Interview: Ted Olson

Ted Olson almost met Doc Watson once.

In 1984, while working for the Blue Ridge Parkway, Olson lived in Blowing Rock, N.C., not far from Watson’s home in Deep Gap. Olson’s landlords were friends with the legendary artist and tried hard to arrange for their tenant to visit Watson at his house.

“Out of respect for Doc, I didn't pursue that very far, but it was nice to hear local stories of Doc,” says Olson, now a professor at East Tennessee State University. “I loved his music. I had many of his records and had heard him for many years and I felt like I knew him, in a sense — like most fans felt that they knew Doc who didn't really know Doc.”

This consideration for others and immense knowledge of bluegrass, old-time, and country music made Olson an ideal person to spearhead the four-disc, 101-song collection Life’s Work: A Retrospective, complete with an 88-page book written by Olson. Via Zoom from his home in Johnson City, Tenn., the author spoke with Asheville Stages about the immense challenges and rewards of tackling such an ambitious project, and life lessons he learned from Doc along the way.

On his early impressions of Doc…
Growing up, I heard Doc and, of course, [his son] Merle [Watson] on a few occasions around Washington, DC, and his music was so brilliant. It was innovative and traditional at the same time — it perfectly married traditional repertoire with unique performances that were always different. Every time you heard Doc, it was different, and it was that improvisatory nature of his music that I think was so thrilling.

And his stage persona was always so wise and humorous and accessible. And his playing was always so exciting that I always associated his music with Appalachia, but also the true spirit of American creativity. I heard a lot of Appalachian musicians in Washington when I was very young, but Doc always struck me as of Appalachia, but of the world simultaneously. And I think it's that complex persona that he carried that was nonetheless very human and very accessible, but also extremely creative that I was interested in and found very appealing — and, of course, so did so many others.

On attending MerleFest…
I never got there while Doc was kind of hosting MerleFest, but those performances and his hosting were all legendary — his graciousness of bringing people to the stage and jamming with them and kind of creating an impromptu passing of the baton to younger musicians. And it really was a tremendous thing to see on video.

But finally, in 2017, I was invited to perform and give a couple talks and impromptu workshops. And I went back the next year and talked about this project to the folks there. It was a wonderful experience and deeply moving to me to be in Doc's place, in memory of Merle and around such stellar talents, including some of the folks who recorded with Doc on this set. There was a sense of being on Doc’s home turf and it added some legitimacy to my love for Doc’s music as a scholar. I was starting to pursue the study of Doc’s recordings and his career by that time, and it was invaluable to actually be at MerleFest and get a sense of Doc's impact on other musicians.

On building a reputation as an archivist…
I've been working on historical albums now for about 15 years, and my role is as reissue producer and also curator. And the curatorial part invariably involves writing liner notes — doing the research that is involved there, but also compiling tracks and figuring out how best to tell the story represented on this particular album. So, I've done a number of such projects, including box sets dedicated to the Bristol Sessions, the Johnson City Sessions, the Knoxville Sessions, and others. 

And then, along the way I started to research and document recordings from the Great Smoky Mountains — the recordings that were made there before there was a national park. I worked on that project and in some spinoff contemporary projects, two of which were released: On Top of Old Smoky and Big Bend Killing, put out by the Great Smoky Mountains Association. I was directly working with artists who worked with Doc, so I was in the studio talking with Bryan Sutton and David Holt and Trevor and Travis Stuart and Sheila Kay Adams and Laura Boosinger, and others, and everybody liked to talk about Doc. It was fascinating because Doc, his repertoire, and his performing style and his courage as a visionary of Appalachian music inspired generations — not just one, but several generations. And so I got to know those different musicians and the conversation often turned to Doc.

I also worked on [Tennessee Ernie Ford: Portrait Of An American Singer] a box set that was the collected recordings from the 1950s of Ford, which in some ways was a precursor for this project in that I was responsible for representing the career, or at least one phase of the career of an iconic American musician. 

On how the opportunity to curate Life’s Work arose…
I was given that honor by some folks representing Craft Recordings, a historical reissues label affiliated with Concord Music. A couple of friends of mine approached me about this opportunity, and they're listed as co-producers of this project: Scott Billington and Mason Williams.

The exciting thing about that invitation was that when it came along in early 2018, many of the labels that Doc recorded for had been been purchased by Concord Music. Previously, this project would have been very difficult to do before 2018, because at one point Vanguard was in a separate company from Flying Fish, which was a separate company from Sugar Hill, which was a separate company from Rounder. Now, all of a sudden, they were all folded together in the same master company. So, suddenly it became possible to do a true compilation album of Doc Watson’s greatest recordings, and I was invited to be the one to decide what recordings should go onto this planned project, which was both an honor and a challenge — and which I happily took on. 

Photo by Charles Frizzell

On navigating lingering licensing issues…
Despite the fact that it became possible to do this large scale retrospective project, there were two large phases of Doc's recording career that were not represented by companies controlled by Concord Music and Craft Recordings. Those were his earliest recordings that were distributed, recorded, and distributed by Folkways, and then a huge chunk of his recording career — really, the 1970s — which were controlled predominantly by Universal Music. In a nutshell, it was necessary to license recordings from other companies to give a true retrospective representative portrait of Doc and his recording career.

And so, licensing recordings from so many different companies took its time — I think three years for all the licensing to get accomplished. The folks at Craft were brilliant at getting that accomplished, because that requires top level negotiations. It also involved acquiring a few licensed recordings from Sony Music, which is yet another huge label, because we wanted to represent a handful of the collaborations that Doc did with artists on CBS or Columbia or RCA, which are now owned by Sony. 

So, it all got done. All the recordings but one that I had initially compiled to be on the set, we received licensing toward. And in the one case where we weren't able to obtain licensing, I feel as if we more than adequately substituted for it within the Sugar Hill family of recordings that Doc did. I feel it all worked out for the best — all the major albums that Doc and Doc & Merle recorded for the major labels, the four labels that are now enfolded within Concord Music, all are represented on this set — and that was strategic. There might be one or two albums that are not represented here, but I didn't see an argument for including those recordings because they seemed a little redundant, relative to other things that were already on there.

On the general approach to curating the collection…
I made the decision — and the folks at Craft were very supportive of this — to make this a truly representative set. There had been earlier anthologies which hadn't really covered the full swath of his career. Frankly, they couldn't because of licensing issues. So this was the first golden opportunity to do that. And I took it very seriously. 

Honestly, I listened to everything, as one would. We didn't concern ourselves so much with bootleg recordings — live recordings that weren't officially released. There have been a few albums released in recent years featuring some live performances by Doc and Doc & Merle, and some of them are quite wonderful, but they're already out there. So, we didn't really try to replicate those. We really more dug deeply into the back catalog of recordings that were released in the past by Doc or Doc with other musicians, and brought out the key recordings from those albums. And many of those albums are kind of hard to find now on CD and very hard to find on vinyl. So, the goal was not necessarily to go for the most obscure recordings we could find, but rather to try to identify the most stellar performances on official recordings — and maybe a handful of curiosities which absolutely needed to be here to tell the full Doc Watson story.

On those curios…
The very first recording that Doc ever made, from 1941, never before released, is on this set. It was a field recording from Boone. A professor at Appalachian State University happened to be informally documenting musicians in Boone that summer, and lo and behold, he records Doc Watson. So, Doc was first documented as an unknown artist at a music event in which he was certainly not the headliner. Of course we associated Doc as the headliner in so many concert settings, but here he was an anonymous performer who was really good as a teenager and he happens to be recorded. And that recording happens to be preserved and then donated to the ASU archive and gratefully, among fans, ASU allowed us to use it on this set, which is very much appreciated.

And then one of his few professionally recorded efforts from the 1950s is also on this set, this tremendous performance from the mid-1950s called “Pharaoh,” which represents a song he actually wrote. We associate Doc with brilliantly covering traditional material, but he did write some great songs and several of them are on this set. So, we wanted to document, for one thing, Doc performing on electric guitar — which is what he did in the ’50s — on this track here. It’s the only example of Doc on the electric guitar, because there really aren't many others to choose from. There were just a handful of others that came out about 10 years ago on the set that his daughter, Nancy, issued about 2012 called Milestones. 

But in my opinion, having listened to all that, this one track needed to be on this set to represent that phase of Doc's music making, which is the period at which he was beginning to work as a professional musician with a band based in Johnson City. He would take the bus over the mountain from Watauga County into Tennessee and join up with Jack Williams and perform country and swing and rockabilly and other music for various community events and dances and such around East Tennessee, and maybe a handful back into North Carolina. He was with that band for several years, but only made a few records and one of them is on here.

Photo courtesy of Hugh Morton Collection

On structuring the collection…
This is comprehensive of his career, and I wanted to tell the full story of his musical journey. Understanding that I was working with four CDs pretty much from the beginning, that pretty much clocked in at about 100 recordings that I could compile. It ended up being 101, but, spread out over four CDs, this album project has an interesting kind of thematic concept. 

They are structured chronologically, and I decided to do it that way partly because he had such a lengthy career. I felt like with some artists, you wouldn't necessarily need to be chronological to showcase their music, and, maybe in some cases, it would be an impediment to really appreciating their musical journey. But in Doc's case, a chronological representation of his career made perfect sense if, for nothing else, you got to see Doc’s ever-evolving sensibility, and that was much easier to trace chronologically.

So, disc one is his early recordings through about 1965, at which point he was recording commercial albums within the folk revival as a national touring act. So, that first CD is entitled “From the Tradition.” That's kind of Doc emerging from the folk tradition in which he grew up and also beginning to enter, but not yet becoming, one of the major stars of the folk revival.

And then CD two is entitled “On the Main Stage,” so it kind of traces his emergence from late ’65 through approximately 1969, when he was a headliner in the folk music world and branching out and drawing in fans from rock and roll and bluegrass and other genres, or even countries. Doc was becoming a well-known national figure who is considered a headliner in the circles in which he moved. And that's the latter part of his highly recognized and much respected Vanguard records recording career. 

That phase of his career transitioned in about the early 1970s, when he recorded the Will the Circle Be Unbroken album that was put out by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band for United Artists in the ’71-72 period. And so this third CD is called “In the Big Time.” He's now not only a headliner, but he's a star who’s playing for thousands of people at stadiums and major arenas and things like that, sometimes in package arrangements with other stars like Linda Ronstadt. But even during that period, he would take on performance opportunities at small local venues and smaller venues around the country, and he also traveled during this period representing the U.S. government, so he clearly was “in the big time.” 

And then CD four, “Of the Ages,” looks at the point at which he's an icon, and everybody's naming Doc as one of their favorite musicians — from about 1980 to the last recordings he made shortly before his death [in 2012].

On Doc’s relationship with electricity…
According to T. Michael Coleman, who was Doc’s bass player for many years, at the time when Ralph Rinzler came to Western North Carolina and East Tennessee to record Appalachian string band music at Clarence Ashley's porch — that was the whole premise for the recordings that were made for Folkways in ’60, ’61, ’62 — Ashley told Rinzler about a great guitar player that they needed to bring on board, because Clarence Ashley was a banjo player and he wanted a guitar player to hold rhythm on the string band performances. And there was a fiddler and another guitarist, but Doc was a guitarist apart because he could play fiddle tunes on the guitar unlike anybody else. It was his signature stylistic point, although he had many signature stylistic points like finger-style guitar and great singing and great harmonica playing and great banjo playing. 

But T. Michael Coleman tells me that when Ralph Rinzler goes to pick up Doc Watson at home to bring him to the sessions for those recordings at Clarence Ashley's house, he realized that Doc only had an electric guitar at the time. He did not have an acoustic guitar — which is eye-opening, if you think about it, because everybody thinks of Doc as one of the great, if not the greatest acoustic guitar player of his generation, but he was making a living playing the electric guitar in the country band in Johnson City and East Tennessee and around Western North Carolina. And he was living in hard times, so the idea of also having an acoustic guitar was not practical for him at the time, raising a family and such. So, he made his living with an electric guitar — a Les Paul electric — and he had to borrow an acoustic guitar to seal his legend as the great acoustic guitarist of all time and kind of launch a career.

Another interesting revelation from that same era is that, while he had an electric guitar, at the time — according to T. Michael Coleman — he didn’t always have electricity in the house. So it’s another irony of the situation. Doc worked very hard to make a living for his family and became very successful and very proud of his hard work on behalf of his family and in service to the music. But they were very hard times for Doc and his family, and he was very honest about them and made no apologies, but he was always hardworking around the house.

On Doc’s non-musical legacy…
Another thing I learned, the reason for the title of the set, Life's Work, and the back cover image of Doc cutting wood — though he was blind, he was an extremely adept person who knew how to figure out how to get things done around the house and around the world. People regularly commented how courageous he was, how resourceful, how good he was at getting things done. 

There was another story about Doc fixing electrical equipment in the ’50s in downtown Johnson City. Nobody else could figure out how to fix the amp that they were using for a gig outside downtown. He figured it out. He just figured out how to change maybe a tube or something within the amp. And no one else was going to go there, but he went there and got it fixed, and everybody was so concerned that he might hurt himself or electrocute himself, but he got it done and they could play the gig amplified.

So, all of these stories I heard from people were so affectionate and so respectful. Everybody who came across Doc Watson — musicians and non-musicians — their lives were enriched by Doc. And I also learned about his humility. He was “just one of the people,” was one of the phrases that he told people as far as how to remember him. And, of course, in downtown Boone there's a statue of Doc, and the motto there is “Just one of the people.” The phrase reflects upon his values, and his values were his values and they were Appalachian values. 

Now, I often say I feel as if he was kind of an unofficial ambassador of Appalachia and Appalachian values, and he represented the region so bravely and surely that his music was a great gift. His personality and his wisdom was a great gift as well. And he was so kind to people. So, I was so happy to work on this project because I wanted to share this great Appalachian icon in his amazing recordings and his great, important, heartwarming story with a new generation.

So, this box set is for his longtime fans, of course, but I also hope it will be heard and appreciated by a new generation of people who maybe have heard the name Doc Watson, but want to know more.

(Photo by Charlie Warden)