Willie Watson

Willie Watson is a folksinger in the classic sense: a singer, storyteller, and traveller, with a catalog of songs rooted in tradition that bridge the gap between the past and present. He is a modern interpreter of older songs, passing along his own version of the music that came long before him: Southern gospel, railroad songs, Delta blues, Irish fiddle tunes and Appalachian music, popularized by artists such as Leadbelly, Reverend Gary Davis, Furry Lewis, and Bascom Lamar Lunsford. The songs don’t actually belong to those artists, they’re part of the folk canon, passed from generation to generation by singers like Watson.

Nodding to the past without resurrecting it, Watson says “There’s so much beauty in this old music, and it affects me on a deep level. It moves me and inspires me. I heard Leadbelly singing with the Golden Gate Quartet and it sounded fantastic, and I thought, ‘I want to do that.’ I heard the Grateful Dead doing their version of ‘On the Road Again,’ and it sounded like a dance party in 1926, and I wanted to do that, too. That’s the whole reason I ever played music in the first place – because it looked and sounded like it was going to be a lot of fun.”

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