Scott Matthews, John Cohen in Eastern Kentucky: Documentary Expression and the Image of Roscoe Halcomb During the Folk Revival; Southern Spaces

John Cohen's documentary work strived to produce a humane picture of Appalachia, but it also created a new romantic mythology that depicted Roscoe Halcomb as a visionary folk musician who, according to Cohen (writing in the mid-1960s), represented "a vanishing breed of people who have held onto their traditions despite mass culture."6 Cohen said his band-mate in the New Lost City Ramblers, Mike Seeger, referred to Halcomb's "outlook" as "Medieval." Mythologizing an Appalachian musician's supposed premodern purity was nothing new.7 Generations of folklorists, song collectors, and writers had portrayed Appalachia as a rural and isolated idyll that preserved and protected the last vestiges of pure Anglo-Saxon culture from corrosive forces of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. Cohen's descriptions of Halcomb at times evoked similar myths about the Appalachian folk created by writers like Will Wallace Harney and William Goodell Frost in the late nineteenth century, song collectors like Cecil Sharp in the 1910s, and by members of the Popular Front in the 1930s like Charles and Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie who championed and mythologized another Kentucky balladeer and mining strike organizer named Aunt Molly Jackson. Most importantly, though, Cohen combined elements of these old myths with new insights provided by modern art and thought, specifically abstract expressionism and existential philosophy. Throughout the 1960s, Halcomb became the face of authentic, noncommercial, white folk music — someone who channeled Appalachian tradition and an avant-garde energy into his art. He became a muse for Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and other young middle- and upper-class Americans who looked South for their musical roots and artistic inspiration.8

Halcomb emerged as a solitary and creative genius, a characterization that echoed the modernist cultural context Cohen imbibed while living in New York among the Beats and abstract expressionist artists. Halcomb's art seemed to display for Cohen the same force, dynamism, and vitality of artists like Jackson Pollock or Robert Rauschenberg. The emotional intensity of Halcomb's music also resonated deeply with Cohen and his peers, creating a legendary reputation for Halcomb. His hard life in the Kentucky mountains heightened his authenticity as folk musician; the sorrow and anguish that hovered over every song seemed to emanate from actual experiences rather than abstract lyrics or mournful melodies. Roscoe Halcomb, the man and his music, soon came to symbolize for Cohen and his peers in the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, the uncompromising polar opposite of popular culture circulating on the airwaves and in the magazines of urban and suburban America. If every aspect of 1950s American culture seemed a cheap imitation, then Halcomb and eastern Kentucky seemed like an authentic people and place apart.9 They may have had access to modern conveniences such as radio, television, and record players, but, for many folk revivalists, their seeming isolation and poverty mitigated these corrupting influences and preserved vestiges of raw folk expression.10

Halcomb's admirers romanticized his apparent isolation not only from urban America and popular culture, but also from his own community in Perry County, Kentucky. "He was so much of the mountains and their culture," wrote Mike Michaels, a participant in the folk revival from Chicago who knew and visited Halcomb in the 1960s, "but the artist within him that had created such unique music ultimately set him apart from his family and neighbors." Another folk revivalist, Jon Pankake, highlighted similar contradictions within Halcomb's music itself which he described as "at once so archaic and so abstractly avant-garde . . ." "the exhultation [sic] of despair . . ." "the most moving, profound, and disturbing of any country singer in America." His image as a torchbearer of Appalachian tradition relied in part upon emphasizing his roots in the poor and, apparently, isolated hollows of eastern Kentucky while his image as creative genius and avant-gardist required his depiction as separate from the people and places that comprised the region. What made him unique necessarily made him isolated. Through photographs, films, and appearances at folk music festivals, Halcomb became the image of the solitary existential hero who expressed life's dilemmas in anguished, uncompromising music.

This essay examines the thought and documentary work of folk revivalist John Cohen. It explores motivations and preconceptions that brought him to eastern Kentucky, the relationships he had there with musicians such as Roscoe Halcomb, and the influential documentary images and recordings he produced. First, I examine Mountain Music of Kentucky (1960), the first record to feature Cohen's recordings, his photography, and Halcomb's image. Cohen's 1959 photographs evoke the elegant realism of Farm Security Administration photographers of the 1930s and 1940s, combined with the psychological depth of Robert Frank's photographs from the 1950s, and Helen Levitt's poetic and candid images of everyday life in Spanish Harlem during the 1940s.

Map of sites that Cohen documented, 1959-1963 (Base Map Data: U.S. Census Bureau)

Next, I explore Cohen's first attempt at documentary film. Realizing that he could convey a wider experience of life in eastern Kentucky with film than through photography and sound recordings alone, Cohen returned to Kentucky in 1962 to make a documentary about Halcomb's Perry County milieu called The High Lonesome Sound: Kentucky Mountain Music (1963). Although Cohen had never used a motion picture camera and had little knowledge of the history of documentary film, The High Lonesome Sound expressed his response to the music and culture of Appalachian Kentucky and captured the tension between the realist and romantic motives intrinsic to documentary work during this time: "I wanted to make a visual statement encompassing both documentary and subjective ideas, to find a way to integrate feeling with seeing. I was often torn between a need to document (describe) [Cohen's parenthesis] what was in front of me and the desire to follow intuitive visual impulses. This set up an internal dialog, a debate between conceptual and creative thinking. I walked the line between these ideas all my life."11

I conclude with a look at Halcomb's relative fame, and after the film, his continued struggle to survive amid the poverty of eastern Kentucky and his failing health. Halcomb never sought wide recognition. More than anything, he simply wanted to make a living for himself and his family. Work, not music, primarily defined him. Halcomb enjoyed the opportunities to perform and to make friends outside of Appalachia, but the legend that grew around him, during and after his life, obscured the hardships and pain that he endured.