At Folk City

It could only have happened in rela life, this mixing of two Appalachian family musical traditions on the stage of a hip Greenwich Village nightclub before an audience of fad-following New Yorkers. Nothing that imporbable is allowed in fiction. The idea could only have come from folklorist Ralph Rinzler. Doc Watson and Jean Ritchie had never heard of each other until Rinzler introduced them. Doc was age 38, and Jean was 40, and they had been reared 200 miles apart, Jean in coal-mining area and Doc in the tobacco and truck-farming Blue Ridge. Both were heirs to rich family and community traditions that were remarkably similar. But they had learned to use these traditions in very different ways and from differe aesthetic viewpoints. Jean was well launched as a professional in the incipient folksong revival, what has been called “the greatfolk scare of the sixties.” It was a world Doc Watson was about to enter.