>when people were attacking Dylan for going >electric, Dylan would respond by saying Pete Seeger wasn't folk >music anyway; that Doc Boggs was. (Rumour? Cannot find this anywhere?)
Washington Post Invisible Republic Review: One section in particular -- worth the price of the book despite its brevity -- explores the life and music of Moran Lee "Dock" Boggs, a banjo player whom Marcus depicts as a kind of Appalachian Robert Johnson. He "made primitive-modernist music about death," Marcus writes, ". . . put together ether out of junk you could find in anyone's yard, hand-me-down melodies, folk-lyric fragments, pieces of Child ballads . . . ."Born in 1898, Boggs was by turns a coal miner, a bootlegger and a born-again member of the Old Regular Baptists. He was a hard man who knew hard times, a man who once stopped just short of beating his brother-in-law to death over $52. "Looks like Dock had a little mercy on Dave," a bystander said. "He's part human." That austere rectitude characterizes much of Boggs's work (yes, I went out and got those recordings too). Beside it, much of Dylan's Basement Tapes seems only callow.
Some of his work
His Folkways Recordings, 1963-1968 Long Time Coming: Dock Boggs
