By Judith Montminy - Globe Correspondent
Sunday, July 21, 1996

DUXBURY - At first, Watson Reid used music to help heal fractured lives. Now the former psychiatrist uses it to help fortify arts programs and strengthen families.

A member of the board of the Handel and Haydn Society, New England Conservatory and Berklee College of Music, the physician-turned-full-time musician has helped raise funds for these arts organizations. At Berklee, he has helped initiate a new musical therapy major to be introduced this fall.

Tonight Reid brings his music and charitable efforts closer to home. Between 5 and 7 PM he will perform with his band, Americana, at a free concert promoting support for the Ellison Center for the Arts, a multi-million-dollar construction project of the Hingham-based South Shore Conservatory and the Duxbury Art Association.

The concert will include the group's new arrangements of popular folk, country, jazz and rock music, as well as some original children's songs by Reid. Old-time family favorites, such as "Camptown Races," "Go Tell Aunt Rhodie" and other selections from the group's first recording, "Pass It On: Songs to Share with our Children, Vol. I," also will be included in the program.

"We particularly enjoy benefit performances for charitable causes," said Reid, 58, who moved to the South Shore from Lincoln last year when he married Juliette G. Reid, a Duxbury resident.

"Our target audience is adults who enjoy sharing music with their families, including children and grandparents. We perform intergenerational music, in the broadest sense of that term, for listening, dancing, singing and partying ... It's older material [performed in] a new way, for kids who are too hip for Barney but are not ready for Black Sabbath," Reid said.

"One of the reasons I'm so excited about this concert is that the Ellison Center is a union of the south shore Conservatory and the Duxbury Art Association. They [both] offer classes and opportunities for the entire age spectrum."

Although he had played the guitar at dude ranches in Arizona when his grown children were young, Reid was firmly entrenched in the medical profession and did not consider a career in music until a few years ago.

He started his medical career as a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, followed by a stint at the White House on a special drug abuse prevention project. When Reid moved to Peterborough, N.H., in the late 1970s to establish a private practice in internal medicine, he picked up his guitar again and formed Heartsong, an amateur musical group that played for nursing home residents.

Watching the patients' positive responses to the music ignited Reid's interest in the mind/body connection.

"I began learning about the stress response and relaxation response," he said. Eventually that interest led him into psychiatry. In 1985 he started a three-year residency at McLean Hospital and began to work with a music therapist there.

Reid started to look at music as a vehicle for relating not only to patients, but also to people in other venues as well.

"I had the opportunity with music to relate to people in a certain way, to their creativity, not just their problems," he said.

He decided to improve his own music making and in 1992 converted the old barn next to his Lincoln home into a practice area. The project mushroomed and soon became a sound studio with a small performance space. Sound engineer Robert Rosati, who also designed Reid's new Duxbury sound recording studio, encouraged him to install state-of-the-art equipment in the barn.

"I thought of myself as an amateur musician," Reid said. When professional players asked to use his barn, Reid would barter with them to benefit from their experience.

"My energy and interest now is in music and recording," said Reid, who gave up medicine by 1994. "I enjoyed psychiatry a lot. But I felt I had done what I wanted with it.

"I'm fortunate enough to be able to build another career," he said. "I feel fortunate the hand I've been given." Financially, he does not depend on his music to earn a living.

Three years ago Reid formed the Broughton Charitable Foundation, a private foundation that makes gifts to bona fide charities.

"I see ourselves helping other charitable organizations raise money for themselves," he said.

So far the foundation has given money to Berklee College of Music, New England Conservatory, Seeds of Peace, Duxbury Free Library and the Ellison Center for the Arts. Although some of the money has been used to put on concerts that feature Americana, Reid said he receives no money for his charitable performances. "I like the idea of having a charitable component to my music," he said.

Already committed to music full time, Reid began his recording career in 1994 during a trade mission to China with US Sen. John F. Kerry. After striking a deal with the China Record. Co. to produce a children's album, he "went full steam ahead." The plan was to release the album by June 1, 1995, China's national children's day.

After a whirlwind of recording sessions, "Pass It On," the family album, was ready. But when Reid reached his contacts at the China Record Co., they seemed more interested in promoting Chinese music here than in distributing his music there.

"We worked as fast as we could," Reid said. "As a result, we put together the band Americana last summer and put on concerts for families," including two at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, two on the Concord Green and two for the Elie Wiesel Foundation's program Seeds of Peace.

Members of Americana include Billy Novick on clarinet, Evan Harlan on keyboard, Matt Leavenworth on fiddle, Jesse Williams on bass, Michael Canfield on percussion and Paul Caruso on drums. Michael Ross on clarinet and Alizon Lissance on keyboards will stand in for the regular band members at tonight's concert.

Watson Reid and Americana are preparing a new album featuring Stephen Foster songs. Reid said he hopes grandparents will buy the recording and share with their grandchildren.

In keeping with his live concerts, first album and charitable work, the new recording will emphasize healthy family togetherness through music.

© 1996 The Boston Globe