This week, we are going with just a song and no social commentary.  “Puff the Magic Dragon” has become a classic children’s song – enjoyed by adults, as well – and almost everyone knows the words.  Even my year and a half-old grandson, Ryder, knows the words.

Some evil people will tell you that the song is full of drug references, but that is not true.  It is, as I said, a children’s song – about a dragon.  I remember being at a Peter, Paul and Mary concert back in 1965.  When the group started the introduction to “Puff,” I heard someone nearby say, “This song is about pot.”  By coincidence, at just that moment, the performers quit playing and Peter Yarrow said, “This is a children’s song about a dragon.  It is not about drugs.  When I decide to write a song about drugs, I’ll tell you.”  then they started playing again, and sang the song.

As I understand the genesis of “Puff,” back in 1958 or 1959, Peter Yarrow was attending college at Cornell.  His roommate had a friend named Leonard Lipton who had recently read Ogden Nash’s poem, “The Tale of Custard the Dragon.”  (You can read it by clicking here.)   Inspired by that poem, and while visiting at Yarrow’s residence, Lipton made up his own poem about a dragon named Puff, and typed it out on Yarrow’s typewriter.  When he went home, the poem remained on the typewriter.

Peter Yarrow joined Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers to form Peter, Paul and Mary in 1961.  Now, Peter had seen that poem on his typewriter a few years earlier.  He was impressed and modified it to make a song – the one we all know.

In 1962, Peter, Paul and Mary released two popular records, “Lemon Tree” and “If I Had a Hammer.”  They decided to start 1963 (a great year for them, with two hit albums and three Top 10 singles), by releasing “Puff” in January.  Before that happened, Peter did contact Leonard Lipton to tell him about the song, and to give him credit as its co-writer.  Consequently, Lipton has received half of the royalties ever since.

Leonard Lipton seems like an interesting guy.  He has published four books, has produced some 25 independent films and holds about 70 patents, many dealing with processes for 3D film making.  In an interview I read, he says he is not much of a Peter, Paul and May fan.  I assume he appreciates the royalties, nevertheless.

We are not here to talk about Leonard Lipton, though.  This is about Puff.  As I said earlier, everyone already knows the words to Puff, so the version chosen here for Song of the Week is an instrumental – a Hawaiian slack key guitar rendition.

As you know, the song tells us that Puff frolicked in a land called Honnah Lee.  I can’t tell you where to find that on a map, but on the North Shore of the island of Kauai there is a nice little town called Hanalei that sits right next to Hanalei Bay, near the mouth of the Hanalei River.  Cathy and I visited there last September, and it is beautiful.

While there, we attended a concert by a slack key guitar player named Doug McMaster, accompanied by his wife, Sandy, on ukulele.  During the concert’s intermission, we were looking at the McMasters’ CDs, and I noticed one titled In a Land Called Hanalei.  I remarked that this could be Puff’s real home.  Sandy overheard me and asked if I would like to hear Doug play “Puff.”  I said, “Sure.”

At the beginning of the second half of the concert, Sandy told a story about Doug sitting on the beach, playing for passing tourists and locals (and probably chickens since this was Kauai).  Among those listening was a girl about 8 or 9 years old, vacationing with her parents.  She asked Doug to play “Puff”; but he said it was not part of his repertoire.  The girl accepted that excuse and went off to enjoy the beach.  The next year, the same girl, a year older, was again on the North Shore with her family, and Doug was again playing on the beach.  She asked Doug if he had learned “Puff” yet.  He admitted he had not, but told her that if she would come back the next day, he would play it for her.  He worked out his arrangement at home that night, and kept his promise to the girl the very next day.

I wrote a little bit about Doug and Sandy in a comment to a post last year.  You can learn more about them, and purchase some of their excellent music, at their website, mcmasterslackkey.com.

I don’t have a video for this song.  Instead, here is the audio, with a picture of Hanalei Bay:

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High Noon (1952), a classic American Western movie, was one of the first films selected for preservation in the United States Film Registry by the Library of Congress.  It tells the story of Will Kane (Gary Cooper), who, as the long-time marshal of Hadleyville in the New Mexico Territory, had cleaned up what was once a wild and lawless town, making it a place where decent people could live and raise a family.  As the film opens, Kane has just married Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly), a pacifist Quaker, and has turned in his badge so he and Amy can start a new life keeping a store somewhere.

Just at that time, word comes that Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), a desperate outlaw Kane had brought to justice, had been released from prison on a “legal technicality,” and will arrive on the train in one hour intent on killing Kane for revenge.  Miller will not be alone, though.  His brother and two other members of his gang are already at the station awaiting the train.¹

Initially, Kane listens to the pleas of his new wife and leaves town with her.  Before they get too far, though, Kane decides he must go back.  He argues that Miller will keep chasing him until he can seek revenge, and that the people of Hadleyville are in danger because the new marshal will not be in town and on the job until the next day.

Back in town, he begins asking the local citizens for assistance so they can present a united front against Miller and his henchmen.  No one will help him, though.  They all have some excuse:  I’m a coward.  You never came to our church service.  If you leave, Miller will go, too.  I wanted to be the new marshal, but you wouldn’t endorse me for the position.  Any altercation will be bad for the town’s image.  I’m just too old.

Amy is not supportive, either.  She tells Kane that if he does not leave with her immediately, she will leave without him, taking the same train out of town that is bringing Miller in.

Kane must decide what action to take in these most difficult circumstances.  He ultimately chooses to face all four of the outlaws alone.

The plot is pretty straightforward, everything happening in virtually real time over a period of little more than one hour.  The underlying themes of the film are much more complicated, however.

The screenplay was written by Carl Foreman, who had been a member of the Communist Party a decade or so earlier until he became disillusioned and quit.  While he was working on this screenplay, he was summoned before Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Senate committee and the House Unamerican Activities Committee, was blacklisted by Hollywood and had to move to England in order to continue writing.  High Noon is seen by some as an allegory of the Communist witch hunt and a criticism of the establishment intellectuals who would not stand up for those who were being persecuted.

The film’s director, Fred Zinnemann, was a Polish Jew who had lived in Germany before immigrating to the United States in the 1930s.  Both of his parents lost their lives in the Holocaust.  With that background, the film is also seen as an allegory of those who were complicit in the violence of the Fascist regimes before and during World War II.

One of the most common adjectives used to describe the movie is “existential.”  Kane is clearly a human being caught up in an existential crisis.  It has been compared to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (or, I might add, the Firesign Theater’s Waiting for the Electrician).  The significant difference is that Godot and the electrician are never going to come.  For Kane, on the other hand, the clock is ticking down for Miller’s entrance.

I chose the theme song from this film as Song of the Week because there has been so much news lately about excessive use of force by police officers.  Within the past few days, two people here in Colorado have died while in police custody, a police officer in Ohio was indicted for murder because of an on-duty shooting, a great deal of attention has focused on a Black woman who died in Texas after being arrested for a minor offense – and the list could go on and on.

I was reminded of a conversation I had with a veteran police officer – an intelligent, brave, perceptive and respected gentleman I will simply call “Pat.”  This was back a few years when I was practicing law and Pat was involved in an Age Discrimination case.  He told me that as a police officer, he faced existential crises every day.  When he arrived at the scene of some incident, he told me, he realized that if he got out of his car he would more than likely have to fight with someone.  If he stayed in his car, he could wait for backup that would make his actions less risky, but could permit the difficult situation to which he had been called to get out of hand, possibly resulting in injury or death to one or more people.  Or, Pat said, he could simply drive away.

I don’t know enough about any of the situations that have recently been in the news to be able to say who is right or wrong.  Certainly, there are some police officers who overreact or are bullies or racists who should not be wearing a badge.  Other times, as Pat or Gary Cooper could tell us, tragedies can result when decent people face decisions that bring the meaning or value of life into question.

Returning to this week’s Song, the music for “The Ballad of High Noon” was written by Dmitri Tiomkin and the lyrics by Ned Washington.  It was an innovative song in several ways.  Before High Noon, it was unusual for Western movies to even have a theme song.  This was not only a good song but a narrative précis of the plot and characters – all in less than two and a half minutes.  It was also a theme, parts of which were repeated throughout the film, to aid in building suspense and moving the action to its exciting conclusion.

The most popular version of the song was done by Frankie Laine; but that was not the original version.  To make it a better popular song, the lyrics in Laine’s adaptation were changed slightly so that they did not refer directly to the characters of High Noon.  The original version from the soundtrack was performed by country music legend, and one of the original “singing cowboys,” Tex Ritter.  Here is how Tex sang the song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5an9OuXKxBw

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For readers who are in a hurry, let me state the lesson that should be taken from this post right here in the first sentence:  Entropy is real.

Technically, entropy is a measure of the ways in which a thermodynamic system may be arranged.  It is essentially the only law of physics that depends on time moving ever forward.  According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a closed system will become more random and less ordered over time.  The term has taken on a less formal meaning and, in common usage, implies that everything becomes less orderly if left to its own devices.

Performing simple tasks of household maintenance, as I have been doing over the past few days, certainly brings principle home¹.  A severe hail storm last year left some tiny dents in our vinyl siding and some mold had started growing in those dents on the North side of the house.  As I was cleaning that, I noticed a window or two needed painting.  Of course, if you neglect the painting the wood will rot.  I also noticed some cracks in a concrete and cinder block planter.  Cracks, you know, have a tendency to widen and lengthen and spread if they are not repaired.

Consequently, I picked “Anna Sun” by Walk the Moon because it begins, “Screen falling off the door, door hanging off the hinges” and the most memorable part of the chorus is “What do you know?  This house is falling apart/What can I say?  This house is falling apart.”

Those lyrics would lead one to believe that the song, indeed, tells us of entropy.  I think it does, but the band probably does not think that.  Walk the Moon is a four-man indie rock band from Cincinnati, Ohio.  Lead singer Nicholas Petricca, and at least some of the other members, attended Kenyon College, which is a small, prestigious liberal arts school.  Anna Sun is an associate professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at Kenyon².  The song was named after her, though she did not have any of the band members in her classes.  Some of them were in a philosophy class taught by her husband, another Kenyon professor.

Petricca has said that the song is “about college, about maintaining that little bit of being a kid.  Don’t be afraid to play.”  Indeed, the lyrics reference the South parking Lot and the West Mezzanine and other things that mean almost nothing to those of us who have never been to Kenyon.  From the video produced by the band, it is apparent that they are essentially talking about a party for graduation or the end of a school year.

So how does entropy fit in?  Let’s start with “a little bit of being a kid.”  By the time any human being reaches middle age, he or she knows that the human body is a prime example of entropy in action.  If you don’t watch your diet, engage in reasonable exercise, get enough sleep and generally lead a healthy lifestyle, tissues and organs and systems will rapidly deteriorate.  Even the twenty-something kids in Walk the Moon write, “My feet are still sore, my back is on the fringes.”

Also consider the college students attending the year-end party.  Over the following months and years, those men and women will move across the country and around the world.  There are many of us who now think of a best friend from college or high school as “some guy I used to know.”  A focused effort to keep in touch with old friends can counteract the more easily achieved result of losing touch.  However, entropy is real.

Think, too, about the areas of study that brought the students to Kenyon in the first place.  How many of them with a degree in Art History are going to end up taking a job with a catering company.  The specialized knowledge they now have will be all but forgotten unless they make some effort to continue to study and apply what has been learned.

The whole concept of knowledge and the workings of the human mind are subject to an insidious form of entropy.  Unless we humans continue to think, to do crossword puzzles, to play the quizzes on funtrivia.com, to keep learning, we open ourselves to various forms of dementia as we age.

I could go on and talk about entropy in our spiritual pursuits, in or families, in rotting trees, in landslides . . ..  I think you understand already, though.  Entropy is real and it takes a focused effort and an infusion of energy to keep it in check.

There is energy in “Anna Sun.”  In 2011, it was named “Song of the Summer” by Esquire, MTV and Seventeen.  It has a good beat and the kids can dance to it.

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Some songs are just meant to be fun.

After the look at Porsches and Ferraris in last week’s Song of the Week discussion, it seemed almost mandatory that I should move on to talk about Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz.”  As you probably know, that is “a song of great social and political import” recorded only hours before Joplin’s death.  To the extent it was meant to be fun, it didn’t end up that way.

“Do Wah Diddy Diddy” was meant to be fun song, it turned out to be a fun song and now – more than half a century later – it is still fun.  I will talk about it, instead – because I’m a fun guy (at least that’s what the mushroom said).

“Do Wah Didddy Diddy” was written by the extremely successful husband and wife songwriting team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich.  From the time they met in 1959 until their divorce in 1965, Barry and Greenwich combined to write a string of hit songs, including “Tell Laura I Love Her,” “Be My Baby,” “Then He Kissed Me,” “Look of Love,” Christmas (Baby Please Be Home),” Leader of the Pack,” “Hanky Panky” and “Chapel of Love” (with some help from Phil Spector on that one).  They also discovered Neil Diamond and produced all of his early hit records.

Most of those songs are just good old straightforward rock/roll/pop with a good beat that the kids could dance to.  Few reached the poetic, nearly Shakespearean lyrical quality of a chorus like “Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do,” but we must remember that Barry and Greenwich had also written “Da Doo Ron Ron,” a hit for the Crystals in 1963.  Phil Spector is also credited as a co-writer of “Da Do Ron Ron,” but Barry and Greenwich seem to have created “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” completely on their own.

After the recent success with the Crystals, they saw this composition as another vehicle for a girl group, so it was recorded by the Exciters, under the title “Do-Wah-Diddy,” also in 1963.  That record met with little success, but fortunately it was played just enough to be heard by a British group, Manfred Mann, which changed the lyrics from “there he was, just a-walking down the street” to “there she was just a-walking down the street”; and released it in 1964 under the title “Do Wah Diddy Diddy.”  The other “diddy” was for emphasis, I guess.  Those changes certainly worked out as the song became a Number One single in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

I remember during my junior year in high school, at the end of each cross country practice Eric Martinez would start singing this song and everyone on the team would join in the chorus.  Many years later, when my children were in their early years of elementary school, the song would come on the radio (oldies station) as we were driving somewhere and both of them would loudly sing along.  Now I have played it a couple of times for my 18-month old grandson, and he too likes to sing along.

The song is also memorable from the movie Stripes (1981).  Bill Murray and Harold Ramis begin singing the song while marching during their Army basic training, and it becomes a marching song for their company.

It is a fun song – about as much fun as one can have in less than 150 seconds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43vOAw2sAFU

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My wife Cathy and I attended a wedding last weekend.  The bride was an elementary school teacher and the groom a former tax lawyer who quit his practice to open a chain of marijuana dispensaries.  As we drove into the parking lot at the wedding venue, we saw in the spots reserved for the bide and groom a Ferrari sports car and a Porsche SUV – which is a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of transportation.  I had no idea that grade school teachers are paid that well.

It was a very nice ceremony and reception, but a few things struck me as sort of strange.  For example, the officiant (it was not a very religious ceremony), thought it appropriate to include an old joke in his remarks.  It was the one about a woman who accompanied her husband to a medical appointment.  After the husband had been examined, the doctor asked to speak to his wife in private.  He told her that her husband’s condition was very precarious, and that virtually any stress could have disastrous consequences.  The doctor told her that she would have to care for her husband with great love and tenderness, cook him carefully planned meals, prevent him from doing strenuous household chores and generally “baby” him for several months.  The wife said she understood, and went to meet her husband in the waiting room.  As they were walking out to their car, the husband asked, “What did the doctor have to say?”  The wife replied, “He said you’re going to die.”

That was not what I expected to hear at a wedding.  The joke, combined with the cars I had seen coming in, made me think of the song “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” which was written by Jack Rhodes and Dick Reynolds, and first recorded in 1956 by Wanda Jackson, the so-called “Queen of Rockabilly.”  It has since been performed and recorded many times by many musicians.  I even recall being at a Grateful Dead concert where Bob Weir sang the song.

One of the best versions – or actually two of the best versions – is/are by Linda Ronstadt.  It was on her 1969 debut album and a different version was on her 1973 album, Don’t Cry Now.  That second version was released as a very popular single.  The version on this post is that from 1969, because that is the one I first heard her perform.

Linda Ronstadt needs no introduction.  She has been an amazing singer creating great music in many fields, including, rock, jazz, country, pop, Mexican, folk, etc.  She even sang the lead in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance.  She was the most successful female singer of the 1970s, and her talent has been displayed on hundreds of records recorded over five decades.

Unfortunately, Linda Ronstadt is no longer able to sing.  In 2013 she disclosed that she has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.  A consequence of that disease is that she does not have the muscle control necessary for singing.

I would like to express my sympathy for her.  Cathy’s father suffered from Parkinson’s for a dozen years or so before his death, and many of those years were very difficult for him.

I also have a longtime friend named Kathy who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease a few months ago.  She lives in another state, but I regularly send her long-distance Reiki, hoping that might be some help to her.

Let’s leave that topic for now and listen to Linda Ronstadt as she sang beautifully more than 45 years ago.

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Once again, the Song of the Week was inspired by my grandson, Ryder.  He is 17 months old, and one of the words he has learned over the past few weeks is “bicycle.”  He pronounces it as bicycle, with the emphasis strongly on the first syllable, reminding me of the song “Bicycle Race” by Queen, in which the beginning of the chorus is sung as “Biiiiicycle, biiiiicycle.”  I played the song for Ryder and he liked it.

To describe Queen, let me quote from a book by Phil Dellio and Scott Woods, entitled I Wanna Be Sedated (1993), at 84-85¹:

“Queen [was] a travelling theatre-in-the round troupe where art rock met glam, metal commingled with La Boheme, orthodoxy gave way to orthodontics, and Charles Darwin’s theories were continually brought into question.  Singer Freddie Mercury was the group’s main attraction, and certainly there were few pop stars in the seventies who could match his wry, extravagant, pan-sexual sense of human tragedy:  ‘Life is a cabaret,’ Freddie’s every gesture seemed to sigh, ‘I wanna ride it all night long.’  Musically, Queen was all over the place, dabbling in opera (Somebody To Love,’ 1976), Steam-like hockey chants (‘We Will Rock You,’ 1977), exciting hillbilly simulations (‘Crazy Little thing Called Love,’ 1979), and whatever else satisfied Freddie’s insatiable appetite for adventure.  Their summit achievement, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (1976), has inspired one generation of teenagers after another to bob rhythmically during the metal part and gesticulate wildly during the Italian part.”

“Bicycle Race” was recorded for the band’s 1978 album, Jazz, and released as a so-called “double-A side single with the song “Fat Bottomed Girls.”  I don’t believe it is a very complicated song.  I think it is the same basic song as that written by Arlo Guthrie – who wanted neither a tickle nor a pickle, but just wanted to ride his motorsickle – a dozen years earlier; or by Todd Rundgren – who didn’t want to work or play, he just wanted to bang on his drum all day – five years later.

The song could, for all I know, have been written about my friend and former co-worker, Greg Grossman, who is very intelligent and a successful escrow officer for a major title company, but would just as soon ignore all of that and jump on his road bike or his mountain bike and ride off for hours  – except in the Winter when he would just as soon serve on the ski patrol at Loveland Basin Ski Area or climb one of Colorado’s 14ers so he can ski down.  As I say, he can do those things for hours – or until he winds up in the hospital (which has happened), whichever comes first.  Such is the mindset of the narrator of this “Bicycle Race” song.

In other words, the narrator of the song finds such enjoyment in bicycle riding that although he is aware of the cultural and religious issues of the world at large, he is happy to ignore them and simply ride.

However, even a cursory internet search will bring up numerous commentators who will talk about deeper sexual meanings and references.  I think they are wrong, and I won’t even get into that discussion.

Nevertheless, I think, too, that Queen purposely fostered their fans’ beliefs that this, and many of their other songs, were something more than they seem.  This band was composed of very intelligent men with a great sense for marketing.

The group got its start when guitarist Brian May and bassist Tim Staffel decided to form a band.  They joined with drummer Roger Taylor, a dental student, and called themselves “Smile.”  Get it?  Smile.  Dental student.  They understood marketing from the very beginning.

Staffel had a friend, a fellow art student who came from Zanzibar, named Farrokh Bulsara.  When Staffel decided to leave the band in 1970, Bulsara joined as vocalist, changed his name to Freddy Mercury, convinced May and Taylor to change the group’s name to “Queen,” designed the band’s logo and joined with the others in hiring bassist/keyboard player John Deacon.

As mentioned above, Freddie Mercury was trained as an artist and Roger Taylor as a dentist.  John Deacon had an honors degree in electronics and Brian May . . .  Well, Brian May had been working on his Ph.D. in astrophysics.  He finally received his doctorate in 2008²  and he served as Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University from 2008 until 2013.  Besides that, almost every list you can find of the top 30 or top 50 or top whatever number rock guitarists includes Brian May.

So, I am pretty sure that a lot of the “buzz” about “Bicycle Race” is mere marketing coming from a band that (as you can see from the video below) was very aware of its posturing and presentation and was much smarter than many of its fans.  The song is here, though, because Ryder likes the chorus – and he is not swayed in the least by that marketing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncQsBzI-JHc

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This is the solstice edition of the Song of the Week, which means it is “Summertime.”

“Summertime” is an aria sung in each act of the 20th Century American opera, Porgy and Bess.  Usually it is sung as a lullaby, though once it is offered as a counterpoint to a craps game.

These days, when Porgy and Bess is mentioned, most people immediately think of George Gershwin, who composed the music.  What became Porgy and Bess began as a novel called Porgy, written by DuBose Heyward in 1925.  Heyward, who was a descendant of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, had worked in his youth as a cotton checker, with the Gullah stevedores on the Charleston, South Carolina waterfront.  He became a successful businessman and author in Charleston, so he continued his observations of the Gullah Afro-American lifestyle for many years.  Such observations formed the basis of his novel.

When the novel became commercially successful, Heyward and his wife, Dorothy, wrote a play, also called Porgy, which opened on Broadway in 1927.  The play was also quite successful.

Then, in 1930, George Gershwin received a commission from New York’s Metropolitan Opera to write a distinctly American grand opera.  His first choice for the libretto was the stage version of Porgy, to be produced with an all-Black cast.  Since this was a time of strict segregation in most of the United States, there was immediately a problem.  Still, Gershwin worked closely with DuBose Heyward who converted the play to an opera libretto by early 1934.  George Gershwin spent most of the next two years writing and orchestrating the music, and working with Heyward and Ira Gershwin, George’s brother, to make necessary changes to the lyrics or libretto.

Porgy and Bess opened in September of 1935 with a classically-trained African-American cast.  It was not very successful, and closed its Broadway run only four months later.  George Gershwin died of a brain tumor in 1937, so he never knew how successful and influential the work eventually became or its positive influence on the so-called Harlem Renaissance in the arts.

Although casting the African-American performers helped theater move toward greater racial equality, Porgy and Bess was considered by many to be racist.  The story depicts the seamy side to Black life with alcohol, drugs, physical violence, etc.  If it was written in the 21st Century it would probably never be produced because of its content.  Beyond that, it seemed incongruous that a couple of Jewish boys like the Gershwin brothers (whose family name was originally Gershowitz) would write “folk songs” for the former slaves of South Carolina’s Lowcountry.

“Summertime” is easily the best known song from the opera – it has been recorded more than 25,000 times.¹  For the Song of the Week, I have chosen what is is probably my favorite version.  This one, I think, avoids any racial overtones.  In fact, you could say that it is certainly “color blind” because it is performed by Doc Watson.

Arthel “Doc” Watson (1923-2012) suffered an infection that left him blind before his first birthday.  Life was hard for his family during the Depression, but they did not let the economy or blindness hold Doc back.  He became interested in music, so his father bought him 78 rpm recordings and made him a fretless banjo.  Later he saved money earned from cutting trees and bought a Sears Roebuck Stella guitar.  He was a natural musician and soon began playing publicly in venues around his North Carolina home.

He played acoustic guitar for his initial public performances, which featured traditional tunes familiar to his local audience.  He was not making much money, however, so he took a job playing electric guitar in a rockabilly band.  The band did not have a fiddle player, so Doc’s trademark became his ability to play intricate fiddle parts on the electric guitar.

In 1960, Doc had the opportunity to play for a folklorist from the Smithsonian, who was not impressed with Doc’s electrical repertoire but was impressed with his acoustic playing.  That was the time that the “folk revival”  was popular in American music, and that audience loved Doc and his acoustic sound.  He was soon recognized as probably the best flatpicker there ever was, and was rewarded with commercial success, multiple Grammy awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a National Medal of Arts presented to him by President Clinton.

Doc’s son, Merle Watson, was also an excellent musician, and the two performed together form 1965 (when Merle was not quite 16) until 1985 when Merle tragically lost his life in an accident on the family farm.  I was privileged to see Doc and Merle play at the Denver Folklore Center a couple of times, and I really enjoyed those concerts.

Besides his amazing guitar playing, Doc Watson always had a great voice.  A girl I knew in college said his was the only voice she had ever heard that sounded “like a 40-year old Martin.”  I repeated that analogy to a different lady several years later, and she replied that she knew nothing about guitars, so that meant nothing to her.  However, she did know that “Martin” was a type of guitar, because I had not included that information in what I had said – so who knows how much she really knew.²  Be that as it may, the words “a voice like a 40-year old Martin” conjures an aural image of a full, round, pleasant means of delivering a song.

It is also inspiring that Doc did not let his blindness hold him back in life.  He did many things that most would not expect from him – things like driving a car around his farm and doing electrical wiring in his house.  Most certainly, he was not held back musically.  Here is the Song of the Week, Doc and Merle Watson playing “Summertime.”

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