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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

The three musicians also bonded over a mutual obsession with Harry Smith's seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, which came out on Folkways Records in 1952. The collection's powerful combination of creative packaging, Smith's humorous annotations, and the haunting sounds of a distant folk geography seduced all three. Southern music provided a vicarious connection to a rural idyll very different from Long Island or Greenwich Village. When Cohen and his friends listened to the Anthology's songs they heard the "voices of people from the rural tradition" facing their own anxieties and singing about them in their own style. The revivalists projected thoughts, emotions, and concerns onto the psyches of rural folk singers who, they believed, shared their internal anxieties. They used the language of existentialist philosophy prevalent in the literature and art of the 1950s' American underground and intelligentsia to construct their image of the folk performers on the Anthology, such as the Carter Family or Dock Boggs, who, they believed, shared their sense of alienation from modern America. Roscoe Halcomb in particular became the embodiment of this existential hero.21

When Cohen and the Ramblers reproduced the sounds and emotions of the old songs in their performances, they hoped to convey the same power and authenticity they discovered when listening to old 78s and LPs. "There are certain qualities which we demand from the music," Cohen wrote in Sing Out! magazine in 1961; "a sense of immediacy, of personal involvement, a sense of tradition as well as appreciation for that which carries things to a point where they can go no further — a feeling of 'way out,' a rejection of compromise for commercial or artistic reasons, an obsession with the song material . . ."22 Cohen's desire for immediacy, experience, and transcendence — a "feeling of 'way out'"— guided not only his relationship to traditional or old-time music but also shaped his documentary work and the nature of his eventual portrayal of Roscoe Halcomb. Cohen drew from the same aesthetic and emotional well when playing old-time music or making photographs and films about musicians and their cultures.

Peter Feldman, John Cohen at a folk festival, 1963

Two years earlier in the pages of Sing Out! Cohen responded to charges leveled by Alan Lomax, the most important folk music collector of the era, who had accused "citybillies" and "folkniks" of not understanding the real emotion of rural singers in their efforts to play authentic folk music. Cohen countered that Lomax assumed an elitist position that characterized him as a "holy ghost" sent from on high to reveal the gospel of true folk music. Cohen portrayed Lomax as out-of-date and unaware of the new ideas that characterized the folk revival in the U.S. While Lomax had been out of the country collecting folk music across Europe (and avoiding the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings), he missed folk music's shift in emphasis from what Cohen characterized as "social reform or world-wide reform" to a movement "focused more on a search for real and human values."23

Just as there was a shift in documentary photography during the mid-twentieth century from producing photographs that exposed injustice and championed social reform to a perspective more explicitly focused on subjective experience, Cohen's acknowledgement of the folk revival's existential search signaled a similar transformation that he believed Lomax did not appreciate. The Old Left and Popular Front politics that Lomax adopted while growing up during the New Deal and beginning his important work as a collector and concert organizer during the 1930s had lost their relevance. Cohen looked back to the New Deal era for aesthetic, not political, inspiration. The New Deal and Depression, he believed, were a time when people did search for values, when people did have a cause to fight for, something which defined their place in society. In his own search for values, Cohen used the past to give meaning to an uncertain and seemingly nihilistic present. His quest also pushed him to do more than learn and practice the music of old-time musicians. He felt he needed to go where they lived, to photograph and film their lives, and to experience and embrace their culture.24

Recalling the New Left's rejection of top-down leadership and authority during the 1960s, Cohen argued that he and his peers in the folk revival were not "looking for someone to lead us" because they were "looking within themselves." There was no particular "truth," no law or formula that defined folk expression. "The emotional content of folk songs is a different thing to different people," Cohen argued, "and it is hard to say that there is a single, correct way to emotional content." Echoing an old refrain in the romantic tradition, truth, according to Cohen, was "available to anyone who will seek it — and there will be eventually be as many ideas of truth as there are people pursuing it . . . There is no truth except that which we make for ourselves."25 Depression songs and eastern Kentucky, where an actual economic depression was ongoing, provided Cohen and others with a vital experience that counteracted the aesthetic and emotional landscape of 1950s suburbia. Writing in the liner notes to the Ramblers' Songs of the Depression, Cohen argued, "there is an element in young people today which feels a yearning for the thirties as a desire to have a clear and humane cause to fight for." Early Ramblers concerts even advertised themselves with the Blue Eagle of the NRA and the slogan, "I am lost. Take me back to 1932."26

NRA (National Recovery Administration) Blue Eagle Poster. This New Deal program from the 1930s was popular with workers.	Fan card from the New Lost City Ramblers 1960 concert tour featuring their own NRA eagle. Courtesy of John Cohen.

It was also during the 1930s that John Lomax and others recorded some of the haunting songs Cohen listened to while in college. The Great Depression was an incubator of authentic music according to folk music fans. The urge to depart the 1950s for the 1930s sprung from the revivalists' appreciation of the artistic and aesthetic images of the decade, as transmitted through FSA photographs, field recordings, and Harry Smith's Anthology, instead of nostalgia for the Old Left or New Deal liberalism. Cohen imbued the leftist idea of a political cause with both aesthetic and psychological concerns.

Writing for Mademoiselle magazine in 1960, Susan Montgomery wondered what lurked at heart of the folk revival: "Why American college students should want to express the ideas and emotions of the downtrodden and the heartbroken, of garage mechanics and mill workers and miners and backwards farmers. . . ." She noted that young middle-class folk revivalists were "desperately hungry for a small, safe taste of an unslick underground world." Folk music for them represented a "slight loosening of the inhibitions, a tentative step in the direction of the open road, the knapsack, the hostel." In a "brutal and threatening" world clouded by prospects of nuclear war and a culture littered with consumerism and slick popular music, folk music provided an experience that broke through the deadening influences of middle-class upbringings. Some of the most intense revivalists, those most committed to embracing and understanding the roots, styles, and aesthetics of American folk music, maintained a level of interest and commitment that extended beyond participating in group folk sings, festivals, or hootenannies. These young adults diligently learned their instruments and the significance of the songs they sang, becoming, as John Cohen acknowledged, the "best city folk musicians." These same people, Montgomery observed, often wished "they'd come from the Kentucky mountains or (depending on the music they play) that they had been born Negroes. . . . The sounds and emotions these students sing so furiously are eventually incorporated into their consciences. They are, in a sense, bedeviled people who, even though they are fine musicians, should be counted among the casualties of contemporary American life." The folk revival, according to Montgomery, functioned as a religious movement led by idealists and romantics like John Cohen — "seekers, value hunters and extremists who are willing to go all the way for something they believe in . . ."27

In 1959, Cohen recalled being "disgusted with the city, grey dirt and second-hand folk music, curious about Kentucky mountains, Elizabethan-like ballads, dulcimers, fierce banjo-playing, hillbilly music, bloody Harlan, mining songs, depressions and striking miners." He said one purpose of his Kentucky trip was to establish respectful relationships between city and country musicians. "If the city wants and needs folk music in its soul," he wrote about his trip in 1960, "then its exchange with country musicians must be a two-way affair. If we feel a desire towards their outlook on music, we must be willing to understand their way of life and to respect them as people who have something to offer in their way."28

Cohen was certainly not the only person to mythologize the Kentucky mountains as a bastion of authentic folk music, and he was not the only person making field recordings in the area in 1959. Despite jokes that young folk song collectors were overrunning the Appalachians with recording studios dragging behind them, there were actually only a few folk song collectors working during this time. Cohen, his bandmate Mike Seeger, and Ralph Rinzler, a former Swarthmore student and friend of the Seeger family came to the southern mountains. The only other visible collector in Kentucky that year was Cohen's nominal nemesis, Alan Lomax, who visited the southeastern part of the state in early September, well after Cohen had returned to New York City.29 Cohen recalled speaking to Lomax in February during the "Folk Song '59" festival that Lomax organized at Carnegie Hall. Cohen mentioned to Lomax his intention to travel to Kentucky to record and photograph musicians. Lomax sensed a competitor and tried to dissuade the naïve Cohen with the cautionary tales of a seasoned folk song collector who had recorded musicians in the Kentucky mountains during the 1930s and early 1940s. "Oh, well you're going to places where they don't have electricity," he warned, telling of carrying heavy batteries up steep hills.30

But Lomax was also hardly the first song collector in Kentucky. Long before he and Cohen arrived in 1959, folklorists and amateur collectors traveled there in the early twentieth century. Most notable was the Englishman Cecil Sharp, who had hoped to find the Elizabethan ballads preserved by years of isolation from modern industrial society.31 The romanticism expressed by these early collectors differed from Cohen's. The ballad collectors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries kept ears attuned for Child ballads, supposed vestiges of old English lineage. Cohen went to Kentucky in part because of its mining culture, which he believed produced the closest thing he would ever get to a setting reminiscent of the 1930s. In 1959, "while the rest of America was busy and prosperous," Cohen wrote, "Kentucky was experiencing a depression caused by troubles in the coal mines." He hoped to find songs sung by miners that would tap into the pathos of a recent past when rural Americans struggled nobly in the face of deprivation and hardship and produced emotionally resonant music. Unlike earlier collectors, Cohen also saw fieldwork as a personal quest for meaning, not a folkloric, literary, or academic safari. "The opportunity to visit traditional artists in their homes was seen as a privilege," Cohen recalled, "an activity of reaching out, a dynamic process that might bring meaning and music to one's own life."32

During the late 1950s, the young folk singer Jean Ritchie from Viper in Perry County contributed to Cohen's and the folk revival's romantic imaginings of the mountains. Ritchie left Kentucky in the early 1950s to live in New York City and get involved with the burgeoning folk scene. Young revivalists like Cohen loved her early recordings for Folkways, which colored their perceptions of the mythical mountains. In February 1959, Robert Shelton, who covered the American folk music scene for the New York Times, declared Ritchie "one of the finest authentic traditional folk singers we have in the United States today. She is the heir of a tradition that goes back to the pioneers who settled the Kentucky Cumberlands. Her forebears lived in isolated areas where customs were tenacious and songs were passed on from one generation to the next." In 1955, Oxford University Press published Ritchie's memoirs and family history in Singing Family of the Cumberlands. In 1959, the Riverside label released an LP by the same title on which Ritchie used excerpts from the book to tell stories about growing up in Kentucky. "Her tales are unaffected, often poetic recollections of a community that was slow moving but often quickened by the vitality of human contact," Shelton wrote. "Here was the sort of family living, except for its material poverty, that the sloganeers of 'togetherness' and The Saturday Evening Post cover artists might dream about."33

George Pickow, Jean Ritchie and Oscar Brand at WNYC in New York City, 1947	George Pickow, Jean Ritchie and Roscoe Halcomb, early 1960s

Cohen's first encounter with Ritchie's songs came over the radio waves on a program hosted by Oscar Brand in the early 1950s. Cohen's father had purchased a wire recorder for him, and he would make recordings of Brand's show and send them to his brother who attended college at University of California, Berkeley. Ritchie provided Cohen with images of Kentucky that differed from those presented by Merle Travis, a popular country singer and songwriter also from Kentucky who sang about the exploitation of miners. Later, Cohen got to know Jean Ritchie when the New Lost City Ramblers shared bills at clubs in the Village, at Izzy Young's folklore center, Carnegie Hall, and other venues. Ritchie was a distant cousin of Roscoe Halcomb who lived just below Viper in Daisy. She remembered Halcomb as one of the "'good old boys'" whom she occasionally saw "making music at square dances and set-runnings around the community." Ritchie drew upon family and community connections to provide Cohen with a list of names and contacts in Perry County.34

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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