Legacy: Doc Watson and David Holt. Collector's Edition containing three CDs of conversation and song plus a 72-page booklet with photographs, stories, and interviews from Doc Watson and his longtime friend and collaborator, David Holt. High Windy Audio, 2002. $24.98.

If you are still alive and you have not yet seen Doc Watson perform, waste time getting to other things but not this. A common rule is that while we are alive, sources of legend are not. Young people put “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” on the turntable in 1972 out of curiosity as to why the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band had all these old folks playing with them. As a result, most lost interest in what the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band would do next. A generation of hipsters who thought folk music was “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” and who thought country music was what was on the pop radio got their education in “The Circle” album. Doc Watson has been performing for over 50 years. There are no adequate superlatives or comparisons to make. Seeing and hearing Doc Watson play is like seeing or hearing Doc Watson play. Ry Cooder explains it: “I watched Doc flat pick and I knew I would never get that. But tone production is another story. How did he make that great tone?” Cooder studied Watson. “But to sit with the masters, you may catch some of that weird intangible thing that they wore like a suit.”

Sit down with Legacy and you sit for nearly three hours with Doc Watson. The first two CDs are an autobiographical journey. David Holt prompts Watson’s memories, punctuated by a kind of musical genealogy. Holt has Watson telling the story of his life in words and music. Watson recalls his first encounters with musical instruments. The time his father offered to make a banjo for him if he’d skin a cat for the material. The time he scratched and damaged a record album. What the local mountain record store kept in stock in the 1930s. His early education in the School for the Blind in Raleigh, North Carolina. The local origins of “Tom Dooley.” The significance of such tunes as “Cousin Sally Brown,” “Deep River Blues,” “Ruben’s Train,” and “Tennessee Stud.” How to hold a pick right. Playing on the street in the 1950s and in city venues in the 1960s, on both coasts. Traveling across country, alone, escorted from the bus to the job by college students or coffee house employees; later touring with his son, Merle. How he got to be called “Doc.” The life story of the humble blind man from Watauga County, North Carolina, offers what Pete Seeger calls “hope for the world . . . overcoming so many obstacles and disappointments and yet keeping on.”

On the first two CDs, the mix of talk and music is just right. Watson tells about getting his first guitar, and then plays the first song he learned on it—the way he played it then, and the way he’d play it now. And so it goes: some talk, some music, and soon it’s all just the mind of Doc Watson, telling it the way it needs to be told, in words and music. The third CD is “The Legacy Concert” performed by Watson and Holt in 1998, a public concert produced by North Carolina Public Television, in Asheville. David Holt is good at prompting information and recollections from Watson, who is so far from self-absorption as to produce in the listener a genuine awe. The talent is awesome.

If there is one quality that exudes from Doc Watson and, impressively, from David Holt’s presentation of his life, it is Mr. Watson’s humility. It may originate from his very first performance, as a child in the Blind School, when he brought down the house with his talent on the banjo, and enjoyed himself immensely on stage playing old time songs. When he got back to the boys’ dormitory, the matron slapped his face and accused him of being conceited. “That about fixed it for me forever as an entertainer,” Watson reports. The matron was embarrassed by Watson’s down-home music, which flew in the face of the school’s mission of uplift. The blind school taught only classical music. Clearly, the matron did a bad thing. “She was mean and hated the underprivileged children,” Watson recalls. Nonetheless, he remembers the incident as formative. Thinking about his own blindness, Watson speculates, “God made me blind to humble me. I think the handicap made me realize I have to depend on others.”

That humility is apparent throughout the Legacy collection. Holt asks him whether being blind gave him an advantage as a musician. It is clear, from other comments Watson makes, that his nonvisual senses, especially his ear, are sharper and more sophisticated than the sighted norm. One expects a yes to Holt’s question. Watson explains that had he been able to see, music would have been a hobby to him as a working man. Because he could not see, he could not fulfill the role of a laborer in the 1930s and 1940s. However, he could work hard at playing music in ways that a laboring man could not. Do blind folks have the edge over the sighted when it comes to music? Holt asks. Watson explains how silly that question is. There are plenty of blind musicians who are not very good, and a good number of sighted musicians as good or better than the best of the blind. All musicians work hard, and all must overcome some hardship—laziness, a small-hand grasp, egotism—and any hardship or disability can be debilitating, or not. Genius or talent either, without work, lies dormant.

The third CD has 18 cuts, and there are a dozen more on the first two, along with Watson’s commentary. There’s more than Doc Watson’s story here. The listener will be taken back to the life of working-class North Carolina in the mid-20th century, to ideas about the function of music in personal, social, and commercial settings, to the interplay of musicians sharing insights about what they do, and doing it. And most of all, the listener is taken to the music, to the traditions of bluegrass, blues, and folk, which, in Watson’s hands, are not distinct genres but points on a spectrum of an American musical heritage into which Doc Watson, as much as any single figure, has left an enduring legacy.

Joseph R. Urgo