Blind But Now I See Quotes

“The moment when Douglas heard that record, his life changed forever. He remembered: “Doc wasn’t messing around. He was playing the melody. I’ve taken that rule to heart my whole career, too. The first thing I want to know is, what is the real melody? Don’t give me the pseudo-melody, or the counter-melody, I want to know what the real melody is, and Doc Watson’s always gone straight to the heart of that, and if you play with him onstage, the thing you are most aware of is what the melody, the true melody is.”
― Kent Gustavson, Blind But Now I See: The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson

“A good guitar is like a friend. Sometimes when you’re lonely, bored, or depressed, you pick that guitar up and play and all at once it’s gone. It’s like a conversation with a good friend, I imagine. You play an old song, and you remember all kinds of wonderful things. Or you come across a sad song and recall some bad things…” -Doc Watson”
― Kent Gustavson, Blind But Now I See: The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson

“There was nothing Doc loved more than being drawn into the working world of his family and neighbors.”
― Kent Gustavson, Blind But Now I See: The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson

“Essentially, Doc was trained at one of the finest institutions for musical study of the time, whether for sighted or unsighted children.”
― Kent Gustavson, Blind But Now I See: The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson

“He began to feel that his blindness had been gifted to him by his loving God as a hindrance to his natural ego: “I think that [blindness] was allowed to be mine as a deterrent – I think I might have been maybe a bit stuck up, or haughty, if it hadn’t have been for that.”
― Kent Gustavson, Blind But Now I See: The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson

“And I just wonder whether Doc, not uniquely because of his blindness, but in part because of his blindness, listened in ways in which you and I would not. And I think that probably contributed to his greatness, that kind of sensitivity to what a song is really all about.”
― Kent Gustavson, Blind But Now I See: The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson

“After the Civil War, isolation came to Appalachia, and family clans stuck to their own hollows, keeping to ancestral traditions, and living a subsistence-based lifestyle.”
― Kent Gustavson, Blind But Now I See: The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson

“Doc never lampooned his own culture, nor misrepresented it in the public. He allowed the world to drink from the rich cup of Appalachian music tradition, and he always then returned home to the mountain to replenish his cup.”
― Kent Gustavson, Blind But Now I See: The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson

“Doc had no limit to what he believed he could do, learn, or achieve.”
― Kent Gustavson, Blind But Now I See: The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson

“People knew [the church] as a place to rest and forget for a while the hardness of life. They could sing their soul’s sorrows and frustrations away.”
― Kent Gustavson, Blind But Now I See: The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson