For Beverly "Guitar" Watkins The Music Speaks For Itself

The New River Blues Festival returns to Grassy Creek, North Carolina this Labor Day weekend. It was founded fourteen years ago by two white musicians from North Carolina to recognize and celebrate the great African American blues masters who mentored them. 

Georgia's legendary blues guitarist Beverly "Guitar" Watkins was among them. Today, at 77 years old, she's still a force to be reckoned with, playing her instrument with one hand, and behind her back, and belting out songs with power and a sense of urgency that belies her years.

Watkins has shared the stage with James Brown, Ray Charles and Jimi Hendrix among many other luminaries, but her own musical apprenticeship began decades earlier as a sophomore at Archer High School in Atlanta. The band director there was Clarke Terry, Count Basie's trumpeter, who would go on to mentor countless jazz artists including Pat Metheny, and Wynton Marsalis. 

Watkins says Terry purchased her first guitar.

"When we would have band practice after school, he would take me over to the piano with the guitar", she says. "And he taught me how to play, [and] how to tune: E-A-D-G-B-E!"   

It's the stories of musicians like Watkins that captured the imaginations of guitarist Rob Baskerville and his wife, bassist Penny Zamagni, since the 1980s. Back then, Baskerville says, they would track down their favorite blues musicians by phone, and cold call them. If that didn't work, they'd hop in their car and drive to small towns in Alabama and Mississippi to search out southern blues greats, like Big Jack Johnson.

"We might ambush him at his job", says Baskerville. "Once we convinced him that we weren't the police but actually crazy musicians from North Carolina who really, really wanted to learn. They would often take us under their wing and teach us where the music came from and how to play it right".

Baskerville and Zamagni have come a long way since then. Now blues musicians are seeking them out.