Audio CD review:
Doc Watson - Doc Watson at Gerdes Folk City

Doc Watson - Doc Watson at Gerdes Folk City

Band: Doc Watson Title: Doc Watson at Gerdes Folk City Rating: Release Date: 2001-09-11 Media: Audio CD Tracks: 1: Little Sadie - Doc Watson, 2: Blue Smoke# - Doc Watson, Travis, Merle 3: St. Louis Blues - Doc Watson, Handy, W.C. 4: John Herald Introduction - Doc Watson, 5: Sing Song Kitty# - Doc Watson, 6: The House Carpenter# - Doc Watson, 7: Liberty# - Doc Watson, Traditional 8: The Old Wooden Rocker - Doc Watson, Kincaid, Bradley 9: Milk Cow Blues - Doc Watson, Arnold, Kokomo 10: Tragic Romance - Doc Watson, Jones, Grandpa 11: The Dream of the Miner's Child - Doc Watson, Jenkins, Andrew 12: The Wagoner's Lad - Doc Watson, 13: Cannonball Rag - Doc Watson, Travis, Merle 14: The Lone Pilgrim - Doc Watson, 15: The Roving Gambler - Doc Watson,

What a treat! This record brought me right back to those days when I would hang out in Gerdes night after night to hear Doc Watson. From the moment the CD started to the end, I had a smile on my face in happy recognition of the performances I heard many years ago. play. Mr. Siegel's production has nothing of a creaky historical document and everything of a you-are-there live performance. Peter Siegel's superb production is absolutely amazing. I have no idea of the technical legerdemain that must have gone into making a set of 40 year old tapes sound like a live performance but that is what he has accomplished. You will feel you are once again sitting there listening to this wonderful music five feet from the performer. The liner notes with detailed historical information and contemporaneous photos add immensely to the value of this work. It surely must have been a work of love to put all this together. I hope there are more such works coming from Mr. Siegel. He is so good at what he does in making valuable historical material sound like an excellent live club performance you went to yesterday. greatness retouched But if Watson's best work appears to be in his past, this marvelous disc documents what a glorious past that was. In recent years Doc Watson, whose contributions to American roots music have few equals, has often sounded tired and distracted, his infrequent latter-day recordings hardly among his most inspired. Here, at the initiation of his career as a solo artist, Watson is bursting with energy and high spirits as he tears into songs, ballads, blues, and instrumentals, all of which he makes distinctly his own. His picking is clean and warm, his vocals clear and affecting. He takes on, in order, such varied material as the comic folk song "Sing Song Kitty," the gothic Child ballad "The House Carpenter," and the rip-roaring fiddle tune "Liberty" and does justice to each. Clearly, long before he became a star of the folk revival, Watson was a natural-born performer. If Ralph Stanley has eclipsed him as the most visible and revered exponent of traditional Appalachian music, this splendid CD shows us that, when he is at his best, Watson is every bit as good. You can see a complete list of all Doc Watson discography, or go back to the Doc Watson tabs