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US singer/banjoist.
Moran Lee "Dock" Boggs was born near Norton VA in 1898. As a child he picked up tunes from family members and the radio. He married in 1918 at about the same time he began subcontracting on a mine. His wife's health forced him however to return home and he started working in the moonshining business and as a musician at local dances.
In 1927 representatives for the Brunswick label visited Norton and Boggs was picked up and taken to New York to do eight sides for the label. Although his records sold fairly well (mainly in his local area), he never really made it big, and the depression in 1929 combined with his wife's weak health forced Boggs to quit his musical career and return to the more reliable income at the mines. He worked the mines untill 1954 when the mechanisation of the mining industry forced him out of the job.
The next decade things looked rather grim for Boggs, but in 1963 Mike Seeger managed to locate him in Norton and convinced him to resume his musical career. The first of three records on the Smithsonian/Folkways label appeared that same year.
Dock Boggs' unique three finger style and mixture of various kinds of "root" music (including a genereous amount of blues - a music style not usually associated with the banjo) gave him a distinctive style very different from the Earl Scruggs inspired mainstream of post-60s banjoism, so distinctive that his style is sometimes referred to simply as "the other way."