Moran Lee "Dock" Boggs (February 7, 1898 – February 7, 1971) was an American old-time singer, songwriter, and banjo player. His style of banjo playing, as well as his singing, is considered a unique combination of Appalachian folk music and African-American blues. Contemporary folk musicians and performers consider him a seminal figure, at least in part because of the appearance of two of his recordings from the 1920s, "Sugar Baby" and "Country Blues", on Harry Smith's 1952 collection Anthology of American Folk Music. Boggs was first recorded in 1927 and again in 1929, although he worked primarily as a coal miner for most of his life.
He was rediscovered during the folk music revival of the 1960s and spent much of his later life playing at folk music festivals and recording for Folkways Records.
Biography
Early life
Boggs was born in West Norton, Virginia, in 1898,
In an interview with Mike Seeger in the 1960s, Boggs recalled how, as a young child, he would follow an African-American guitarist named "Go Lightning" up and down the railroad tracks between Norton and Dorchester, hoping the guitarist would stop at street corners to play for change.
Boggs's version of the ballad "John Henry" was based in part on the version he learned from Go Lightning during this period. The constantly moving mining camps were fraught with excess and violence, and Boggs was consistently engaging in drunken brawls that often left him or an opponent badly injured. The stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression hit southern Appalachia particularly hard, and few people had the means to pay musicians to play at gatherings or buy records.
In the early 1970s, Boggs's health began to deteriorate, and he died on his 73rd birthday. In 1968, his protégé Jack Wright started the Dock Boggs Festival, which is still held annually in Boggs's hometown of Norton,
He was buried in Norton, Virginia.
Technique
While Boggs was familiar with the clawhammer style, or "frailing", he typically played in a style known as up-picking, which involves picking upwards on the first two strings and playing one of the other three strings with the thumb. He played several songs in a lower D-modal tuning. His technique, which Seeger considered "a style possessed by no other recorded player,"