Summer Sessions kicks off in Kingston Saturday

Summer Sessions time is here again, and the inaugural concert is Saturday evening, May 13t, from 6 to 9 p.m., at the Southwest Point Amphitheater in Kingston. The ORNL Federal Credit Union, which makes these concerts possible, is celebrating its 75th anniversary as one of the area’s leading financial institutions, and they kick off this Summer Sessions season with The Hackensaw Boys and the Larry Keel Experience.

It struck me that most Summer Sessions fans may not be familiar with either group, so I was planning to write about the Hackensaws last week and Larry Keel this week, because they both have new records out, and they’re both really compelling stories.

But then I received what I’m convinced has to be the record of the year, even though we’re only a third of the way through 2023, and I must write about it. It’s called “I Am a Pilgrim: Doc Watson at 100,” and it’s one of the most intelligently produced, perfectly recorded, and culturally significant records I’ve ever heard.

So all of a sudden, I felt a bit overwhelmed. What should I tackle first? I had a lawn that needed mowing. There were bicycles to fix, a vexing bathtub drainage problem to solve, a first-grader with ear aches and a sore throat, fire ants to battle at the entrance to Chapel on the Hill, windshield wipers I can’t get to turn off, and hot rods at Chilhowee Park. How does everything happen at once like this? It’s chaos.

Then I realized that the Hackensaw/Larry Keel/Doc Watson stories were really one story. Piece o’ cake.

Doc Watson’s 100th birthday was March 3. And MerleFest, the Americana festival he founded in 1988 in memory of his son, took place the last weekend of April for the 35th year. Unfortunately, about half of the scheduled performances this year were rained out. Life gets teejus, don’t it.

Doc and his soft-spoken genius son Merle categorized their music as “traditional plus,” and that’s been the guiding light of MerleFest. It’s also the idea that has made the Summer Sessions so successful. I’m not sure how “traditional plus” morphed into the nebulous “Americana,” a term which the more you hear it the less it means, but that’s sort of where we’re at in this post-vinyl world.

Watson, who was born in Deep Gap, North Carolina in 1923 and left us in 2012, combined a bottomless well of knowledge, appreciation, and understanding of mountain music from the Appalachian chain with an agile, natural-born, other-worldly virtuosity on strings. If a tune had parts for guitar, banjo, fiddle, and mandolin, Doc could play all the parts himself. He gave the idea of a "one man band" a whole new meaning. In a performance career that spanned four decades plus, he ignited a legacy that will shine like a North Carolina lighthouse for as long as this country is the land of the free.

“I Am a Pilgrim: Doc Watson at 100” celebrates the humble life of this musical giant. It makes a strong case for changing “Americana” to “Watsonian,” a genre no longer about instrumentation, pedigree, race, jamming, gender, intention, commercialism, or style. “Watsonian” music is about heart, because no one’s ever had a bigger one, or a purer, stronger, more honest one than Arthel Watson.

“I Am a Pilgrim” was released three weeks ago by executive producer Mitch Greenhill, whose father Manny had been Doc’s manager for years. But the in-the-trenches producer was a remarkable avant-garde guitarist named Matthew Stevens. A Toronto native, 41 years old, graduate of the Berklee College of Music, and professor of Jazz Studies there now, Stevens, as a composer, performer, arranger and producer, is one of the most sought-after artists in the guitar universe. His work defies genre boundaries, and that, oddly enough, put him in the perfect position to produce a record that redefines Doc Watson’s impact on not just American music, but the music of the world.

A conventional record producer probably would have looked no further than Nashville for country-tinged Americana stars to record songs for “Doc at 100,” and Stevens enlisted a few of those names. There’s Dolly Parton, Jerry Douglas, Roseanne Cash, and Steve Earle. But then he looked to alumni of the Big Ears Festival, and to young artists you have likely never heard of, and to alternative neighborhoods Nashville barely recognizes, for surprises that make “I Am a Pilgrim” a strong candidate for record of the year at the Grammy Awards.

Stevens and fellow alt-guitarist Jeff Parker team up on the traditional blues tune “Alberta,” which Doc Watson recorded 55 years ago. Eighteen-year-old banjo phenom Nora Brown recorded “Am I Born to Die?” Canadian virtuoso Ariel Posen recorded “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Lionel Loueke, from the Republic of Benin in West Africa, performs “Reuben’s Train,” a traditional tune Doc recorded in 1964. Big Ears stalwart Marc Ribot and Hungarian-American singer Eszter Balint give us the gut-wrenching 1963 Doc Watson dirge “The Lost Soul.” Chris Eldridge of the Punch Brothers and Infamous Stringdusters performs a clear as a bell “Little Sadie.” Jazz titan Bill Frisell and Tennessee original Valerie June team up for “Handsome Molly,” and then Bill Frisell solos on “Your Lone Journey” in the most moving elegy imaginable to Merle Watson.

No, it’s more than an elegy. “Your Lone Journey” is the only song Doc and his wife Rosa Lee wrote together, and it was first heard on the 1963 Smithsonian Folkways record “Doc Watson and His Family.” So it was being performed 25 years before Merle Watson’s accidental death. Sung by Doc and Rosa Lee, it was an achingly beautiful mountain memory that felt and sounded centuries old. In later versions by artists like Emmy Lou Harris, the Steep Canyon Rangers, Johnny Hartford, and the duo of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, it was about contemporary voices trying to reach back to the mountains, to a different kind of sadness.

But Frisell takes “Your Lone Journey” on its own lone journey, and if you can tag along, it’s a breathtaking trip. In Doc’s voice, a man is singing to a lost love one, hoping the one who has passed can hear the singer’s earthly pain. In the Steep Canyon Rangers’ cover, it’s a study in harmony, and they’re hoping you can hear their breaking hearts. But in Frisell’s pure instrumental “Journey,” you become conscious of a Heavenly place where Doc and Merle drop whatever they’re doing to listen and acknowledge this plaintive connection to the Earth they left behind. They recognize in Frisell’s tone poem a familiar structure of the tune they used to play, distilled to its eternal essence, broadcast to the cosmos, to the Watson Family, to Ron Miles, to Chick Corea, to Wayne Shorter, to Joe Zawinul, to Ellis Marsalis ... and it probably makes them a little homesick. Frisell isn’t saying “don’t leave us.” He’s saying “don’t forget us.”

Producer Stevens told me, “I felt that if I got artists performing great songs in a stripped down way, it would be hard to go wrong. For me, Doc’s music represents the cultural and generational melting pot from which it sprang, and it continues to tell the stories of our shared struggles and experiences.

“Some artists on the record had a more direct connection to Doc, or perhaps a more intimate knowledge of his work. But it was important to me to have a group that reflects the musical, cultural, generational and gender diversity of the melting pot to offer renditions of his songs.”

But the biggest surprise on “I Am a Pilgrim” is “Doc’s Guitar” in the hands of Yasmin Williams, the 20-something Virginian who has floored audiences at the Big Ears Festival and elsewhere around the world with her own completely unique method of playing the guitar. “Doc’s Guitar” on a centenary tribute album to Watson’s birth could have been given to Tommy Emmanuel, Dan Tyminski, Bryan Sutton, Molly Tuttle, Billy Strings, Norman Blake, Beppe Gambetta, Sierra Hull, Ricky Skaggs ... but Matthew Stevens knew none of them could make Doc smile the way Yasmin has.

There’s an aphorism used to illustrate a principle of chaos theory, the branch of mathematics that brings out the laws of order and underlying patterns in systems once thought to be unpredictable, random and disordered, which says that the beating wings of a butterfly in Tennessee can cause a typhoon in Taipei.

Doc Watson was the butterfly, and his music will be charging the atmosphere around the world for generations to come. He was a pilgrim. As Matt Stevens told me, “I think this album shows how Doc and the songs he played permeated the musical ether and is something that has influenced so many of us, directly or indirectly. It’s always up there to grab on to at any moment.”

And Saturday, evidence of his impact will be on display at Summer Sessions in Kingston.

The Hackensaw Boys and Larry Keel

The Hackensaw Boys have been at it for two dozen years, with more ups and downs than a bull rider at Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth. But midway through their third decade, they’re finally coming into their own. Led by a truly committed six-stringer named David Sickman, with a new record simply called “Hackensaw Boys,” these guys take you back to a time when no one categorized the honest yearnings of independent, self-reliant American working people into pigeonholes so narrow they’d suffocate a millipede.

Where other groups might milk the road life for every ill-gotten pleasure imaginable, the Hackensaws take a very different route. Asked to recall a best memory of touring, Sickman said it was the time they did a house concert. Not just any house concert. Someone came backstage after a show somewhere and told him that a friend had wanted to see the show but his chemo treatments made travel impossible for him. Sickman asked “Where does he live?” It was more than an hour out of the way to their next gig, but the next day the Hackensaws’ station wagon rolled up to the cancer patient’s shack, and he got a private hour-long performance for free.

“Hackensaw Boys” (the record) sounds like dulcimer music for a five-piece roots band. The nine original songs, anchored by a brilliant cover of Bob Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do,” the album made me imagine Doug Sahm knocking on the front door of the Carter Family’s log cabin in Maces Springs, Virginia. Maybelle opens the door, and Sahm (Sickman) sings all he really wants to do “is, baby, be friends with you,” strumming a dulcimer he’d picked up at a pawn shop in Mountain City. They spend the whole weekend on the porch writing new songs, then ride down to Victor Records in Bristol where Ralph Peer pays them $50 to cut “Things We’re Doing.” Peer tells them “I like that line ... ‘The Past, you’ll see / Ain’t nowhere to be.’”

Larry Keel is a direct descendent, artistically, of Doc Watson. Someone described Keel as (here’s that name again) the Bob Dylan of Bluegrass. Nothing could be further from the truth. For one thing, Bob Dylan couldn’t give a flatpicking clinic if his life depended on it. He also couldn’t smile on stage if his life depended on it. Larry Keel’s career is known for both, Doc Watson-inspired guitar shredding and a stage presence that conveys pure joy.

I had read that Keel once collaborated with the jazz guitarist Al Dimeola, who was a favorite of mine during his tenure in the quartet Return To Forever with Chick Corea in the 1970s. So I asked Keel about it. His wife and bass player Jenny Keel shot back: “That happened at a Django Reinhart tribute concert at Carnegie Hall a few years ago. It was a sold-out concert ... one of the greatest moments in our lives.

“The promoter, French jazz guitarist Stephane Wrembel, brought together the world’s greatest acoustic guitar players from all genres to showcase their hommages to Django. He chose Larry to represent the bluegrass Americana flatpicking approach to the gypsy jazz influence. In Larry’s solo that evening, he played a variety of tunes reflecting his style. And at some point he mentioned that it happened to be Doc Watson’s birthday that day. So Larry played Doc’s “Black Mountain Rag,” and the crowd jumped to their feet and went wild.

“Then Larry joined Dimeola and Stochelo Rosenberg and others to play an exquisite rendition of Chick Corea’s 'Spain.' The whole evening was unforgettable.”

Larry Keel has the same distinctive quality of all truly great guitarists. He is instantly recognizable. Say you enter a theater and the curtain is closed. Then the house lights fade and the curtain opens on a blacked-out stage. Then, after a few moments of silence, a guitarist begins to play. If you can identify the guitarist in three notes or less, it’s the Bill Frisell effect. The Bonnie Raitt Effect. The Tony Rice, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton Effect. You know it’s Larry Keel that instantly.

Come to Kingston Saturday night. Experience the Larry Keel Effect.

Longtime Oak Ridge resident John Job is a frequent contributor to The Oak Ridger.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Summer Sessions kicks off in Kingston Saturday