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Not only does Doc Watson's Gallagher speak volumes as he masterfully picks it, the man himself speaks eloquently.......in a "down home" kind of way of course! Enjoy some of Doc's musings on a variety of subjects.

On the influence his family, friends, and mountain home had on his musical style.......

"I cut my teeth on it. Mother used to sing a few of the old ballads, and Dad was a singing leader in the little church from the time I can remember. He played a bit of old-time banjo. I had a brother that could pick some old-time banjo, and there were folks that lived around there that played a bunch of the old-time music. I got a good bit of my repertoire firsthand from some of the old-timers --- fiddle tunes, ballads. But a lot of it came from early 78 (rpm) recordings and early radio."

On his first musical instruments.......

"My very first instrument was a little harmonica," he recalls. "It was like the one I was playing Milk Cow Blues on out there (at the concert that evening) --- the same type. I got one every Christmas as far back as I can remember. And sometimes if I was a good boy, I got one for my birthday, because I usually wore them out pretty quick as a kid or lost them somewhere! "The first stringed instrument I had was a little homemade banjo that Dad made for me when I was 11. Then my first guitar came along when I was about 13. Though it was my second (stringed instrument), it was my first love as an instrument."

On his first musical endeavors.......

"Dad showed me a few tunes on the olf five-string. It was a fretless, and it was very hard to play true notes on. Then the original Carter Family, Sarah and Maybelle, were the first guitar influence. The first thing I learned was the old Carter Family style, using a thumbpick and a strum with the fingers. Maybelle Carter played the lead on the bass strings with her thumb and did the rhythmic strum with her fingers. Then Jimmie Rodgers came right along, that good full strum sound he played with a thumb lead and a finger strum."

On how he became a flatpicking wizard.......

"Then I got into flatpicking. I ordered a guitar from Sears and Roebuck, and there came a book with it with different little songs in there that you could flatpick. It showed the old-time jazz guitarist Nick Lucas; it showed how he held his pick. My youngest brother, David, showed me how Lucas held his pick, and that's how I learned to hold mine. But I figured out that if you're going to play good flatpicking, you have to learn an even up-and-down stroke on the strings. That's the first step in learning. But I never tried to do too much lead with the flatpick until I began to hear Hank Garland and Grady Martin. Hank was a jazz guitar player, but in the early days he played some country music up in Nashville with Red Foley and different people. I heard them play fiddle tunes and I thought, By golly, if they can do that, I can."

On how he acquired his first guitar.......

"My real interest in the music was the old 78 records and the sound of the music, I loved it. And I began to realize that one of the main sounds on those old records I loved was the guitar. One of my brothers had borrowed one from a cousin and I was foolin' with it and he says, Dad just says if you'll learn to play a song on it by the time I get in from work this evening, we'll go in to town and get you one. Well, I knew some chords and I just played the rhythm chords to 'When Roses Bloom in Dixieland'. I had some money saved in my piggy bank, so we took that and he finished it up and got me a $12 Stella, which was a pretty good little guitar at the time."

On his love of the guitar.......

"I just loved the guitar when it came along. I loved it," Doc recalls. "The banjo was something I really liked, but when the guitar came along, to me that was my first love in music."

On folklorist Ralph Rinzler's influence early in his career.......

"I suspect if it hadn't been for Ralph's encouragement I wouldn't be on the musical scene as a professional. Ralph helped me very much. He traveled with me a lot in the early days and taught me a whole lot about how to program sets from the stage until you got to where it's automatic, you don't even have to think about it. He encouraged me an awful lot."

On how he would like to be remembered by his friends and fans.......

"I would rather be remembered as a likable person than for any phase of my picking. Don't misunderstand me; I really appreciate people's love of what I do with the guitar. That's an achievement as far as I'm concerned, and I'm proud of it. But I'd rather people remember me as a decent human being than as a flashy guitar player. That's the way I feel about it."

On his early experiences with blues on the family graphophone.......

"There was a record or two by (Mississippi) John Hurt, Furry Lewis, some of the other blues artists. Let's see, I think we had one with Skip James and the Memphis Jug Stompers. The blues were there; it was part of the background.

On his picking and performing style.......

"As long as I've been picking professionally, I've been putting my own notions into the music. Whatever tune I play, I play the way I play it. I've purposely tried my best to copy every lick Smitty played on the early Ernest Tubb recordings. (Fay "Smitty" Smith was Tubb's first electric lead player, appearing on Walking the Floor Over You and other recordings.) That man was some kind of guitar picker, I thought. He was a jazz guitar player turned country. God, I loved his guitar picking! Whew! Did I ever! I swore by it.

On a few of his musical inspirations.......

"For years, Chet (Atkins) was my idol. I finally figured out that I can't play three-finger style or four-finger style like he does, literally, physically can't do it. I don't have the span, the reach that he has on the neck of the guitar. Merle Travis, oh, God, I loved his music. The Delmore Brothers, um-um! I guess I liked every guitar player that I listened to, but there's some at the top of the list, like Chet, Merle, Smitty, Hank, Garland . . . I like George Benson pretty much.

On how MerleFest came about.......

"The late Bill Young, one of the best friends I ever had, B. Townes, the fellow who is the Dean of Development at Wilkes Community College, and Ala Sue Wyke came up to our house the fall of '87 and asked me if I would do a concert and maybe get Jack to help do a concert to raise money to put in a small memorial garden for Merle. I said, well, I could talk to Jack about it. But then Rosa Lee and Nancy said, Let us spend our opinion on this. Why don't you get all of Merle's friends and Jack and everybody else to come in the spring and do a festival? I bet most of them would donate their time on that first festival to get it off the ground. Them two fellows jumped on that with all four feet, not just two feet, they did! They had a couple of truck beds for the stage the first time around, and now there's a good facility there, with dressing rooms and a fine covered stage, a big old stage. You could put on a whole big theatrical stage play on that thing! Volunteers and all, there were nearly 30,000 this last year. It's a big one!"

On how he and Jack Lawrence work out arrangements.......

"Things just sort of fall into place. I'll do a break on something and then Jack'll take a break. We kind of play'em off the cuff. If you know the guitar and you're used to playing by ear, you play what you feel at the time. That's the way arrangements work. If I learn a tune that Jack wants to do, I have to be able to know the exact chord progression as it comes down in the tune. Once I get that in my head, I can improvise on arranging picking breaks or fills behind him as he sings. And Jack's the same way --- he works the same way I do. I guess you learn to play off each other's riffs and complement each other. Merle and I did that without even thinking about it, and I think Jack works the same way with me."

On how he and Merle worked out arrangements.......

"Merle and I sat down and thought about it some: he thought what he wanted to do to it, and I thought what I wanted to do to it and we found out that we naturally complemented each other. Take "Summertime," for instance. One day in the early Seventies I asked Merle, "Son, you think you can learn to play 'Summertime'?" And he said, "I don't know, it's a hard one." And in five minutes he picked the devil out of it. He was like that. Once he got started, music ran out of his fingers. I still can't hardly understand how quick he could learn a tune. Me, I was a slow learner. If I heard a tune I could get it in my head, but I had to work on it a week to get it down just like I wanted it. After I got the basics in my head, I'd be able to play around with the arrangement. Once I get a lead break down, any improvising I want to do comes easy. As I said, I'm a slow learner."

On Merle's greatest attributes as a picker.......

"He had three areas he excelled in: his fingerstyle on the guitar, his slide, and his frailing banjo. A lot of the banjo --- 95 percent of the banjo on the last records we did was Merle. He learned most of his frailing style from his grandfather, the late Gaither Carlton."

On what made Merle outstanding as a slide guitarist.......

"You want a direct, in-the-nutshell answer? This is my opinion about talented people: When we come here we're born with whatever talents we have, and Merle developed easily and naturally his ability to play music. As I say, it just ran out his fingers when he got started. His mother taught him his first chords. And if he wanted to learn something from me, all he needed was just the melody of the song, and he would figure out his own way of doing it. And it didn't take him all day to do it. Somebody asked him once in an interview, "Was it hard to learn all those songs?" And he said, "I've learned a lot of 'em on the stage." It was a natural talent. He just did it."

On what it was about Merle's musical sound that he liked.......

"How clean it was, his perfect timing, and another thing I should have mentioned --- Merle played blues in the flatpicking style as good as anybody I've ever sat with. I mean, it was his blues. He didn't copy B. B. King or Mr. So & So on the guitar. It was Merle."

On which musicians he listened to growing up.......

"When I began to notice music I was just a little fella. It was everybody from the Skillet Lickers and the original Carter Family to a recording by John Hurt. We had a little pile of 78's and there might have been one or two by (bluesman) Furry Lewis. There was Jimmie Rodgers, of course; he had to be in there. All kinds of people came up through the years and I listened to all of 'em. The whole full scope of the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights. Radio helped play a big part. I listened to music, whoever and whatever they played, even to some of the old Dixieland jazz."

On whether any local muscians or family members had any influence on his early guitar style.......

"No sir. I listened to everything I could get hold of where the flattop guitar was featured. And enjoyed it, if they were good. I guess I enjoyed some that weren't too good when I didn't know any better. (laughs) Recordings, radio were it, though. There just weren't any local people that played good guitar when I was growing up."

On whether or not anyone taught him how to play the guitar when he was young.......

"When I was going to school over at Raleigh, there was a fellow, Paul Montgomery, who could play guitar pretty good when he was just a little old boy. And he showed me three or four chords --- the C, the D, and the G chords. And I was hitting one or two of those chords one morning on a guitar one of my brothers borrowed, and Dad said, "Son, if you'll learn to play a tune o that thing by the time I get back from work this evening, I'll tell you what: on Saturday we'll take the money out of your piggy bank and I'll finish up and we'll buy you a guitar." And I said, Well, all right." Well, I figured out the chords that went with a Carter Family tune, "When The Roses Bloom in Dixieland." And when he come back, I said, "All right, "I've learned a tune." And I played the chords, the backup to it, and sung it. And he said, "Well, I have to keep my word."

On what his advice would be to a beginner who is just learning to pick.......

"For the beginner on the guitar, hold the flatpick properly between the index finger and the thumb, with the index finger curved and the pick laying against the side of it with a normal amount of the point of the pick exposed so you can play the strings. And when you squeeze the pick tight and play, that gives you louder volume. And you can relax the pick a little bit in your fingers to make it softer. That's the first part. Then you learn to pick up and down, playing the notes evenly, and playing them slowly as you learn a tune. And you gradually speed it up. You can't just jump on it and do it, like I've heard beginners try to do. It has to be learned slowly, at first. The first thing I learned was the scales on the guitar. This will sound a little formal. I learned the beginner's scales, like playing the scale on the C chord, and the G, and even on the D chord. I didn't get into the hard ones until much later. But that's the way I started off."

On what kind of tunes he most enjoys playing.......

"A lot of different things. Anything from a good bluegrass tune to Western swing. And I like old-time fiddle tunes to pick out, either on the mandolin or the guitar. I don't mess with the mandolin on-stage but I fool with it some at home. I like it because you can pick out a fiddle tune almost exactly note for note. You can't do that on a guitar. Sometimes you have to improvise a little bit to make it come out. Well, I guess if you slave over it, you can make it come out note for note on the guitar, but mandolins, they're tuned like a fiddle, and it's easy."

On how he learned to adapt fiddle tunes to the guitar.......

"I loved the fiddle so good, and there was a couple of old-time fiddlers --- my father-in-law, for one --- when I was growing up. And then there was a fellow, Uncle Ben Miller. He wasn't really my uncle, but everybody called him Uncle Ben. And I learned old-time fiddle tunes, mostly from those two. I loved the fiddle so good that I got one when I was 18. I kept it, I guess, 12 to 15 months. I could note the thing pretty good, but my bowin' hand just wouldn't do it. But I thought that if Hank Garland and those boys out of Nashville could play fiddle tunes on guitar, I'd see if I couldn't learn some. I think the first one I learned to do successfully was the "Black Mountain Rag." In the Fifties, I played an electric guitar with a little local dance group. We didn't do any hot records or hit TV shows or none of that mess; we just did dances. And a lot of times they didn't have a fiddle and they needed a lead --- more than just a piano --- and I worked on that and a couple of the other fiddle tunes, "Sugarfoot Rag" and some of that stuff. That's where I started. The technical practice I got in the Fifties on the electric guitar didn't hurt me a bit when I went back to the flattop in the Sixties, when I got into the folk revival."

On whether or not he has ever considered doing an entire album of jazz based tunes.......

"No, no; I'm not versed enough in jazz chords. I think I could have learned it, if I'd have started much earlier or pursued it by the time I got on the electric guitar in the Fifties. I like good jazz, but just for listening. I never was inspired enough to really buckle down to it and learn it."

On his relationship with Muriel Anderson.......

"She said that I had been her "influence." At first, she played bluegrass --- she worked with an all-girl bluegrass group, Darlin' Cory & The Wildwood Pickers, for a spell. They've done a lot of bluegrass festivals. Muriel worked for them a good while back when she was in her teens. She went on into classical music and plays the classical guitar now. The girl's good.

On what kinds of guitars he is playing these days.......

"I have a beautiful Gallagher cutaway and two old road-weary Gallaghers that I love dearly. I also have a Martin D-28 with a Henderson neck that I play, and then I have the John Arnold copy of the Jimmie Rodgers Weymann guitar. It's a sweet little animal; it's a beautiful instrument. And I have a Les Paul electric, a new one that I bought from my grandson. He needed money one day, and he had two electric guitars, and he says, "You wanna buy one?" And I said, "Yeah, I want that one to fool around with now and then."

On what sort of pickups he uses on his acoustics and what he plugs into.......

"When Jack and I work on the road we plug into an Ashley preamp system, with parametric equalizers and preamp. But when me and Richard, my grandson, play we use Fishman pickups. That's the best I've found. It's a little strip that goes under the saddle. If you want to use pickups on your guitar you should have a combination of the piezo pickup and a little tiny mike. They make some little tiny mikes that can be suspended inside the guitar. And if you combine and mix both of those you get a wonderful sound. I recently played the Fishman prototype amplifiers built especially for acoustic guitars. It's the most beautiful sound I've heard on an acoustic guitar. It has a three-way speaker system in it --- it's a beautiful rig. And there's a new Fishman preamp, the Pro-EQ, that you can get that goes with the pickup. With the amplifier, they really put a lot of full sound into your guitar.

On what turned him on to Gallagher guitars.......

"I just liked the way they sounded, the tone they had. They weren't as big boomers as the Martin D-28's, but there was something about the way they sounded that Merle and I both just loved. We used Martins for a while, you know. And another thing, in the beginning, J. W. Gallagher, the old man who started the guitar-making, gave us two guitars. He brought over four for us to choose from, and I picked the cheapest one --- the one with the least expensive inlay. It had the best tone. Merle did exactly the same thing. Gallagher had made Merle one with really elaborate inlay on it, but he didn't tell Merle. And Merle picked out the one he liked the tone out of. All real good guitar players will do that if they're not fooled by flashy inlay. True music is the sound of an instrument, not what it looks like. Even if it was explained to me that it was a $50,000 instrument, if I didn't like the sound of it, I wouldn't want it. It'd just be something for somebody to steal."

On what kind of strings he uses.......

"John Pearse; I have been for years. I use the lights. I used mediums for years, but I've started using the light strings."

On what he considers to be his best recording.......

"There's three recordings that I'm really proud of. Two of them were with Merle. The first one was Southbound. When we came into the studio for that he'd only been playing the guitar about 18 months. And he did over half the lead guitar on that record. I was ecstatic. Oh, that was a proud day. The next one I like is Doc Watson On Stage, for its feeling and warmth. That was a live record, and it came out wonderful. And my third effort that I'm really proud of is the gospel album on Sugar Hill, On Praying Ground. I love that. I always wanted to do a good gospel album, and with the help I got from Alan O'Bryant and those boys from the Nashville Bluegrass Band I really got the warmth and feeling I wanted into that record. Those three, I think, are my proudest efforts."