John Cohen in Eastern Kentucky: Documentary Expression and the Image of Roscoe Halcomb During the Folk Revival
Scott Matthews, Hollins University
Essay Sections:
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
Cohen's Musical and Artistic Awakening:
In 1948, at the age of sixteen, John Cohen first heard
Woody Guthrie's Dust
Bowl Ballads at summer camp at a site called Turkey Point, north of New York City. The music
entranced him. Guthrie's ballads and other albums of old songs and
fiddle tunes sparked not only Cohen's
fascination with old-time music, but also his rebellion against mainstream
culture.12 At the same camp, Cohen also got an introduction to Kentucky
mountain
music and learned how to both build and begin to play a banjo. Woody Wachtell,
a camp counselor, had been to Kentucky with Margot Mayo, founder of
the American Square Dance Group, whose uncle, Rufus Crisp, was a banjo
player
from Allen, Kentucky. Crisp had recorded for the Library of Congress
during the 1940s and '50s. Wachtell and Mayo made recordings of Crisp
who, in
turn, taught Wachtell about the banjo. Wachtell, as Cohen remembered,
"conveyed such joy with his music . . . it was astounding to me .
. . it had the
feeling that it was something that I could do." Cohen also listened
to music collected by John and Alan Lomax in the southern mountains
while attending camp. A record called Mountain
Frolic gave Cohen his first glimpse into the world of old-time music
and string bands. When Cohen returned to his suburban high school in
the fall, familiar with sounds from Appalachia, and interested in playing
the guitar and banjo, he began to feel alienated from his peers. "I
was the only person — the only person — playing a guitar
in high school,"
he recalled, "and the only one singing these kinds of songs . . .
which didn't
make me special . . . it made me seem weird, you know, strange."13
Cohen's sense of alienation persisted when he attended Williams College in 1950. Fraternities dominated the school's social scene and he met no one who shared his fascination with folk music. He found solace playing the banjo in his room and listening repeatedly to the Library of Congress recordings in the school's library. At night, he tuned his radio to WWVA and listened to country music broadcasted many miles to the south. The sounds seemed alien, but deepened his fascination for Appalachian music. "The songs spoke of Honky Tonk life and cheating wives and husbands on the one hand, and of the longing for home, farm and tradition, on the other." Enraptured, Cohen spent his first summer after college hitchhiking south to experience the music firsthand. When one of his rides stopped for gas somewhere in Virginia late at night, Cohen noticed the bugs swarming around the station's lights as a radio outside blared Flatt and Scruggs. He had heard Flatt and Scruggs before, but never so close to the source. They hit him hard.14
Fed up with the preppy culture of Williams, Cohen transferred to the art school at Yale in 1951 and fell in with a group of students and professors who played a profound role in shaping his career. Cohen found Tom Paley, a mathematics graduate student, who shared his passion for southern folk music. Cohen, Paley, and other enthusiasts started hosting and promoting "hootenannies" in 1952 and 1953. Early on, the "hoots" attracted only a few art and graduate students, but word spread and the next thing Cohen knew "two or three hundred students were showing up to sing with us on Friday nights."15
Cohen's sense of alienation persisted when he attended Williams College in 1950. Fraternities dominated the school's social scene and he met no one who shared his fascination with folk music. He found solace playing the banjo in his room and listening repeatedly to the Library of Congress recordings in the school's library. At night, he tuned his radio to WWVA and listened to country music broadcasted many miles to the south. The sounds seemed alien, but deepened his fascination for Appalachian music. "The songs spoke of Honky Tonk life and cheating wives and husbands on the one hand, and of the longing for home, farm and tradition, on the other." Enraptured, Cohen spent his first summer after college hitchhiking south to experience the music firsthand. When one of his rides stopped for gas somewhere in Virginia late at night, Cohen noticed the bugs swarming around the station's lights as a radio outside blared Flatt and Scruggs. He had heard Flatt and Scruggs before, but never so close to the source. They hit him hard.14
Fed up with the preppy culture of Williams, Cohen transferred to the art school at Yale in 1951 and fell in with a group of students and professors who played a profound role in shaping his career. Cohen found Tom Paley, a mathematics graduate student, who shared his passion for southern folk music. Cohen, Paley, and other enthusiasts started hosting and promoting "hootenannies" in 1952 and 1953. Early on, the "hoots" attracted only a few art and graduate students, but word spread and the next thing Cohen knew "two or three hundred students were showing up to sing with us on Friday nights."15
 |
Playing hoots and meeting other musicians occurred alongside Cohen's formal education.
He studied painting with Josef Albers and photography with the Swiss artist Herbert
Matter who introduced him to another Swiss photographer "in retreat from the
Swiss bourgeois life," Robert Frank.16 After graduating from Yale, Cohen moved
to New York City and, for a short time, lived next door to Frank on the lower
East Side at 32 3rd Ave. In 1957, before his book The
Americans was published, Frank showed Cohen a stack of photographs he shot
during his travels across the country. The floor was strewn with prints. Frank's
photographs captivated Cohen and showed him another way of seeing his surroundings.
While the FSA photographers revealed the roots of poverty and social patterns,
Frank focused more on the interiority of American life — the "hollowness and
corrosion" that lurked beneath the sheen of mainstream middle-class society.
Cohen believed Frank's photographs evoked a visceral and subjective response
that focused on emotion and feeling. "They hit me," Cohen recalled. "It
was no longer FSA, it was no longer news, and it wasn't art either, you know,
it wasn't [Edward] Weston."17 |
|
Cohen's friendship allowed him to work on the set of Frank's 1959 experimental
film about Beat culture, Pull
My Daisy, which was based on a script by Jack Kerouac. Cohen served as
the set photographer, taking stills of the filming. The cast Frank assembled
comprised a 'who's who' list of New York's Beat scene during the 1950s: Allen
Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, David Amram, and Peter Orlovsky.
Though Cohen recalled that Frank had an idea of structure, ultimately, "improvisation
seemed to dominate the production." Cohen marveled at the way Frank carefully
composed images in the camera rather than dominate the production. "Frank's
images," Cohen recalled, "caught the feel of loft living and the crazy
openness of the Beat poets. In this setting the kitchen sink, the refrigerator,
and even
the cockroaches took on grimy meaning."18
Frank's composed images and evocation of the "feel" and material attributes of
Beat life influenced Cohen's understanding of documentary as a means to portray both
an objective reality and subjective feeling and emotional response. This tension
between the need to document and describe and the desire to follow what Cohen
called "intuitive visual impulses" defined his documentary vision. Ultimately,
Cohen rejected any pretension to cool detachment but, rather, embraced Frank's
example of documentary as art, a mode of expression in which subjectivity and
interiority guided composition. Observing Frank's filming on the set of Pull
My Daisy in 1959 would provide Cohen with a model when he began his own
documentary filmmaking in Kentucky. |
 |
Still from Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy (1959) |
During the late 1950s, Cohen also worked in New York as a photojournalist. As
he remembers, the life of a freelance photographer during this period was
frustrating and uncertain. He and other photographers responded by creating an
informal organization of independent photographers that held meetings at Cohen's
loft. Members included Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, among others. Cohen's
assignments were mostly dull and unsatisfying, although he did get an eight-page
spread in Esquire for a photo essay on motorcyclists at a rally. Life also
paid him for his photographs of the Beats taken on the set of Pull My
Daisy.
Cohen used the money he had made from Life to finance his first trip
to Kentucky during the late spring and summer of 1959. Cohen hoped his trip would
help establish an independent means of making a living, one that fulfilled creative
desires rather than stifling them, as he described, "I had to make my own means of working independently."19
Essay Sections:
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
