Joe Pug & Willie Watson
The Ark 316 S. Main, Ann Arbor, MI, United StatesA singer-songwriter known for his lyrical acumen and plaintive harmonica style, Joe Pug dropped out of college and moved to Chicago where he worked as a carpenter before breaking into the city’s music scene. Soon before Willie Watson turned 18, he met God in an apple orchard. Or at the very least, he met there a man named Ruby Love, the older friend of a high-school buddy who had an enormous Martin guitar and a seemingly bigger understanding of the American folk songbook. He never saw Ruby Love again, but within months of that foundational 1997 rendezvous, he met the musicians with whom he’d soon start Old Crow Medicine Show. Call it revelation, fate, resurrection, whatever you will; for Watson, more than a quarter-century later, it was a duet with the divine.