Dock Boggs

Written by Dermot on Monday, 24 August 2009

Dock Boggs was not your average banjo player. He obviously listened to the Appalachian hill music that must have surrounded him (he was born in West Norton, Virginia) but you also get a sense of the black blues and string band players that were also around at the time. 

On a lot of tracks he played in ‘modal’ tuning (which is where you raise the B string to a C, giving you G, D, G, C, D). This means that there’s no open third, so nothing naturally resolves. This, combined with unique right hand and a death whine of a singing voice, made for a strange, unsettling ‘spooky’ sound. This was scary stuff….very scary. If – as people say – you can hear hell hounds on Robert Johnson’s trail, next port of call for them was clearly Dock.

His first recordings came about in the mids 20s for Brunswick and – though a nervous performer – he gained enough confidence to make a living from playing at parties and get-togethers. Quitting mining in 1928 he formed Dock Boggs and His Cumberland Mountain Entertainers and allegedly ended up making as much as $400 a week…big money in those days.

When the Great Depression hit, however, not many people had spare cash to pay musicians, and Dock eventually ended up back down the pits. The move was encouraged by his wife, Sara, who considered secular music to be sinful.

‘Rediscovered’ in the sixties, Boggs went on to record three albums for Smithsonian Folkways, and now even has an annual festival named after him. He died in 1971.

A great starting point is Country Blues or Sugar Baby off the original recordings. I will say though (although it’s not a popular perspective) the later recordings actually stand up for different reasons. They’re slower and have a different elegance and he sounds if not world weary, then certainly lived in. The hell hounds may not have got him, but they’ve scared the bejaysus out of him.