At twelve years old, Willie Watson came across a Lead Belly record that fixed the direction of his musical life. A folksinger, multi-instrumentalist on guitar, banjo, and harmonica, and occasional songwriter, he absorbed his father’s collection in Watkins Glen, New York, which held recordings by Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Lead Belly; later he found Harry Smith’s celebrated folk anthology, sources that together shaped the traditional and old-time repertoire he would claim as his own. Watson helped establish the Old Crow Medicine Show, a five-piece group devoted to the classic American string-band style, and remained with them through roughly seventeen years of recording and touring. Their unexpected platinum hit arrived in the late ’90s with a reworked version of Bob Dylan’s “Wagon Wheel.” He stepped away in 2011 to pursue a solo career, issuing his first album under his own name, Folk Singer, Vol. 1, in early 2014; David Rawlings produced the set for the Acony Records label run by Rawlings and Gillian Welch.
