LEGENDS OF

FLATPICKING GUITAR
by Mark Humphrey
If you had been learning guitar in your grandpa’s time,
you might have bought a method book for ‘plectrum style
guitar.’ The Latin-rooted plectrum (‘to strike’) sounded
high-handed to country guitarists, who preferred to speak
of straight picks or flatpicks (as opposed to the curved
variety worn on the thumb for Carter-style strumming or
Travis-style fingerpicking). Flatpicking came to describe
a genre of guitar playing in the early 1970s, about the
time the four men featured in this video started being
widely noticed. And it is a genre they defined: guitarists
of every ilk from grunge rock to trad jazz play with
flatpicks, but they tend not to be called flatpickers. It is
tribute to the dazzling instrumental skill of Doc Watson,
Tony Rice, Norman Blake and Dan Crary that they not
only defined this relatively recent development in Ameri-
can traditional music; their facility with a simple piece of
plastic (or nylon or tortoise shell) became the adjective
for a school of guitar.
The music played on this video isn’t only about
flatpicking, of course. “Beyond technique are some
deeper essentials of musicianship,” Tony Rice once noted
in a Frets magazine column (Frets, April 1985). “Music
is mainly communication...Doc Watson and Dan Crary
could both play the exact same notes of the same tune,
yet sound totally different.” For demonstration purposes,
check their disparate versions of ‘the flatpickers national
anthem,’ Black Mountain Rag, on this video. Both are
expressions of distinctly individual personalities, as is ev-
ery other note played on this video. Hot licks abound,
but behind them is a focused skill of communication
through music, which, whatever the genre, is the reason
we honor such artists as ‘legends.’

2
 Photo by Axel Küstner

3
 DOC WATSON

Photo by Axel Küstner

While flatpicks and guitars had been meeting for a long
time before Doc Watson came along, he endowed that rela-
tionship with a fresh zest. Audiences who heard his 1963
Newport Folk Festival debut were stunned by Doc’s facility.
“In the early 1960s,” Dan Crar y told Art Coats (Pickin’,
February 1975), “guitar and folk music were pretty much
somebody on a nylon-stringed guitar doing some groovy
strums. And all of a sudden here comes Watson playing all
this beautiful, clean, driving stuff with a flatpick. People were
literally on the floor gasping for breath.” The ever modest
Doc is quick to point to such predecessors as George
Shuffler, who flatpicked fleet lead lines with the Stanley
Brothers, and Don Reno, best remembered for his extraor-
dinary banjo skills but also a fine flatpick style guitarist.
But Doc reached ears the bluegrass musicians simply did
not. “Doc has revolutionized flatpicking,” Ralph Rinzler,
Doc’s discoverer, once remarked. “He has his own style,
and you can hear it coming out in other guitarists who imi-
tate him. Doc has set more fingers picking than anybody
except maybe Chet Atkins, Maybelle Car ter and Merle
Travis.”
Arthel ‘Doc’ Watson’s life is something of a Horatio Alger
story. His ‘triumph over adversity’ tale opens in 1923; Doc
is of the generation of Americans who grew up during the
lean years of the Depression. Deep Gap, North Carolina
4
wasn’t exactly prosperous in the best of times, and Doc’s
difficult conjunction of time and place was exacerbated by
his being blinded in infancy. But working to his advantage
was a large and loving family in which music was a con-
stant presence. His parents’ singing, his brothers’ banjo play-
ing and fiddling, and his own boyhood experiments with the
harmonica and “everything that had a musical tone” set the
stage for Doc’s later success.
The arrival of a Victrola in the Watson home when Doc
was six provided a further catalyst: the fascinating contrap-
tion evoked such influential voices as those of the Car ter
Family, who first gave Doc the incentive to take up the gui-
tar. “I started off playing with a thumb lead, Maybelle Car ter
style,” Doc told Jon Sievert (Frets, Vol. 1 No. 1, arch 1979).
“Then when I began to listen to Jimmie Rodgers I figured
out there was something being done there besides the thumb
and finger. So I got me a pick and started working on it.”
Doc picked and sang for a time with his brother Linney,
imitating the then popular sounds of the Monroe and Delmore
Brothers. By age 18, Doc was playing with bands on local
radio broadcasts as well as for tips on the streets. “People
who heard me on the street invited me to come to amateur
contests and fiddlers’ conventions,” Doc told Siever t. “I did
win some contests, and I remember one time I entered once
in the professional category and won it. That really helped
my ego.”
Word of Doc’s talent spread. In 1953 he began a stint
as lead electric guitarist with Tennessee pianist Jack Will-
iams, playing ever ything from square dance tunes to
rockabilly. “The hardest chore I got into with that group was
playing the lead fiddle tunes for square dancing,” Doc told
Sievert. “I got a lot of technical practice with the flatpick
during those years. It helped build my knowledge of using
the flatpick enormously.”
By the time Ralph Rinzler and Eugene Earle discovered
Doc in 1960, the 37-year-old part time piano tuner had de-
veloped an extensive repertoire and commanding instru-
mental skills for expressing it. Rinzler has described Doc’s
discovery as ‘serendipitous,’ for the timing coincided per-
fectly with the burgeoning folk revival. Stylistically, Doc fit
midway between the rediscovered ‘old timers’ such as
Clarence Ashley who excited the folklorists and young cam-
pus favorites like Joan Baez who were then still performing
5
 Photo by Peter Figen
traditional songs. Doc grew up with the ‘old time’ tradition
but had developed exciting new ways to express it. Within a
decade of his discovery a whole school of guitarists were
eagerly following his example.
How did Doc feel about that? “You hear somebody play
a lick that I figured out,” Doc told Joe Wilson (Sing Out!
Vol. 29/No. 1), “it makes you just as proud as can be. You
think, well, somebody likes what I do. A lot of people are
jealous, but I figure if he learns too many of my licks I’ll
figure out some harder ones. Earl Scruggs said the same
thing. He said that lots of people in the music business felt
like somebody was stealin’ corn from their crib. He said, ‘If
I can’t do it better than the people who copy me, I’m a-
wantin’ know-how.’”
As for transmitting know-how, Doc believes a lot has to
do with the quality of the receiver. “A person’s born with
the talent to play music,” Doc told Joe Wilson and Jean
Stewart. “Ain’t no use in beatin’ around the bush to say
anybody can learn to play the guitar when you know they
can’t either...Some people learn it mechanically but I’m sure
you’ve heard people play that sounded mechanical.” On
another occasion Doc told Michael Brooks (Guitar Player,
July/August 1972): “There’s more than just technique go-
6
ing into the music. You have to feel it as well. If the picker’s
personality isn’t expressed in the picking technique, there’s
something missing.”
But technical command surely marches in tandem with
musical expression. “When you start out,” Doc suggested
to Brooks, “you’ve got to learn to develop an even stroke
so that you can play the same clean picking stroke on the
string coming up as you do picking down. And syncopa-
tions are impor tant too, like [mandolinist] Jesse
McReynolds...When you’re beginning the guitar, don’t feel
bad about practicing a few scales because, using an even
up-and-down stroke, there’s no better way to develop the
flatpicking technique than to learn a few of the easier scales
on the guitar and practice those until you can speed them
up.”
Though Doc spawned a whole school of flatpicking gui-
tarists, he has never felt that his disciples should remain
imitators of Doc Watson. Advising a young admirer who had
a handful of Doc’s arrangements worked out, Doc told him:
“Son, when you learn to play those without missing a note,
begin to think of some things that you want to add to them
or some of my things that you want to take out and replace
with some stuff of your own.”
Doc’s performances here, ably assisted by his late son
Merle and Jack Lawrence, show not only his influential in-
strumental facility but also his warm vocals and winning
way with everything from pop chestnuts (Bye Bye Blues) to
fiddle tunes (the flatpickers’ national anthem, Black Moun-
tain Rag). Along with their musical strengths these perfor-
mances are richly imbued with a quality Ralph Rinzler de-
scribed in his 1964 Sing Out! profile of Doc as a “forthright
honesty that pervades his approach to life in all aspects.”

7
 TONY RICE

Photo by Axel Küstner

“It’s the same with musicians as with instruments,” Tony
Rice once told Mark Hunter (Frets, April 1980). “As they
play longer, it sounds richer. The sounds of experience.”
Tony’s enriching experience has spanned a lifetime of play-
ing in such influential ensembles as J.D. Crowe and the New
South, the David Grisman Quintet, and his own Tony Rice
Unit. A seminal figure in the birth of ‘new acoustic’ music in
the 1970s, Tony has reaffirmed his abiding love for tradi-
tional sounds in duet recordings with Ricky Skaggs and
Norman Blake. “I have influences from the bluegrass, jazz
and folk worlds,” Tony told Hanson, “but I try to put my own
stamp on what I do.” And that stamp is unmistakably Tony
Rice. “What I want,” he has said, “is a pounding sound on
each note...Some people say I’m the loudest acoustic gui-
tar player they’ve ever heard.”
David Anthony Rice was born the second of four sons
in Danville, Virginia in 1951. His father, Herbert, played
mandolin and guitar: Tony was exposed to the classic re-
cordings of Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs at an early age.
The Rice family moved to southern California when Tony
was just two, but the bluegrass music his father and older
brother Larry played went West, too. “To tell you the truth,”
Tony said to David McCarty (Acoustic Guitar, November/
December 1993), “I probably started playing guitar just
because it was there.” Tony discovered the instrument when

8
he was only five: “I prob-

Photo by Axel Küstner

ably put my hands around
it and kind of lucked into
some kind of sound,” he
recalls. “But anyway, I was
off and running.”
Tony was nine when he
made his performance de-
but on the Town Hall Party
radio show, a popular Los
Angeles countr y music
showcase. Per forming on
the same show was a band
called the Countr y Boys,
later renamed the Ken-
tucky Colonels. Tony was
struck by the talent and
drive of the band’s sixteen-
year-old guitarist, Clarence
White. His admiration led to a friendship and apprentice-
ship with one of the most creative flatpickers of his era.
(Recalling a 1964 Newport Folk Festival workshop with
White, Doc Watson once said: “He could really tear it
down...he almost scared me.”)
“I played rhythm similar to Clarence White,” Tony told
Mark Hunter, “and he really played differently. A bluegrass
rhythm is ‘boom-chick’ and there’s another that’s ‘boom-
chicka,’ and there’s yet another thing that Clarence did and
I do, which is an extra note in there, an extra upsweep with
your pick, which certainly adds a fuller sound.” Despite
White’s strong influence, Tony believes that it enhanced
rather than overwhelmed his own individuality. “For a long
time,” he told McCarty, “people thought that Tony Rice was
an extension of Clarence White. Well, I’m not sure about
that, because as much as I admired Clarence, the more I
tried to play like him, the more I found out that I could not
play like Clarence White. What happened as a result of try-
ing to play like Clarence was that I developed a unique
sound, both rhythmically and harmonically. Trying to sound
like him opened up a whole new world for me.” And once
he set foot in that world, Tony never looked back. “I never
even finished high school,” Tony recalls. “I knew what I was
going to do as long as I had ten fingers.”
9
 In 1965, Tony’s family moved back East. Bluegrass fes-
tivals were becoming popular there in the late 1960s, and it
was at Carlton Haney’s Reidsville, North Carolina festival in
1971 that Tony met and auditioned for the Bluegrass Alli-
ance. The group’s guitarist-singer, Dan Crary, was leaving,
and Tony stepped into his spot. With mandolinist Sam Bush,
Tony made his first explorations of progressive bluegrass
during his year-long stint with the Alliance. His brother, Larry,
was working as mandolinist with banjoist J.D. Crowe, and
when the opportunity to join Crowe’s New South arose in
1972, Tony grabbed it. “I learned general musicianship from
J.D. Crowe,” Tony told McCarty. “His approach has a delib-
eration that’s really important, and I learned that from him.”
Tony’s stint with the New South saw the addition of two other
outstanding young musicians, Ricky Skaggs and Jerry Dou-
glas, to Crowe’s band. But the decision in 1975 to amplify
the New South displeased Tony (“I never really saw any
purpose in it”), so in September of that year he left the New
South for a promising venture in the New West with mando-
linist David Grisman.
“We did a lot of rehearsing to put that band together,”
Rice explained to McCarty. “We didn’t even appear on stage
anywhere for probably three months after I got out there.”
Once unveiled, the David Grisman Quintet’s sound was
hailed as revolutionary, and Tony Rice’s guitar was a big
part of the buzz. Tony left the Quintet in 1979; his celebrated
1980 duet album with Ricky Skaggs was hailed as a ‘back-
to-the-roots’ masterpiece.
In the years since, Tony’s recordings and performances
have balanced the experimental ‘new acoustic’ sound he
pioneered in the late 1970s with the traditionalism evident
in the Skaggs-Rice ‘brother duo’ sound. His performances
here find him jamming with his old Bluegrass Alliance band
mate, Sam Bush, as well as New South alumni Ricky Skaggs
and Jerry Douglas. Fiddler Mark O’Connor and banjoist Bela
Fleck add to the splash of the new acoustic rafting romp,
Whitewater; the Skaggs-Rice duets evoke the soulful coun-
try brother duets of the 1930s and the Tony Rice Unit’s ren-
dition of the Stanley Brothers’ White Dove (with a harmony
cameo by Peter Rowan) evokes Tony’s Virginia roots.
Asked about pointers for aspiring pickers, Tony told
Mark Hanson: “The advice I usually give people is to tr y to
play fluently what they hear in their heads.”
10
 NORMAN BLAKE

Photo by Dave Gahr

“My one philosophy in life is this,” Norman Blake once

told Louisville Times reporter Ronni Lundi: “I’ve never known
what I’m going to do, but I certainly know what I’m not go-
ing to do.” With that certainty in mind Blake has carved his
niche in the flatpickers’ hall of fame as a kind of progres-
sive conservative, a man deeply rooted in tradition who still
enjoys pushing his own perimeters when the spirit moves.
“I listened to a lot of old-time countr y and bluegrass
music as I came up,” Blake told Ar t Coats (Pickin’, Febru-
ary 1975). Those sounds were in the air around Chatta-
nooga, Tennessee, where Blake was born in 1938, and like-
wise around the small northern Georgia towns where he was
raised, Sulphur Springs and Rising Fawn. An only child,
young Norman was doted on by a grandmother who played
piano, guitar, and mandolin. She helped, Norman has said,
with “music in general...how music worked.” A fiddling
cousin also helped him grasp timing and appropriate chord
changes in ‘seconding.’ Norman took up the guitar at age
eleven: “The first thing I did was some fingerpicking stuff,”
he told Coats. “The only lead playing I did on the guitar at
first was bass style, like Mother Maybelle Car ter. I did it with
a thumb and finger. I didn’t use a flatpick. The flatpicking
came in with the mandolin.”
“When I did start playing the guitar with a flatpick,”
Norman told Jon Sievert (Frets, March 1988), “I started

11
using some of the mandolin technique I’d developed. Like I
used to try to play this rhythm on the mandolin where your
hand actually goes in a figure-eight pattern on the strings...I
got into that and gradually kept bringing it down into single-
string playing on the guitar.”
Norman was too enamored of music to finish high
school. At sixteen he joined the Dixieland Drifters, with whom
he played mandolin and dobro on Knoxville radio station
WNOX’s Tennessee Barndance. The Drifters would earn the
distinction of being the only bluegrass band to record for
Sun Records (their 1957 recordings waited until the 1980s
to be released). Norman’s talents subsequently earned him
stints in Hylo Brown’s traditional bluegrass band, the
Timberliners, as accompanist to countr y singer Walter
Forbes, and as part of June Carter’s road band. Uncle Sam
requested a different performance (U.S. Army radio opera-
tor) in l96l and Norman brought his fiddle and mandolin
skills to the Panama Canal, where his Fort Robbe Moun-
taineers was voted Best Instrumental Group of the Carib-
bean Command!
After his 1963 discharge Norman was back in Nash-
ville, where June Carter had become part of Johnny Cash’s
troupe. Carter’s enthusiastic recommendation got Norman

Photo by Jim McGuire

12
some record dates with Cash (you hear his dobro on “Un-
derstand Your Man”), though he continued to teach guitar
in Sulphur Springs and pick with a local countr y band.
Norman’s low profile heightened considerably in 1968 when
he played on Bob Dylan's influential Nashville Skyline al-
bum. The following year he became par t of the house band
on Cash’s network television show, and his new visibility
brought him session work with Kris Kristofferson, Joan Baez,
and John Hartford (he toured with Hartford's Aeroplane
band). Norman’s role in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's Will the
Circle Be Unbroken project and the release of his debut solo
album, Home in Sulphur Springs on the then fledgling
Rounder label, effectively launched his solo career.
In 1972, a young cellist from Independence, Missouri
was performing in a group which opened for Norman at
Nashville’s Exit Inn. “That was the first time I’d ever heard
him,” Nancy Blake told Jon Sievert, “and I thought to my-
self, ‘This guy must be totally nervous to play this fast!’”
Despite coming from different musical worlds (Nancy’s train-
ing was classical, though she was per forming in a progres-
sive rock ensemble), the pair hit it off and were married in
1975. Both the marriage and musical partnership have
matured over the ensuing two decades.
In 1978, fiddler James Bryan joined the B1akes to form the
Rising Fawn String Ensemble, a trio that lasted nearly eight
years. “It gives my guitar music some places to go where it
hasn’t been before,” Norman said of the trio to Art Coats
(Frets, April 1979); “We’re very much into the bass line
concept in our music...Nancy and I play the bass line to-
gether when we back the fiddle with the guitar and cello...It
gives James some decent backup.”
Like any new combination playing old time music, the
Rising Fawn String Ensemble met with mixed notices: “When
people started to label us as ‘chamber music,”’ Blake told
Ronni Lundy, “it was a little offensive to us.” But the point
the Blakes and Bryan hoped to make was that old time coun-
try wasn’t one dimensional. “A lot of people can’t get past
the cornfield,” Norman told Roanoke Times reporter Laura
Alderson. “I’m looking for the source.” Norman’s search for
the source frequently took him musically to the British Isles,
a journey manifest in much of the Rising Fawn String
Ensemble’s performance on this video. “Our music demands
an ancient tone character,” says Norman, who cites old fiddle
13
books as one of the source he looks to for both material
and inspiration. Likewise, he hews close to what he calls
“good old-fashioned country music” as witnessed by such
standards as Jimmy Brown the Newsboy and the Delmore
Brothers’ Nashville Blues.
Norman’s approach to fiddle tunes prompted this com-
mentary from J.D. Kleinke (“Backroad Baroque,” Acoustic
Guitar, November/December l99l): “One of the most dis-
tinctive qualities of his playing is a singular ability to pre-
serve and emulate the spirit and drive of old-time fiddle
music with six strings and a flatpick,” wrote Kleinke. “Blake’s
heavy use of down-up-down-up cross-picking between
melody note and harmony note accomplishes two key things
in the pursuit of the old-time fiddle sound: the square down-
up stroke perfectly replicates the bowing patterns (‘sawing’
and ‘shuffling’) of an old-time fiddler; the two-string har-
mony of the cross picked pattern captures the drone echo
of a fiddler’s double stops, the chordal essence of traditional
fiddling.”
Norman likes to cite an old mandolin book when asked
for tips from aspiring flatpickers: “They said you have to
pick it like you were shaking water off your hand,” he re-
marked. “I simply turn my wrist outward.” Beyond tech-
nique, Norman told Art Coats: “I’m just lost in the tune and
trying to interpret what’s in my head...” Which, despite lim-
ited formal education, is a lot. “I’ve got a ninth grade edu-
cation,” Norman admits. “There isn’t much else that I can
make as much money at as I’ve been able to do with music...I
play for pure survival reasons, as well as, you know, loving
it.”

14
 DAN CRARY
Photo by Axel Küstner

Lest the high percentage of dropouts among our ‘Leg-

ends of Flatpicking’ discourage any aspiring pickers with a
high school diploma, take note that Dan Crar y has a Ph.D.
and is an active professor of speech communication at Cal
State Fullerton. His first line of academic pursuit was theol-
ogy, which may account for Dan’s philosophical pronounce-
ments on flatpicking and the betterment of humankind: “My
nomination for something that’s going to make a difference
is a real aesthetic experience,” Dan told David McCar ty
(Bluegrass Unlimited, June 1989). “It connects you to other
human beings that have had a similar experience... It’s not
just another way to spend your recreational dollars... it will
bring tremendous rewards from rigorous study and partici-
pation, or from just doing it once in awhile and being kind
of your neighborhood fiddle player.”
It’s fitting that a fiddler (or, more accurately, violinist)
was among the earliest inspirations of one of the men who
took fiddle tunes to the guitar. Though only five, Dan viv-
idly recalls a recital by Fritz Kreisler: “I was knocked out by
the audience's reaction and by all the flourishes of Kreisler’s
performing,” Dan told Jim Hatlo (Frets, February 1980).
Born in Kansas City, Kansas in 1939, Dan was eleven
when he fell in love with the guitar based on the per for-
mances of a local radio personality, Don Sullivan: “He tuned
15
his guitar down about three frets,” Dan told Ar t Coats
(Pickin’, February 1975), “and played a real jangly, very
guitar sounding backup.” Dan’s first instrument was an
archtop, f-hole Gretsch, and by the time he was fifteen, he’d
made his performance debut singing Burl Ives’ The Ballad
of Thunderhead at Kansas City’s Granada Theater in a lo-
cal talent contest. “I'd get up wearing a cowboy shir t and
hat and play a couple of funny songs I’d worked up,” Dan
recalled in an interview with Dan Daniel (Walnut Valley Oc-
casional, April 1986).
Following high school graduation in 1957, Dan went to
Chicago to attend the Moody Bible Institute. He was in Chi-
cago when the Kingston Trio’s Tom Dooley ushered in the
folk boom, and Dan began working on arrangements of
songs. “It wasn’t long after I left Chicago in 1960,” Dan told
Hatlo, “that I started looking for places to play and make
some money.”
However, Dan’s primary pursuits were still academic:
in 1965 he moved to San Francisco to pursue a theology
degree at the Golden Gate Seminary. Two years later he
was pursuing a doctorate in theology at Southern Seminary
in Louisville, Kentucky, where he became involved with per-
forming a music he’d been listening to since the early 1950s,
bluegrass. In 1968 Dan joined the Bluegrass Alliance, a band
which made waves at Carlton Haney’s festival in 1969. “As
far as I knew,” Dan told David McCarty, “there was nobody
flatpicking in bluegrass bands in the late 1960s when we
went to our first festivals...I guess that was one contribution
that we made.” It wasn’t unheard of – George Shuffler and
Don Reno, as previously mentioned, had done it a decade
earlier. But in the wake of Flatt & Scruggs’ stardom from
the film Bonnie and Clyde, the banjo became the reigning
star of the bluegrass instrumental firmament. “People were
real interested in the fact that I was playing some lead gui-
tar breaks,” Dan told Hatlo. “This was a time when lead
guitar playing in bluegrass had kind of subsided and not
much of anybody was doing it.” His stint with the Bluegrass
Alliance was influential on Dan’s repertoire and relation-
ship to traditional music. From fiddler Lonnie Peerce he
learned such tunes as Forky Deer and Dusty Miller and an
appreciation of fiddle music in general: “Lonnie became my
main source of information about fiddle styles and fiddle
tunes,” Dan recalled.
16
 By the time he left the Bluegrass Alliance in 1970, Dan
had made his influential first solo album, Bluegrass Guitar
(American Heritage). In the quarter century since Dan has
divided his energies between academics and music. Along
with teaching at Cal State Fullerton, Dan has toured and
recorded extensively both as soloist and in the company of
many first rate acoustic players, foremost among them fid-
dler Byron Berline and banjoist John Hickman, with whom
Dan has performed in groups variously labeled Sundance,
Berline, Crary & Hickman, and California. “I love the expe-
riences I’ve had and the music I’ve played,” Dan has said,
“but I’m never satisfied... I’m just pressing on.”
His performances in this video start with Dan’s inter-
pretation of Reno & Smiley’s 1956 recording, Country Boy
Rock ‘n Roll. “Historically,” Dan told David McCar ty,
“flatpicking starts with Don Reno’s Country Boy Rock “ n
Roll and a few other people who were experimenting with
the flatpick as an alternative to Carter style picking in the
1950s.” As for his imaginative interpretations of fiddle tunes,
Dan contends: “Just because Limerock was thought up on
a fiddle doesn’t mean it belongs only on a fiddle. That also
means it’s not my goal to play it exactly as it was played on
the fiddle.” He strongly urges aspiring pickers to maintain
open ears: “Guitar players who listen only to other flatpickers
are digging a very deep rut for themselves,” he says.
Dan has plenty of pointers he gladly shares with any-
one serious about learning. “When you’re playing solo,” he
told Hatlo, “the trick is to make the solo instrument sound
as full as possible. One of the ways to do that is to leave a
bass string ringing as a sort of drone behind a moving part
somewhere else. A lot of times I will hit the bass string and
leave my thumb down on it, freeing the other fingers to keep
the moving parts going...It’s a little unorthodox, but unor-
thodoxy is okay as long as it doesn’t prevent you from do-
ing something that you want to do.”
And for Dan Crary, that’s worked like a charm. “I’ve
always been an unor thodox guitar player,” he told Dan
Daniel, “partly because I didn’t come up through the blue-
grass ranks but through folk music. I came up through sit-
ting on the edge of the bed and doing weirdness that only I
could understand.”
Thanks to Mary Katherine Aldin for help
with background material.
17
 D OC W ATSON
Black Mountain Rag
Peach Pickin' Time Down
In Georgia
T ONY R ICE A LL STAR JAM
Nine Pound Hammer
Norman Blake & Tony Rice

Cold On The Shoulder

Whitewater
N ORMAN B LAKE & T HE RISING
F AWN S TRING E NSEMBLE
Jimmy Brown The Newsboy
Salty
Molly Bloom

D AN C RARY
Country Boy Rock N' Roll
Medley: The Fishing Creek Blues/
The Blackbird/Turkey In The Straw/
Bonaparte's Retreat/Arkansas
Traveller
D OC W ATSON & J ACK L AWRENCE
Bye Bye Blues
Tennessee Stud
T ONY RICE & RICKY S KAGGS
Where The Soul Of Man Never Dies

Dan Crary
More Pretty Girls Then One
N ORMAN B LAKE & T HE R ISING F AWN STRING
E NSEMBLE
Nashville Blues
Medley: The Cuckoo's
Nest/Over The
Waterfall/Opera Reel/
Cherokee Shuffle
T ONY RICE A LL S TAR J AM
Freeborn Man
D OC & M ERLE W ATSON
Medley:Sheeps In The
Meadow/ Stoney Fork
Doc Watson & Jack Lawrence

Medley: Bill Cheatham/

Salt Creek
D AN C RARY
Lady's Fancy
Black Mountain Rag
T ONY RICE UNIT
The White Dove
Sally Goodin
Running Time: 90 minutes • Color • Hi-Fi Stereo
Front Photo: Lorinda Sullivan
Back Photos: Tony Rice & Norman Blake by Bill Wolf;
VESTAPOL 13005
Dan Crary by Irene Young; Doc Watson & Jack Larence ISBN: 1-57940-900-8
by Lorinda Sullivan
Duplicated in SP Mode/Real Time Duplication
Nationally distributed by Rounder Records,
One Camp Street, Cambridge, MA 02140
Representation to Music Stores by Mel Bay Publications
® 2001 Vestapol Productions / A division of
Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop Inc.
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