Doc Watson, who died eight years ago, was a low-key, kindly man with a gigantic talent. In 1960 folk-music scholar and musician Ralph Rinzler found him in his native North Carolina, where he was playing electric guitar in a cover band that recycled current pop and country hits. Rinzler had come looking for Clarence Ashley, who had cut classic old-time ballads and blues in the 1920s. His encounter with Ashley's young friend Arthel Watson -- called "Doc" after Sherlock Holmes's famous companion -- was serendipitous.

Married to Gaither Carlton's daughter Rosa Lee, Doc was the product of the unincorporated hamlet of Deep Gap in Wautauga County, where he was exposed to the region's rich mountain-music tradition. The first recordings to document Doc's gift feature not only him but Carlton, Ashley and other locals, representing the music in a fairly pure form. It is not exaggerating to say this is easily some of the most moving authentic folk music ever recorded in America.

Doc's first album as a professional entertainer appeared in 1964 on the Vanguard label. He would keep working until he wearied of the road in his late years. Until 1985 he played and toured with his guitar wizard son Merle, killed that year in a tragic accident. Doc cut more than two dozen albums with his name on the cover. His appearance on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and guests' famous Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972) brought his name to listeners not otherwise attuned to traditional folk and country.

Though always anchored in oldtime Appalachian music, over time he also cut Nashville country, blues, gospel, revival folk songwriters (e.g., Tom Paxton, Townes Van Zandt), rockabilly and vintage pop. Though he occasionally turned to banjo on some of the more aged songs, he was known most of all -- at least in his professional years -- for his brilliant flat-picking and fingerstyle work, the latter originally inspired by Merle Travis, then developed into a unique personal style. Though not a bluegrass picker as such, bluegrass musicians recognized him as a kindred soul, a master of the genre's roots, and he was a festival regular. Among my favorite albums is one he cut with Bill Monroe in 1993, an inspired effort to revisit the sound of the pre-bluegrass Monroe Brothers.

Those of us who love Doc Watson's music were thrilled when Smithsonian Folkways announced it would issue an album's worth of heretofore-unreleased live recordings from Watson & Carlton's first New York City concerts, performed in October 1962 at a small coffeehouse in the West Village, the rest at a Friends of Old Time Music gathering elsewhere in the city. Records of them survived thanks to a young Peter K. Siegel's tape recorder. Fittingly, he serves as producer of the new album.

A shy man who eschewed the limelight, Carlton died at his home in 1972. His fiddling, which does all the speaking for him here, is integral to the beauty of this album. This Doc is not the Doc Watson of later legend but a capable tradition carrier with commanding skills offered without distracting frills. The songs are hardy traditionals destined to become familiar as the folk revival picked up steam, but these versions are so lovingly rendered that familiarity breeds anything but contempt.

In any event, they're the kinds of songs it is hard to tire of: "Handsome Molly" (among the reasons I have a daughter named Molly), "Willie Moore," "Bonaparte's Retreat," "Groundhog," "Reuben's Train," the exquisite "My Home's Across the Blue Ridge Mountains." "The Dream of the Miner's Child" wanders in from the English music hall, the dark Civil War-themed "He's Coming to Us Dead" from the pen of the African-American songwriter Gussie Davis (1863-1899) who in his relatively brief life managed also to compose "Maple on the Hill" and "Irene Goodnight" (though Lead Belly's version is not much like Davis's). While often mistaken for a traditional tune, "Blue Ridge Mountain Blues" is the creation of early commercial-country singer-songwriter Carson Robison.

Here's a tip of the hat and a bow to Peter Siegel and Smithsonian Folkways for rescuing this music from oblivion and putting it into the lives of all who would hear it.