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"John Cohen in Eastern Kentucky: Documentary Expression and the Image of Roscoe Halcomb During the Folk Revival" was selected for the 2008 Southern Spaces series "Space, Place, and Appalachia," a collection of innovative, interdisciplinary publications exploring Appalachian geographies through multimedia presentations.

Scott Matthews examines the documentary work John Cohen produced in eastern Kentucky from the late 1950s into the 1960s, particularly the image he created of singer-musician Roscoe Halcomb, who is prominently featured in Cohen's 1963 film The High Lonesome Sound (made in collaboration with Joel Agee). Cohen, a musician, photographer, and member of the group The New Lost City Ramblers, met Halcomb in Eastern Kentucky in 1959, when the area was in the grip of an economic depression. Through sound recordings, photography and film, Cohen spread Halcomb's music and image throughout the folk revival scene of the early 1960s, making him an iconic embodiment of artistic authenticity based in the grinding poverty of Appalachia (and turning his recognized name to Roscoe Holcomb along the way). The article shows how Cohen's representation of the depressed conditions that shaped Halcomb's existence contributed to the power of Halcomb's mythic image during this time. Matthews also explores the differences between the two men's views on the relationship of art, work, poverty, and survival. Based upon several extended interviews with John Cohen as well as other historical materials, the article examines Cohen's friendship with Halcomb and his relationship to Halcomb's personal life and musical career, with special attention to the production and reception of The High Lonesome Sound.

Preface | Introduction | Cohen's Awakening | In the Folk Revival | Kentucky, 1959 | Portraying Roscoe Holcomb | Mountain Music of Kentucky | Mythologizing Halcomb | Documenting Halcomb | The High Lonesome Sound | Reception | Aftermath | Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources

On a muggy Sunday afternoon in June of 1959, John Cohen wandered the winding mountain roads of eastern Kentucky searching for old-time musicians. Neon, Bulan, Vicco, Viper, Daisy, Defiance — tiny coal and timber towns with sonorous names popped up around each bend before giving way to the Cumberland Mountains. Cohen had come to Kentucky from New York City to find songs about "hard times" that would fill out the repertoire of his old-time music group, the New Lost City Ramblers. "In order to experience an economic depression firsthand, I visited eastern Kentucky and made photos and field recordings for six weeks in 1959," he recalled.1 "The United States was quite prosperous at that point, but east Kentucky wasn't and I had heard about that. . . . And I said, 'Maybe I can find some music about the depression, experience the depression, and understand it more and maybe photograph it, maybe record music.'"2

Later in the day, Cohen began to wonder whether his trip was in vain. He had exhausted every name on his search list of banjo players and he had no desire to return to the hot boarding house room along the railroad tracks of Hazard. Earlier, he had visited an eighty-five-year-old fiddler, Wade Woods, but Woods could barely play anymore. On a whim, Cohen took the first dirt road that led off the main highway to see what or who might turn up. Turning off the hardtop, he crossed over a little bridge and stream and entered a lumber-mill village called Daisy. He approached a couple of small houses and, at the first one, asked some children standing out front, "Any banjo players around here?"

"Over there in that house," they replied.

Cohen pulled up and recognized a young man named Odabe Halcomb he had recorded the night before at a nearby roadhouse.

"What are you doing here?" Halcomb asked, surprised to see this outsider on his doorstep.

"Well, I'm looking for music," Cohen said.

Halcomb turned to his adopted aunt, and Cohen asked her to play a banjo tune. Mary Jane Halcomb played a couple of songs including, "Charles Guiteau," about assassin of President James A. Garfield. Suddenly she announced, "Here comes Rossie!"

A wiry and weathered man, aged forty-seven, Roscoe Halcomb walked toward the house.3 A manual laborer and former miner, Halcomb lived at the very end of the hollow in Daisy. After some cursory introductions, Halcomb played a song for Cohen called "Across the Rocky Mountain." "My hair stood up on end," Cohen later remembered. "I couldn't tell whether I was hearing something ancient, like a Gregorian Chant, or something very contemporary and avant-garde." The combination of pulse-like rhythm, coupled with the high, tight singing, and the insistent droning notes of the guitar had its effect. "It was the most moving, touching, dynamic, powerful song I'd ever experienced . . . not the song itself but they way he sang it was just astounding. And I said, 'Can I come back and hear you some more?'"4

John Cohen, Roscoe Holcomb, Daisy, KY, 1959.

Roscoe Halcomb allowed Cohen to visit him at home on a number of occasions to record, photograph, and film him. Cohen produced a remarkable documentary, The High Lonesome Sound, not only of Halcomb and his music, but also of the social, economic, and cultural life of Daisy and Perry County. Cohen's work undermined stereotypes by portraying Appalachian people differently than the typical "hillbilly" caricatures that circulated on television, in movies, cartoons, and popular magazines during the 1950s and 1960s. Cohen countered these images through documentary realism, depicting the diversity and vitality of eastern Kentucky's cultural life while revealing the poverty that an exploitative mining economy created.

A sympathetic interpreter, Cohen still controlled the means of representation. He acknowledged that subjective desires and motives dominated the documentarian's objective conceits. Documentary workers revealed and described, but also framed and selected. "Although I had come to Kentucky to document what I heard," Cohen later reflected, "inevitably the undertaking required me to become an editor. I was put in the position of determining . . . how [Roscoe] was presented, and photographed. Like it or not, my task was to shape Roscoe's image. I was uneasy with this situation, but then again, there were few alternatives." Cohen was neither a social scientist diagnosing the causes of poverty, nor a journalist writing or filming an exposé for a national outlet. He arrived before Michael Harrington's The Other America (1962) focused the nation's attention on Appalachia as one pocket of poverty in a nation of affluence and before Harry Caudill published the groundbreaking and controversial book Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1963). Cohen also visited the region eight years before a man named Hobart Ison shot and killed a Canadian filmmaker named Hugh O'Connor as he filmed a coal miner sitting on the porch of the home he rented from Ison in Jeremiah, Kentucky, just down the road from Daisy. Ultimately, Cohen came to observe an economic depression and the music and culture of the Mountain South that possessed his heart and mind.5

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Preface | Introduction | Cohen's Awakening | In the Folk Revival | Kentucky, 1959 | Portraying Roscoe Holcomb | Mountain Music of Kentucky | Mythologizing Halcomb | Documenting Halcomb | The High Lonesome Sound | Reception | Aftermath | Conclusion | Notes | Recommended Resources

Published: 6 August 2008

© 2008 Scott Matthews and Southern Spaces