Faith Keeps Doc Watson Pickin’ : Guitarist: The legendary musician, coming to the Coach House, releases a lighthearted record of children’s numbers, plus an album of gospel songs.

Doc Watson says he places one requirement on the songs he performs.

“If a song doesn’t have something to say that makes sense, where I can put some feeling into it, I don’t care about singing it,” the 67-year-old guitarist avowed Thursday over the phone from his home in Deep Gap, N.C.

Since being discovered amid the folk music boom of the early ‘60s, Watson has emerged as America’s foremost repository of traditional songs. He knows more than 800, ranging from tunes older than the nation to recent songs that strike his fancy. Far more impressive than the range of material on his 40-odd albums and in concert appearances (he will perform at the Coach House Sunday night) is the feeling he brings to every tune he assays, taking full drafts of whatever joy or sadness the songs might contain.

He has recently released two albums that accent that emotional spread. “Songs for Little Pickers” is a lighthearted collection of children’s numbers, while “On Praying Ground” is an album of gospel songs, devoted to the faith that has helped him endure some hard losses in recent years.

Of the first, Watson said: “I’ve always liked children, always will as long as I stay here. There’s a special place in my heart for them. And I enjoy doing little old fun songs and songs that young ‘uns like to hear.”

He’s pleased that, in this day of video games and Ninja Turtles, a simply delivered folk song can still stir childrens’ imaginations.

“With today’s children--and there’s only a few families left that are really rural folks like they used to be when I was growing up--it surprises me,” he said, “that as many city children as do like the little old songs like ‘Mole in the Ground,’ ‘Froggy Went a-Courtin’ ’ and story songs like ‘John Henry.’ I guess they can still relate to the down-to-earth-ness of it.

“And for someone to take a harmonica and make it say ‘mama,’ I imagine that would make any ol’ boy or girl from 3 years up to 15 kind of grin and enjoy it.”

“On Praying Ground” is a compilation, Watson said, of the gospel songs he has heard for as long as he can remember. (He also acknowledges the help of Van Nuys-based musicologist Gene Earl in unearthing some gems.)

He was moved to do the gospel songs, he said, because “I’m certainly a believer. I think if it wasn’t for my faith in Him I wouldn’t be here, honestly. Between me, you and all that’s decent, I don’t think I’d be here.

“Life’s been hard (Watson let out a sigh), losing a son and mama, dad and brothers and all that. Then the road’s been tough on top of all that. My poor little woman’s (Rosa Lee Watson, his wife of 44 years) had two major heart attacks.

“You’ve got to have something to lean on when those kind of things come along. And I found out that I’m not enough for me to lean on.”

As much as Watson loves playing music, he detests the road, and said that if his career choices hadn’t been limited by his blindness he never would have taken up the musician’s life.

Blind before he was 2, he credited his father with teaching him that his handicap shouldn’t deter him from leading a productive life. Growing up in rural Deep Gap, his father taught him to saw wood and made him a banjo with a groundhog skin for its resonating head.

By the time he was 12, he had graduated to a store-bought guitar, and a career was born. He worked in obscurity for many years--even playing electric guitar in a regional rockabilly band in the ‘50s--before his astonishing flat-picking abilities and reservoir of folk music traditions made him a hero in the folk boom.

Since then, music has allowed him to “supply the family’s needs,” but the touring life--which some years had him playing more than 300 dates--also denied him the home life he desired.

The greatest hardship he has endured was the death five years ago of his son, Merle, in a tractor accident. Since he took up the guitar at age 15 in 1964, Merle Watson had been his father’s constant touring and on-stage companion. Watson said he rues that the pair rarely had time for fishing and the other shared pleasures of life, though they certainly shared something precious on stage.

“When Merle and I played music together,” Watson said, “I think we did have a sort of sixth sense between us. Did you ever hear us work? I don’t think there will ever be another sound like that again to me, for the feeling in the sound, and music is a feeling to me. Maybe I’m prejudiced because he was my son, but to me Merle had some things that I haven’t found in anybody else in music, a natural thing.”

To this day, Watson’s favorite musical memory remains the first show Merle did with him in 1964.

“It was the first concert of the Berkeley Folk Festival that year. He went on stage backing me up, and he’d only been playing guitar a few months. When we came off I asked how he felt, and he said, ‘I wanted to run,’ and, frankly, I did too. There was 12,000 people out there.”

Watson’s accompanying guitarist since 1985 has been Jack Lawrence, who before that had been picked by Merle to sub for him on the gigs he could not make. “I appreciate him,” Watson said, “He’s an awful good man on the road. He’s going to run me down to the wire.”

That “wire” is Watson’s retirement, which he’s made no secret in the last few years of desiring. He would have retired already were it not for the expense of his wife’s hospitalizations. Now Watson said he’s due to quit the stage “one of these days pretty soon.”

“But I’ll never stop picking, that’s for sure, as long as I can do it. I’ll probably do some records along the way (he has one in the can now, titled “Dear Old Southern Home” due out next spring), until my hands begin to fail me. They haven’t failed me yet too bad, but age usually tells after a while.

“I’ll be 68 in March. But (jazz violinist) Stephane Grappelli can sure play good in his 80s, so I may be picking for a while yet.”

There’s still another Watson album in the can made up of folk songs and ballads called “Dear Old Southern Home,” to be released in the Spring on Sugar Hill. “We did it the same time we did the gospel sessions,” he said, “last December when we had that deep freeze back here. Boy, was it cold back in Nashville.

“We had a great time doing those sessions, and the music turned out as good as on the gospel album.”