Finally, in 1953, Jack Williams, a piano player from Tennessee, invited Watson to play lead guitar in his country swing and rockabilly band. To earn a living, Watson tuned pianos and played music wherever he could, for local dances and over the radio. They had two children, a son, Merle, and a daughter, Nancy. In 1947 Watson married Rosa Lee Carlton, the daughter of old-time mountain fiddler Gaither Carlton. A woman in the crowd suggested, "Call him 'Doc,'" and the name stuck. Before a remote radio broadcast at a furniture store, the announcer decided that "Arthel" was too cumbersome to use on the air. When Watson was 18, he joined a group that sometimes played on local radio stations. He won some of the contests but, as he said, "I found that people didn't want me in their shows no matter how good I was because I was a little trouble to them and I didn't have a flashy stage show." People who heard him on the street invited him to play amateur contests and fiddler's conventions, and he did. Sometimes I'd make as much as $50, and I paid that guitar off in four or five months." "I played on the street nearly every Saturday, when the weather was warm, at a cab stand in Lenoir, South Carolina. Pressure to make payments on his new Martin prompted Watson to sing on the streets for tips. Around 1940, he bought a Martin D-28 from Richard Green, who owned a little music store in Boone, North Carolina, and let him have a year to pay it off. In time, Watson was able to get a Sears Silvertone guitar with money he earned cutting wood. "Daddy heard me messing with it one morning," Watson remembered, "and said, 'Son, if you can learn a tune on that by the time I get back from work this evening, we'll go find you a guitar of some kind.'" By the time his father returned home, he was picking the chords to "When the Roses Bloom in Dixieland," and, as promised, they went and got his first guitar, a $12 Stella. His brother, Linny, had borrowed a cousin's guitar on which Watson practiced. When he returned home that summer, he was eager to play the guitar. While at the Raleigh School for the Blind, he heard a classmate playing a guitar and learned a few chords himself. These included recordings of Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, the Carolina Tar Heels, and the Carter Family. Watson's musical education continued in the home through a battery-powered radio and a small windup record player with a stack of 78 rpm records his father had purchased from a neighbor. You get where you can play that thing pretty, it might help you get through the world.'" "My dad picked that banjo up and said, 'Here, son, I want you to learn to play it real well. His musical education began at home with a new harmonica in his stocking every Christmas and, one day, a homemade banjo. He entered the Raleigh School for the Blind at the age of 10 and stayed for four years. Watson contracted glaucoma when he was an infant, causing him to lose his sight by the age of two.
Arthel "Doc" Watson was born March 3, 1923, in Stoney Fork in western North Carolina, the sixth of nine children born to Annie and General (his given name) Dixon Watson.
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