The things I started with, in the '60s, I learned from the older folks and early recordings. There were a lot more fireside chats and story tellin' when I was growin' up. They don't do that anymore. TV ruined it. Makes you a little sick inside, but it's really gone.

"Once in a while they'll have what they call a pig pickin' — that's a barbecue — and some old-timey group will get together, and I'll sit in with them. But Jack Lawrence and I play a lot of different stuff now. It's traditional and whatever I wanna play."

Watson says this will be our last time to hear him, live. He's long been tired of the road, never liked it anyway. He swore, three years ago, that it was his last time out. But there were bills yet to pay, so there were miles to go before he could rest. Come January, he vows, he's staying home for good. "I won't quit pickin', of course, and I'll probably do another two or three records. Merle and I did 25 in 20 years. I've done another three, I think, and there's another one in the can. But I won't be tourin' anymore."