Dock Boggs

Dock Boggs ranked among those earliest Appalachian musicians who cut sides during the 1920s, then slipped from public view for years until the folk resurgence of the 1960s brought him back onstage near the close of his life. Even so, the twelve tracks he laid down between 1927 and 1929 stand as landmarks in the folk canon, dark-toned mountain ballads and blues numbers that include “Danville Girl,” “Pretty Polly,” and “Country Blues.” Born in 1898 near Norton, Virginia, as the youngest of ten siblings, he received his nickname from the physician present at his birth. At twelve he entered the coal mines, yet in leftover hours he took up the banjo, fretting and strumming it after the manner of blues guitar rather than the common clawhammer approach.

Songs reached him through relatives and radio broadcasts. After marrying in 1918 he took a subcontracting job at a mine, only to return to his wife’s family home when she fell ill. He briefly entered the hazardous moonshine trade and earned modest pay by playing local dances. His real opportunity arrived in 1927 when Brunswick scouts reached Norton and held auditions; Boggs succeeded where others failed, including A.P. Carter, and traveled to New York City to record eight selections for the company. Although the discs never vanished entirely, most copies moved only in his immediate region. He secured a booking agent and cut four additional sides for W.E. Myer’s Lonesome Ace imprint before the stock-market collapse of late 1929 shut down countless recording operations and halted his studio work. He kept performing in the surrounding counties into the early thirties, at which point his wife insisted he abandon music and return underground. He remained employed there until 1954, when mechanization eliminated his position.

Nearly ten years later Mike Seeger tracked Boggs down in Norton and urged him to pick up his instrument once more. Within weeks the musician appeared at the American Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina. New recording sessions followed, yielding the album Legendary Singer & Banjo Player on Smithsonian/Folkways before the year ended. Two further LPs appeared during the decade, yet all three releases again fell out of print soon after Boggs’s death in 1971. Renewed attention to early folk material, sparked by a digital edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, eventually restored his work to circulation. John Fahey’s Revenant label issued Complete Early Recordings (1927–1929) in 1997, followed the next year by His Folkways Years (1963–1968).