Doc Watson Video

Television cameraman and traditional musician Chuck Hemrick produced this popular weekly news feature focused on cultural traditions, especially traditional music, of western North Carolina and southwestern Virginia. These two-to-three minute features were broadcast by High Point, North Carolina’s WGHP-TV FOX 8, as part of the Friday evening news, from February 1990 to September 1993. In October 2005, Mr. Hemrick donated the original studio tapes of all 101 Blue Ridge Ridge Views features, the original unedited camera tapes used to produce the segments, and other regionally-related footage he shot in the course of his career to the W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection.

In conjunction with Merlefest 2008, the W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection is pleased to present the Blue Ridge Views broadcast in which Chuck Hemrick interviews Doc Watson at the third annual Merlefest. In the video, Doc Watson recalls the origins of the festival.

This episode will be available for viewing from the Special Collections website for one month, after which it will be archived in the Documenting Appalachia digital library. A new episode of Blue Ridge Views will be featured on the Special Collections webpage each month. Eventually, all the Blue Ridge Views episodes and other select video from Mr. Hemrick’s collection will be available as part of Documenting Appalachia.