Rating:
Genre:
Folk
Release Date: 09/19/2006
Black Mountain Rag is drawn from
Doc and
Merle Watson's three early-'80s albums for
Flying Fish Records (1981's
Red Rocking Chair, 1983's
Doc & Merle Watson's Guitar Album, and
Watson Country, which in turn was a sort of a best-of the
Flying Fish years), and what is immediately striking about this compilation is how varied it is, even as it settles nicely into familiar "Watson country."
Doc Watson is incapable of ever making a bad album, given his warm, easy singing style (
Watson's vocals sound eerily like
Jack Teagarden's, if
Teagarden had been born in North Carolina instead of Texas and had played guitar instead of trombone and had devoted his career to
traditional music instead of
jazz) and his simply stunning acoustic guitar playing, but here he shows how at home he and
Merle are with not only
traditional folk fare (
"Red Rocking Chair," "Mole in the Ground") but also
Western swing (
"Smoke, Smoke, Smoke"), organic
bluegrass (
"Blackberry Blossom"), fiddle tunes reconfigured for guitar (
"Fisher's Hornpipe/Devil's Dream"), straight
jazz (
the Gershwins'
"Liza/Lady Be Good") and even a hybrid that might be termed Appalachian
jazz (the striking
"Below Freezing," which features clarinet lines from
Tom Scott). A young
Mark O'Connor plays fiddle on several tracks here, and
Byron Berline takes a turn at the fiddle for
"Down Yonder." There's also a 1990 trio recording (
"Blackberry Blossom") featuring
Doc with
Norman Blake and
Tony Rice, which is here as a sort of bonus track. Again, there's no such thing as a bad
Doc Watson album, and this one, like all the others, shows why he's a true national treasure.
~Steve Leggett, All Music Guide
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