William Gay: Time Done Been Won't Be No More

Between songs Doc jokes easily with the audience, tells a couple of stories. The audience eats it up. They’re eager to laugh at his stories, and maybe they’ve heard them before; their laughter anticipates the punch lines. They love him. He could sell them a used car with a blown transmission, a refrigerator that keeps things warm instead of cold. His voice is comforting and reassuring. He could be a neighbor sitting on the edge of your porch, or rocking right slow in the willow rocker.

Except for the playing. The picking is impeccable; it’s what you expect Doc to do: the hands sure and quick, the notes clean and distinct, and the absolute right note to go where he picks it. Those cannot be seventy-six-year-old hands, the audience is thinking.

Maybe they are not of a mortal at all; maybe they are the hands of a king, a god.

And with the guitar clasped to him and his fingers moving over the strings, he is a god, the king of what he does. They are the hands of a man sitting on top of the world.

But every set has to end, and when this one does, and Doc begins to rise, his hand reaching for the hand that without seeing he knows is reaching for his own, and the hands touch, the illusion shatter: The audience sees that he is not a god at all but a mortal with frailties like the rest of us, and this somehow is more endearing yet.

The applause erupts again.

Chet Atkins is the best guitar player in the world, Doc said.

I figured you’d say Merle Travis.

Well, Merle was a great influence on me. I named (my son) Merle after him, and we finally met when we did that Will the Circle Be Unbroken record. But Chet’s the best. He can play anything.

That’s what people say about you, I said.

I’m slowing down a little. I’m getting older, and I can feel my hands stiffening up. I don’t tour as much as I used to. I can feel myself slowing down, some of the runs are slower.

Close-up, Watson’s face is pleasant, ruddy, the silver hair a little thin but waved neatly back, every strand in place. He does not wear dark glasses, as most blind performers do, and in fact, it is easy to forget that he is blind: The lids are lowered, the eyes just slits, and he looks almost as if he’s just squinting into strong sunlight.

Where’d you come up with the picking on Sitting on Top of the World?

Watson laughed. I made that up, he said, that’s my arrangement. I heard it off that old Mississippi Sheiks record. You might not have heard of them. But I changed it. I just played it the way I wanted it.

What do you think about the way MerleFest has grown? It’s pretty big business now.

Well, it’s good for the music. It’s good for Merle, to keep people thinking about him. And people have to make a living, have to sell records. It’s good to know so many people love this kind of music enough to come way down here to hear it.

Do you think it’s changing? Music, I mean?

Music is always changing, Doc said. But it’s all music, just people getting together and playing. One thing I noticed though, somebody told me there were some complaints about one of the performers using some pretty rough language over the mic during his show. I don’t care for that. This has always been a family thing, women and kids, and that young fellow needs to remember where he is.

It was almost dark, and gospel music was rising from the tents when I walked down the road toward the parking lot. It was Sunday, the last day of the festival, and gospel was mostly what today had been about. There had been Lucinda Williams, of course, but mostly it had been gospel, like Sundays on old-time radio when the Sabbath was a day of respite from the secular.

Off to the right were the campgrounds. You could see the RVs, but they were hazy and ambiguous through the failing light, and music was rising from there, too the plinking of a banjo, a fiddle sawing its way through some old reel.

What you could see best were the campfires scattered across the bottomland, and for an illusory moment, time slipped, and it could have been a hobo camp or a campground for Okies on their way to the Golden State. There was a gully beyond the camp area. It was shrouded with trees, and fog lay between the trees like smoke, and it was easy to imaging Tom Joad slipping through them like a wraith, fleeing the vigilante men on his way upstate to organize the orange pickers. Or Woody Guthrie himself might ease up out of the fog, his fascist-killing guitar strung about his neck, a sly grin on his face that said all the world was a joke and only he was in on it. He’d warm his hands over the fire, for the night had turned chill, and he’d drink a cup of chicory coffee before heading down one of those long, lonesome roads Woody was always heading down.

Then I was closer, and I saw that the fires were charcoal and gas grills, where ground beef sizzled in tinfoil, and hot dogs dripped sputtering grease, and I saw that these people were much too affluent to be Okies and that the guitars they played were Fenders and Gibsons and Martins. They were guitars that Woody would never have been able to afford.

After a while Grady wandered up. I knew he’d made id, since I’d seen him a couple of times in crowds and had seen him playing guitar in a tent with other players, guys with homemade basses and washboards and Jew’s harps and whatever fell to hand. I hadn’t talked to him yet, though.

You learn what you wanted to know?

Doc heard it off that old Mississippi Sheiks record, I said.

I told you that.

He invented the arrangement, though. It’s his song now.

But he did talk to you. Was I right about him, or not?

I guess you were right, I said.

I thought about it. It seemed to me that Doc embodied the kind of values that are going out of style and don’t mean as much as they used to: self-respect and respect for others, the stoic forbearance that Walker Evans photographed and James Agee wrote poems about. Something inside that was as immutable and unchanging as stone, that after a lifetime in show business still endured, still believed in the sanctity of womanhood, family, property lines, the church in the wildwood, the ultimate redeemability of humankind itself.

Life sometimes seems choreographed from the stage of a talk show, where barbaric guests haul forth dirty linen and a barbaric audience applauds, where presidents disassemble themselves before a voyeuristic media, where folks sell their souls to the highest bidder and then welsh on the deal. It was nice that Doc was still just being Doc, just being a hell of a nice guy.

But Doc’s getting old, and those values are getting old, too. Maybe they’re dying out. Maybe in the end there will just be the music. For there will always be the music. It is what Doc loves above all things: from show tunes like Summertime to music leaked up through time from old, worn 78’s by Mississippi string bands, from the hollow, ghostly banjo of Dock Boggs to the contemporary folk of writers like Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan.

All Music that will endure and help us endure. The music will never let you down.

JMW I’ve seen several interviews with you recently in various magazines around Nashville. Seems like the most substantive was the one you did a couple of years ago for Water Stone.

WG Yea, it kind of wears me out. I feel like it is hard not to repeat myself. Water Stone sent this woman down. She was nice, said she was from Ireland. She just showed up and stayed for several days. She wanted to tape and to tape and to tape and we rode around in a car talking and it got kind of bothersome since she had been there for three days at that time and I rapidly lost interest.

JMW Yeah, end of interview. When I first met you over at the trailer on Grinder’s Creek I would go home and write up our conversations