NEW YORK — Doc Watson, a singer and guitarist who expanded the instrument’s role in traditional American music and influenced generations of musicians with his playing skills, died Tuesday. He was 89.
Watson passed at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C., said Marguerite Beck, a hospital spokesman. He underwent colon surgery there after a fall earlier this month.
Watson, blinded by an eye infection before his first birthday, rose to prominence during a 1960s folk-music revival. His style of flatpicking, or plucking a guitar’s strings with a pick rather than his fingers, transformed the acoustic guitar into a lead instrument in folk, country and bluegrass songs.
Watson won seven Grammy Awards, starting in 1973. The last one came in 2006, for his recording of “Whiskey Before Breakfast” with bluegrass guitarist Bryan Sutton.
Arthel Lane Watson was born on March 3, 1923, in Deep Gap, N.C., in the western part of the state along the Blue Ridge Mountains. He was the sixth child of General Dixon Watson and Annie Green, according to the North Carolina History Project.
Watson got his nickname as a teenager when he played at a local furniture store. The show was broadcast on radio, and the announcer didn’t want to refer to him by his first name. “Call him Doc,” a woman in the audience said.
Rosa Lee Carlton, the daughter of a fiddler who lived nearby, became his wife in 1947, according to the website of Folklore Productions International, which represents Watson. The couple had a son — Eddy Merle, who was later known by his middle name — in 1949 and a daughter, Nancy Ellen, two years later.
To support his family, Watson tuned pianos. He didn’t become a professional musician until 1953, when he was hired as the lead guitarist for Jack Williams and the Country Gentlemen.
A friend, guitarist and banjoist Clarence Ashley, enlisted him for a recording session that musicologists Ralph Rinzler and Eugene Earle arranged in 1960.
Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley’s, the resulting album marked Watson’s first appearance on record, according to Folklore Productions.
Merle Watson started accompanying his father in 1964. They made about 20 albums together before Merle died in a 1985 tractor accident on the Watson farm.
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band included Doc Watson on Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a 1972 album of traditional songs that the country-rock band played with country and bluegrass stars.
Information for this article was contributed by Vivek Shankar of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 05/30/2012