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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

During the late 1950s, Pikeville had a population of about six thousand people and, according to anthropologist Allen Batteau who studied the region during the 1960s, was a "commercial outpost in the midst of a mountain wilderness. After a hundred miles of travel through baffling curves and folded hills, through villages like Dwale and Ivel and Betsy Lane, in Pikeville one could find the latest styles and fashions of the American economy." Pikeville's signs of middle-class consumerism and commercialism did not fit with Cohen's image of Kentucky as a land ripe with "Elizabethan-like ballads . . . fierce banjo-playing . . . mining songs . . . and depressions . . ." He left for another commercial center, Hazard, about thirty miles away, partly because it was close to the Ritchie family's village of Viper where he had contacts. Cohen passed the first days of his trip establishing supportive connections.35

In 1959 Cohen did not have a reference source like Harry Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands, which came out in 1963. Instead, he relied on W.J. Cash's 1941 The Mind of the South, a book that was hardly relevant to life in Appalachia. Cash's reading of southern history had taught how plantation owners tried to establish a Herrenvolk democracy that reinforced racial divisions and mitigated class conflict between white planters and yeoman farmers. Cohen looked out at the economically depressed mountains searching for things that reinforced and added to his analysis. He recalled driving with old-time musician Willie Chapman over to Hyden in neighboring Leslie County. On the way they passed a burning coal truck by the side of the road, a possible casualty of an effort to organize workers who ran the ramps and tipples where truck miners brought their coal. When they passed by later that day and the truck was still on fire, Chapman suggested to Cohen that nobody wanted to intervene because they would probably get shot. "So then you realize," Cohen recollected, “that it was much more than meets the eye, or anything you looked at had a lot about it . . . ." Photographing provided Cohen with a way to make sense of what he saw, to give structure and meaning to a place that was confounding his preconceptions.36

Before he started photographing, Cohen spent a few days walking the streets of Hazard, observing and thinking about how he wanted to represent the region. He considered the "depressions" that drew him to Appalachia, "mining people vs. farming people, religious music vs. dance music." He knew he wanted to avoid the "obvious," what he had seen in photographs and what he knew people like the editors at Life expected to see: hillbillies amid squalor. He avoided stereotypical pictures, but chided himself later, knowing that by rejecting these "good" images, he also "kicked out the possibility of sale" for his photographs. Nevertheless, as Cohen wrote his friend Ross Grosman in a letter from Kentucky in 1959, "this leaves me with a strange sense of freedom in relation to what I finally do produce — for it can come from a more personal or profound part of myself." For Cohen, documentary expression and the "seeking out of ideas, feelings, situations etc. to photograph" depended on a "very subjective sequence of following whims and hunches — which are not logical immediately." If they seemed logical, Cohen purposefully avoided them. The friction between the "logical" and "literary," or the reality Cohen witnessed versus the one he imagined, provided the creative tension he felt was necessary to produce beautiful photographs.37

Cohen was keenly aware of the potential for trouble with local authorities and residents as he roamed with a camera and a recording machine. He sensed friendliness at times from the locals but wondered about how much of it was façade. "On one hand," he said, "when you get to a new place everything is exciting but at the same time everything is potentially dangerous." Cohen visited the sheriff's office in Hazard and told them, "If you see this weird guy walking around with a camera, it's me! If they pull me in, you know, it's me." He compared himself to Alan Lomax who traveled the country making recordings of strangers. While Lomax could use his association with the Library of Congress to lend credibility, Cohen had only a loose connection with the Ritchies and the UMW. "I expected and encountered an unmistakable sense of mistrust from many quarters."38

He remembered reading an article in Life magazine about how federal revenuers disguised as folk song collectors scoured the Appalachians after Prohibition hoping to dupe unsuspecting bootleggers and moonshiners. One of the first musicians he recorded, Bill Cornett, told him that folk song collectors were suspect. Cornett possessed a unique banjo style replete with odd phrasings and tunings. He had established himself as a local hero by singing "The Old-Age Pension Blues" on the floor of the Kentucky legislature. Once, while playing at the National Folk Festival, Cornett was told to keep an eye out for suspicious folklorists who would steal his music and copyright it in their own names. When Cohen arrived at Cornett's house for the first time he brought along two familiar UMW officials. Cornett sang "vigorously" on his porch for Cohen who described him as a "terrific performer, his rich musical ideas pouring out from the first moment he started playing for us." Yet, Cohen "felt his apprehension" about playing for a suspicious "outsider." Cornett said he was wary of collectors and, consequently, declared ownership of each song after he finished singing. "He was a confident person," Cohen recalled, "yet seemed gruff and abrupt about the music he knew so well. He had little doubt about its importance and that he was preserving and passing on something precious and vital."39

Cohen tried to understand where musicians' apprehensions came from and why they existed. Something larger than folk music, rooted in the long history of exploitation of the region, fueled the doubts and fears. "Suspicion starts with a feeling of being different from the mainstream culture," Cohen later asserted, "and comes down to a power struggle over who controls the means of representation." But what first attracted Cohen to Kentucky was its seeming difference. Instead of exploiting stereotypes, Cohen used this sense of difference to heighten his aesthetic experience of the musicians, their music, and their region. Kentucky mountain people, he wrote, "have been made to feel as if their own way is inadequate in the face of the sophisticated luxuries which bombard them from the national advertisements — and they know the stereotype which the national press has given of them, as ignorant, primitive and barefoot, and they resent it."40

Cohen's awareness mixed with his own preconceptions to produce an image of eastern Kentucky that was humane, yet still mythic. Towards the end of his 1959 trip, he wrote again to his friend Ross Grosman about the impressions and ideas that shaped this documentary vision, revealing the tension between his desire to depict reality and a tendency toward romanticism. "It has been a hard time here in Kentucky and I just don't know how much I have accomplished." He particularly wondered about how the ideas and impressions "communicated on film." On the one hand, he felt a "certain spirit of this region is akin to Shakespeare's England, with motivations coming from a sense of gallantry + duty primarily. People here are rugged individuals." On the other, he witnessed a less idealized reality: "But still, there is something which isn't yet clear — which I can't get with. Although there is real + warm love within families — there is something extremely opposite that — which manifests itself in feuds, shootings, cuttings, etc."41 Domestic violence and murder occurred everywhere, but in Appalachia such acts became stereotypical "feuds" or signs of a deviant and primitive culture in the minds of the many Americans who knew little about the region. Cohen never associated eastern Kentucky with deviance or attributed violence to social pathologies. Instead, the cognitive dissonance caused by seeing 'Merry England'-in-Kentucky alongside explicit talk of familial violence only deepened the region's allure and mystery for Cohen, just as Roscoe Halcomb's apparent combination of the traditional and the avant-garde heightened the power and artistry of his music.

These regional contradictions played out in person one day when Cohen drove with two brothers, both banjo players (aged sixty-eight and seventy-one), some seventy miles "out over wild mountain country," he wrote at the time, "to a section of these mountains . . . which is generally feared by people in Hazard – (who also have a fearful enough reputation themselves.)." Their destination was the home of an old fiddler whom Cohen wanted to photograph and record. "The music we made (I taped) was just exactly the greatest type which I've only heard before in the Library of Congress." And, yet, while he was among the fiddler's children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, he also overheard talk "about local murders, brothers killing brothers, wives killed by husbands, violent automobile accidents, snipings at coal operators, dirty dealing in coal contracting, moonshining, illegal hunting, etc." He also sensed the home held an "arsenal of guns" — and "all the while we were making all that nice old music."

The dissonance produced by the pleasant "old-time music" and the talk of murder, by the scene of a mother nursing her baby daughter and the whispers of fratricide, intoxicated and bewildered Cohen. Here he was in what looked like a particularly remote locale in Appalachia, recording seemingly ancient fiddle music while a television flickered in the corner of the house. "This was no log cabin," Cohen assured his northern friend. But when Cohen wanted to capture these visual impressions of Appalachia, his request to make photographs, unlike his request to record music, "was vehemently denied." Someone there had "something particular to fear" and the passionate refusal to allow photography filled Cohen with fear. Nothing else happened that day, he wrote, "but this is the atmosphere in which things operate once you leave your warm bed." The air of violence and suspicion wafted among more seemingly quaint and traditional scenes and sounds. The mixture created a place that seemed like no other in America, and that was susceptible to romanticizing.42

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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