Dock Boggs
His Folkways Years (1963-1968)

Perhaps, or rather almost certainly, the name Dock Boggs won't mean much to many of you, however, the gentleman in question is one of the forefathers of white Appalachian country-blues-hillbilly, a legend of prewar folk.

We are in the 1920s and America is not quite the country we know today, but rather a nation in crisis and severe economic depression, especially the South, a still predominantly rural area with strong racial contrasts and numerous coal mines.

Not only were there contrasts between whites and African Americans, but there were also many points of contact and similarities in life, as in music, where many Southern whites found themselves living in the same conditions as African Americans and adopting Mississippi's acoustic blues to reinterpret it in a country style.

Dock Boggs was one of these. A little-known singer and banjoist, originally from Virginia, where he was born in 1898, he had a life to say the least troubled, first working as a miner at the age of twelve, then as a whisky bootlegger, a failed musician, and later a unionist miner.

His career is conventionally divided into two parts: the 1920s, during which he tried in every way to make a living from music, recording for various labels but without great success, and the 1960s, when thanks to the interest of Mike Seeger, Pete Seeger's brother, he became the subject of a real renaissance with recordings for Smithsonian/Folkways, the historic American traditional music label.

We spoke of the first phase of his life, which saw him mainly engaged in surviving various shootings, disruptive drunkenness, and stays in domestic jails. His passion for the banjo was his only outlet, the way to narrate the stories of violence, alcohol, and poverty he faced daily. Of course, the banjo, which he played with great mastery and an original technique, touching one string after another, creating perfect melodies, did not, however, provide sustenance. So after some recordings in the late '20s, he stopped recording, "preferring" the mines and labor struggles.

Then, until 1963, silence. Nothingness.

Only after the interest of Pete Seeger (and thanks to the folk-revival wave that hit the States in the '60s) who wanted him in that year at the American Folk Festival in Asheville, did our good Dock take up the banjo again and return to tracing rural, dry, skeletal, obsessively dissonant melodies.

His limping voice is made more hoarse and raw by the years and hardships life bestowed upon him, yet the sound of his banjo reaches the ears and hearts more directly and clearly, also thanks to the better recording quality.

The precious double album from Smithsonian/Folkways includes precisely the recordings from the '60s, specifically those contained in "Legendary Singer & Banjo Player" (1963), "Vol. 2" (1965), and "Vol. 3" (1970).

What's astonishing about this intriguing collection is the purity and spontaneity of the music and Dock Boggs' genuine ability, even years after his musical debut, to keep his compositional and narrative skills intact, with frequent uses of brilliant and clever allegories and metaphors, which would be hardly conceivable for someone raised among mines and whisky.

Highly recommended for those who love country, folk, blues, and hillbilly.