© Jack Wright
In the very successful 2000 movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? Ralph Stanley sings the Appalachian dirge “Oh Death” popularized by Dock Boggs of Needmore. According to Stanley, T-Bone Burnett, music director for the film, initially wanted Stanley to perform the song with Ralph playing and singing in the Dock Boggs style. Though Stanley eventually recorded it without musical accompaniment, winning a Grammy for his haunting rendition, Dock Boggs’s voice had reached down through the ages to the halls of Hollywood.
This past March Boggs himself was posthumously honored for his celebrated banjo playing and singing by the Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. The 2025 awards program recognized seven artists and producers from the region and beyond. I was glad to accept the Pioneer Artist award in Dock’s memory and to speak about his contribution to what we now call “roots” music. Corbin Hayslett of Floyd, Va., a gifted musician who attended the University of Virginia at Wise, paid tribute to Boggs by performing two of his songs, “Down South Blues” and “Danville Girl,” in an electrifying style that Boggs surely would have appreciated.
I shared with the North Carolina audience that I knew Boggs for only a short time before his passing in 1971. We became friends in October 1969 when I invited him to play at a December concert at Clinch Valley College in Wise. He struck me as a gentle, thoughtful, and articulate retired coal miner. A few years earlier, in 1963, Mike Seeger had tracked down Boggs at his home in Needmore. Dock had just retrieved his banjo hocked some 30 years before and was practicing his music. Seeger persuaded Boggs to begin performing in public again and arranged concert dates. Thus began Dock’s second musical career decades after he had given up on music. He then made appearances in many impressive venues including Carnegie Hall, the Newport Folk Festival, and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
When Dock Boggs stepped onto a stage, he brought a landscape of coal dust, loaded with boom and bust, moonshine and murder, gambling and sinning. As he reached for the breath to sing his songs, audiences could hear the undertone of broken bodies, broken lives, living paycheck to paycheck, uncertainty. Dock stated that when he sang, his voice often had tears in it. And his own black lung disease caused his noticeable shortness of breath. He mostly worked the coal mines from the time he was 12 until he was 56, 1910 to 1954.
Dock’s life reveals a violent backdrop of economic and social upheaval. Born Moran Lee Boggs on February 7, 1898, he was the last born of ten children, five boys and five girls. His oldest brother played fiddle and the banjo in the clawhammer style. His sisters sang. Dock learned songs from them, but he later would make his mark with his unique self-taught style based on the three-finger technique learned from some of the black blues guitar and banjo players he encountered in a nearby coal camp.
Dock explained the source of his musical inspiration in a spoken-word LP record on the Folkways label called Excerpts from Interviews with Dock Boggs: Legendary Banjo Player and Singer. “One night I went to a colored dance with a couple older white fellows down in the colored quarters of Dorchester. I didn’t go to dance…I heard this colored fella playing the banjo…‘Turkey in the Straw.’ I just got my own heart up and I said ‘I’m gonna get me a banjo and learn to play…’” Then Dock proceeded to develop a unique style of singing and playing possessed by no other musician.
In 1927, talent scouts from Brunswick Records came to the Norton Hotel in Norton to set up auditions for the company. They only needed to hear him play a few bars of his “Country Blues” and “Down South Blues” to sign him to a contract. These eight 1927 recordings of raw, powerful singing and distinctive banjo-playing have moved and influenced musicians, fans and scholars ever since.
His records became well-known, so Dock put together a band, the Cumberland Mountain Entertainers, and began to tour. But after a few months, tension between the band members broke the band up, and Dock never toured again. In 1929 he recorded four sides for Lonesome Ace, which went out of business shortly afterwards so very few sales were generated. His wife, Sarah, whom he had married in 1918, was opposed to his trying to earn a living by playing music.
Supporting a household with a mining job, though, was dependent on the industry’s cycle of booms and busts. During one particularly desperate period, at least partly due to his wife’s health problems, Boggs fell into debt $1,200 with no steady job. According to the Folkways interviews, Dock borrowed $700 from his brother-in-law and went into the moonshining business. He set up a still on the Virginia side of the mountain near the town of The Pound, and started bootlegging into Kentucky to make ends meet, a common practice in hard economic times in the Prohibition era.
In 1928, Boggs had a dramatic confrontation with the law over alcohol, but it took place at his home on Guest River. According to Boggs’s version of events as told to Mike Seeger, during a house concert, officer Doc Cox smashed in the back door of Boggs’s house without a warrant. Sarah Boggs was washing dishes in the kitchen. Cox grabbed her as a shield but she jerked free. Boggs with his .38 pistol threw down on Cox, driving him and his deputy out of his house. Dock said, “They never got a drop of liquor, never seen a drop of liquor.”
He took the raid as a warning and immediately moved into Kentucky, not returning to Virginia for about three and a half years, when Cox was killed. While in Kentucky, Dock pawned his banjo and quit music. The Great Depression had brought an end to his musical aspirations, and he settled into life as a coal miner and staunch union man, retiring in 1954.
In 1969 when I first presented Dock in concert, an audience member shouted a request for his song “Hard Times in the Wise County Jail,” which was inspired by his long-ago troubles with the law. Dock acted hesitant before he sang it. As he leaned forward and looked around toward the side door, he said, “I’m an old man now, and I don’t wanna be shot and killed.” The audience laughed. “This song don’t really pertain to nobody now, but it did back then when I wrote it. Of course, he’s dead now.” In this jovial song Dock was alluding to Doc Cox in the last verse.
It almost brings me to my knees
When I hear that jailer
Ringin’ them keys
It’s hard times in the Wise County jail;
It’s hard times I know.
The cops around Norton
Are a dirty old crew;
They’ll arrest a poor man.
And look him plumb through.
His pockets they’ll pick
His clothes they’ll sell
For twenty-five cents,
They’ll send him to …hell.
It’s hard times in the Wise County jail;
It’s hard times I know.
In September 1970, some of my friends and I organized the county’s first alternative music festival held at Chestnut Flats on High Knob. We named the event the Appalachian People’s Old-Timey, Folk-Rock, Camp Meeting Music Fair. This ridiculous mouthful of a title represented our naive sense of a new musical order. We planned for folk, old-time, bluegrass and country rock music acts on Saturday, closing out the late evening with two local rock bands. Sunday was for gospel and spiritual music.
I arranged for my friend, the actor and playwright Don Baker, to drive Dock up the mountain to the festival site for a performance on that warm Saturday afternoon. Dock came dressed in his trademark dark suit, necktie, and polished black dress shoes, his silver hair parted and combed perfectly in place. There was a mix of ages in the all-white audience, but most were young folks, many had longer hair, several were shirtless, and some barefooted and wearing shorts. Other folks brought lawn chairs but most spread blankets on the ground. About 120 people out in the sunshine for the afternoon performances saw Dock’s arrival at stage side.
Dock took his banjo out of the case and shuffled over and sat down on a folding chair and tuned a little. Mike Kline accompanied him on guitar during the 25-minute set. With a cheerful smile and gleam in his eye, Dock addressed the crowd. Talking between songs, telling the story behind a song or about himself. The late afternoon sunshine gleamed off his eyeglasses. He finished with “Oh Death.” Little did we know that we had just witnessed Dock’s last public performance, September 12, 1970.
Dock Boggs thoroughly enjoyed his second musical career. He told me so the last time I ever saw him. It was at his home in Needmore on a chilly, damp November day. Smoke rose from the chimney of the Boggses’ little white frame house across the creek from the main road. I dropped by with my friend Gary Slemp. Dock told us during the visit that death was near his door. He said he was not afraid.
On his 73rd birthday, February 7, 1971, Dock passed away. A crowd of friends and relatives filled the funeral home in Norton for his wake and funeral. I attended with his friends Mike Seeger and Alice Gerrard. Jeanette and Hubert Cook sang two gospel songs at the funeral as Dock had requested. During the service I do not remember any mention of Dock’s musical career. In the spring of 1974, I organized the first Dock Boggs Memorial Music Festival at the picnic area at Clinch Valley College. That festival ran for well over 40 years with the help of scores of dedicated volunteers. It ended during the pandemic. But the recent Pioneer Artist award from the Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame reminds us of what a remarkable musician Dock Boggs was, 54 years after his passing.
*******