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
Portraying Roscoe Holcomb:
Cohen's documentation of the life and music of Roscoe Halcomb provides a compelling example of his fascination for Appalachia's seemingly conflicted culture. Here he found a place and people he saw as unique and mysterious because of the coexistence of traditional rural values alongside modern poverty produced by the mining industry. Cohen's work demonstrates how sound recording, photography, and film could present a dignified, respectful, and admiring portrait of a poor, middle-aged man from Appalachia in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Yet, because of the humanity and artistry of his work, Cohen also created a romantic narrative that portrayed the poverty Halcomb faced not as a product of an exploitative economy but as an aesthetic quality authenticating his music and validating its emotional force. Through Cohen's lens and microphone, poverty becomes not a burden but a precondition for beauty, a signifier of pure, powerful folk expression, of authenticity. Halcomb consented to documentation and exposure not because he wanted recognition for his music but because he believed Cohen truly appreciated it and that the younger musician might help him get a job.
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Still of Roscoe Holcomb playing guitar on his front porch from The High Lonesome Sound
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When Cohen met Halcomb for the first time in June of 1959, he saw "a little, wiry person, stooped from hard physical work, coughing from asthma, black lung, and too much smoking." He was also quiet, gentle, unassuming and melancholic. After hearing him play "Across the Rocky Mountain," Cohen said Halcomb "seemed gigantic and full of inner strength." Cohen acknowledged his "Appalachian posture," his "hard life," and his "broken health," but these features, along with his conflicted relationship with old and new ways in the mountains "all gave an edge to his music." Something "heroic and transcendent" emanated from his voice. His singing "had a power that went straight to the listener's core." Cohen recalled, "His spiritual concern was beautiful and always present, revealed with a sharp, cutting expression of pain." The poverty Halcomb faced each day shaped the man and his music, but he never dwelled on it. Cohen, however, emphasized the poverty in Halcomb's life, not as a personal burden that took a toll on his physical and mental well-being, though Cohen certainly recognized this, but as an abstract force that gave the older musician's music its power, its "edge."43
In 1959, poverty was only one of Halcomb's many worries. Cohen sensed tension in his home. "His old ways were in conflict with the rest of the household. He was tolerated, but there was little feeling for his music, which was met with indifference or scorn." Earlier in his life he played with a small country band, but in 1959 if Halcomb played music, he played it alone, or occasionally with the older members of his family such as Mary Jane Halcomb and his adopted nephew Odabe Halcomb or with his old friend, Lee-boy Sexton. The children in his home (his wife Ethel's from a previous marriage to a miner who died in an accident) preferred to listen to rock n' roll music on the radio rather than the old ballads and blues Halcomb played on guitar or banjo. "It's not music," he said of rock n' roll in 1962, "it don't suit me . . . well the young generation can't hardly tell the difference no how cause they never heared nothing else much but that — but since this old music started back they're beginning to learn different."44
In 1959, poverty was only one of Halcomb's many worries. Cohen sensed tension in his home. "His old ways were in conflict with the rest of the household. He was tolerated, but there was little feeling for his music, which was met with indifference or scorn." Earlier in his life he played with a small country band, but in 1959 if Halcomb played music, he played it alone, or occasionally with the older members of his family such as Mary Jane Halcomb and his adopted nephew Odabe Halcomb or with his old friend, Lee-boy Sexton. The children in his home (his wife Ethel's from a previous marriage to a miner who died in an accident) preferred to listen to rock n' roll music on the radio rather than the old ballads and blues Halcomb played on guitar or banjo. "It's not music," he said of rock n' roll in 1962, "it don't suit me . . . well the young generation can't hardly tell the difference no how cause they never heared nothing else much but that — but since this old music started back they're beginning to learn different."44
The tensions and conflicts that defined Halcomb also had roots in social and economic changes affecting eastern Kentucky during the mid-twentieth century. "Roscoe was right in the center of conflicting Appalachian values," Cohen observed. Born in 1912, the agrarian world of Halcomb's youth gave way to one dominated by the mining and timber industries. "I was raised up when there were very few coal mines," Halcomb told Cohen, and "we made our living mostly in farming." He was also raised in the Old Regular Baptist church singing slow, somber, lined-out hymns. But as the Pentecostal-Holiness sect spread throughout the Appalachian region in the early twentieth century, he turned away from the Baptists who believed musical instruments were sinful and, instead, started playing guitar and banjo at a local Holiness church. Nevertheless, Halcomb still sang the Old Regular Baptist hymns at concert performances and alone at home "rekindling feelings, reliving lost pleasures, and immersing self and sentiments in days gone by," Cohen noted.45 |
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John Cohen, Men praying at Old Regular Baptist Church, Jeff, KY, 1959. |
Listen to a clip of
Old Regular Baptist Church, "When We Shall Meet" (21 sec.)
Disc One, Mountain Music of Kentucky CD (Smithsonian Folkways CD 40077), 1996. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime |
When Cohen first met Halcomb, he admitted he "had no idea what he was about." "I only knew that he usually worked at construction jobs and that the way he sang his songs had a great effect on me. Now, after almost forty years, I have come to realize I was hearing a man confronting the dilemma of his own existence." Cohen's trip to Kentucky also allowed him to confront his own existential struggles. Going to Appalachia resembled a pilgrimage, a search for meaning, values, and traditions missing from his own life in New York City. The region's apparent isolation and poverty, Cohen believed, nurtured music that combined tradition with powerful expressions of sorrow. It also sustained what he saw as folk customs that seemed like true expressions of a rural and traditional way of life he never knew in New York. In the summer, tomatoes and corn came fresh from the garden, in the fall at the first frost, Cohen noticed, "across the porches of East Kentucky, beautiful, bright-patterned, handmade patchwork quilts would appear, hanging out to be aired after summer in musty storage chests." He characterized what he saw as more than quaint tradition. The scene equaled "a visual experience" at the "Museum of Modern Art . . . the country version of contemporary aesthetics." Like Halcomb's music, eastern Kentucky's material culture seemed to blend the traditional and avant-garde. Cohen said in the late 1990s that these rural traditions and cultural expressions "never felt like 'folk art' or 'Americana,'" but at the time they signified to him a regional vitality and authenticity, attracting the "value hunter" Susan Montgomery identified in her 1960 article. "That part of Kentucky may be out of phase with the rest of the country," Cohen wrote in 1960, "but it can work well for itself right there. Those people have ways of doing things and attitudes which we in the city feel missing in ourselves — which is probably one of the big reasons we get so much from their songs."46
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
