Flatpicking as we know it in the US - playing trad fiddle tunes fast on a steel-string guitar with a flat pick - essentially comes from Doc Watson. He wasn't the first to do it, but he was the one who turned people on to it and got it to be a popular thing to do, even though guitar had never been a lead instrument in bluegrass because it just isn't loud enough without electronic reinforcement of one kind or another.

Anyway, I once went to a Doc performance where he explained how he got to playing fiddle tunes on the guitar. He was in a local rockabilly band, before anyone outside of his home town had ever heard of him, and they got lots of requests for some of the traditional fiddle tunes, but they had no fiddle player. So Doc decided to learn fiddle. And he couldn't do it! He couldn't get anything that sounded anything like music out of the thing. So he decided, in frustration, that he'd have to learn to play the fiddle tunes on guitar so his band could honor peoples' requests.

So he became the first of the great flatpickers, and some would say still the greatest, because the fiddle was too difficult.

That was his story, anyway.

Peter.