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
Mountain Music of Kentucky:
When Folkways released Mountain Music of Kentucky in 1960 (with an accompanying booklet of Cohen's notes and photographs), new stereotypes of the "hillbilly" were spreading through American culture. In the late 1950s and 1960s, an unprecedented migration of poor Appalachian people from the mountains to the mid-Atlantic and Midwest coincided with a federal War on Poverty that used the region as a symbol of America's failings. Fears of a hillbilly invasion combined with the discovery of Appalachia as an aberrant "pocket of poverty" to produce a mix of anxiety and wonder towards southern highlanders. In a February 1958 article for Harper's, "The Hillbillies Invade Chicago," |
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Still from The Beverly Hillbillies
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Albert Votaw argued that "the city's toughest integration problem has nothing to do with Negroes" but, rather, "it involves a small army of white Protestant, Early American migrants from the South — who are usually proud, poor, primitive, and fast with a knife." At about the same time, television shows such as The Real McCoys, The Andy Griffith Show, and The Beverly Hillbillies played a significant role in shaping public perceptions and stereotypes about southern mountain people. Historically, middle-class economic interests had used the hillbilly image to "denigrate working-class southern whites (whether from the mountains or not) and to define the benefits of advanced civilization through negative counterexample . . .," argues historian Anthony Harkin. Since Cohen and his peers questioned and challenged the supposed benefits of modern civilization, Appalachia, to them, did not seem deviant or a land of hillbillies but instead a bastion of authenticity, a retreat from the commercialism of contemporary mass culture. And yet, while folk song collectors like Cohen longed to leave the city for the mountains, many in the mountains yearned for middle-class comfort and a steady city job.47
Public responses to the 1960 Mountain Music of Kentucky release quickly revealed to Cohen the power that documentary and other media images carried. Folklorist D.K. Wilgus recognized the effort as one of the first to respectfully represent Kentucky folk music and life. "John Cohen's collection of Mountain Music of Kentucky is another raid on our resources by a 'furriner,'" Wilgus wrote, "but put away your long rifles, boys. We couldn't have asked for a more sympathetic interpreter than Cohen." An Appalachian journal, Mountain Life and Work, expressed similar sentiments by quickly assuring readers that Cohen's record was not another stereotyping of the region’s people and culture. "Anyone who is touchy about the subject of mountain people and music, as talked about or misconstrued by outsiders, will thank Mr. Cohen for a sympathetic, 'whole,' treatment of the music and people he met at Hazard and nearby," the reviewer wrote.48
Cohen introduced the recordings and photographs on Mountain Music of Kentucky with liner notes about the singers and the variety of music that existed in eastern Kentucky in 1959. He took some pride in presenting singers from all walks of life — farmers, coal miners, construction workers, a disc jockey, a housewife, a politician, a banker, a horse trainer — and music from a range of styles and backgrounds. Listeners heard Child ballads alongside more recent banjo and guitar tunes, some influenced by the blues. He also provided selections from the main religious traditions in the Kentucky mountains — the Old Regular Baptists who sang lined-out hymns in their slow solemn manner and the Holiness church who preferred "a style similar to popular Hillbilly music" that combined "guitars, banjos, cymbals, hand clapping, shouting" with "wild harmony." Along with the diversity of styles, Cohen also noted a diversity of motives. For Willie Chapman, a retired miner and a banjoist who played "Little Birdie" and "Jaw Bone," music was an important way "to keep active" in his old age. For Lee Sexton, a coal miner and a five-string banjo player who performed "Fox Chase" and "St. Louis Blues," playing at square dances was a "social role he maintains." But for Roscoe Halcomb, Cohen wrote in his liner notes, "music has become a deeper means towards a lonely and passionate artistic expression." Halcomb's contributions to the compilation included "Wayfaring Stranger" on banjo and "East Virginia Blues" and "Across the Rocky Mountain" on guitar, and he stands as the obvious star of the record.49 Robert Shelton, writing for the New York Times, believed Halcomb particularly deserved "to be heard in person at some of the big Eastern folk festivals" — as he eventually would. A San Francisco Chronicle reviewer declared Mountain Music of Kentucky "one of the greatest records in the entire literature of American folk song” and Halcomb as "a true genius of the white blues and Anglo-American ballad."50
After returning from Kentucky, Cohen tried to donate his tapes to the Library of Congress but given his anonymity as a folk song collector, he was initially turned away. Crushed, Cohen went back to New York and contacted Moe Asch, head of Folkways, and asked if he would release the recordings and reprint the photographs. Asch gave him a $200 budget for music editing, notes, photographs, cover design and type setting, along with instructions to "pay the artists." Cohen searched for a vivid typeface for the cover, choosing one resembling that featured on Walker Evans's 1938 collection American Photographs, which he greatly admired. Like Agee's and Evans's collaborative Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was reissued the same year, Cohen wanted to include documentary photographs alongside information about the artists and a socioeconomic description of the Kentucky mountains. Cohen's booklet that accompanied the LP constituted an early example of independent, self-published photography. It circulated his work to an audience beyond the New York art world. The complete control Asch allowed "for the material, the documentation, and the interpretation along with the visual representation" established a "pattern of independence and setting values," Cohen said, "that made it difficult" for him to "ever work in any other fashion."51
Cohen also wrote an "Introduction to the Photographs," part of which he later read during the opening scenes of his film The High Lonesome Sound: "Hazard, Kentucky in 1959 is an area reminiscent of the Depression of the 1930s. People there say that these are the worst times they have ever seen. They see no prospects for the better ahead of them." He describes labor tensions in the local mines and mentions other means of making a living. His photographs try to present a cross-section of life in this particular area of eastern Kentucky and reveal the paradoxes of a place he was confronting for the first time. Photographs of an agrarian world clash with images of soot-darkened miners who wear grave and tired expressions.
Public responses to the 1960 Mountain Music of Kentucky release quickly revealed to Cohen the power that documentary and other media images carried. Folklorist D.K. Wilgus recognized the effort as one of the first to respectfully represent Kentucky folk music and life. "John Cohen's collection of Mountain Music of Kentucky is another raid on our resources by a 'furriner,'" Wilgus wrote, "but put away your long rifles, boys. We couldn't have asked for a more sympathetic interpreter than Cohen." An Appalachian journal, Mountain Life and Work, expressed similar sentiments by quickly assuring readers that Cohen's record was not another stereotyping of the region’s people and culture. "Anyone who is touchy about the subject of mountain people and music, as talked about or misconstrued by outsiders, will thank Mr. Cohen for a sympathetic, 'whole,' treatment of the music and people he met at Hazard and nearby," the reviewer wrote.48
Cohen introduced the recordings and photographs on Mountain Music of Kentucky with liner notes about the singers and the variety of music that existed in eastern Kentucky in 1959. He took some pride in presenting singers from all walks of life — farmers, coal miners, construction workers, a disc jockey, a housewife, a politician, a banker, a horse trainer — and music from a range of styles and backgrounds. Listeners heard Child ballads alongside more recent banjo and guitar tunes, some influenced by the blues. He also provided selections from the main religious traditions in the Kentucky mountains — the Old Regular Baptists who sang lined-out hymns in their slow solemn manner and the Holiness church who preferred "a style similar to popular Hillbilly music" that combined "guitars, banjos, cymbals, hand clapping, shouting" with "wild harmony." Along with the diversity of styles, Cohen also noted a diversity of motives. For Willie Chapman, a retired miner and a banjoist who played "Little Birdie" and "Jaw Bone," music was an important way "to keep active" in his old age. For Lee Sexton, a coal miner and a five-string banjo player who performed "Fox Chase" and "St. Louis Blues," playing at square dances was a "social role he maintains." But for Roscoe Halcomb, Cohen wrote in his liner notes, "music has become a deeper means towards a lonely and passionate artistic expression." Halcomb's contributions to the compilation included "Wayfaring Stranger" on banjo and "East Virginia Blues" and "Across the Rocky Mountain" on guitar, and he stands as the obvious star of the record.49 Robert Shelton, writing for the New York Times, believed Halcomb particularly deserved "to be heard in person at some of the big Eastern folk festivals" — as he eventually would. A San Francisco Chronicle reviewer declared Mountain Music of Kentucky "one of the greatest records in the entire literature of American folk song” and Halcomb as "a true genius of the white blues and Anglo-American ballad."50
Listen to a clip of
Willie Chapman, "Little Birdie" (21 sec.)
Disc One, Mountain Music of Kentucky CD (Smithsonian Folkways CD 40077), 1996. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime |
Listen to a clip of
Lee Sexton, "Fox Chase" (20 sec.)
Disc Two, Mountain Music of Kentucky CD (Smithsonian Folkways CD 40077), 1996. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime |
After returning from Kentucky, Cohen tried to donate his tapes to the Library of Congress but given his anonymity as a folk song collector, he was initially turned away. Crushed, Cohen went back to New York and contacted Moe Asch, head of Folkways, and asked if he would release the recordings and reprint the photographs. Asch gave him a $200 budget for music editing, notes, photographs, cover design and type setting, along with instructions to "pay the artists." Cohen searched for a vivid typeface for the cover, choosing one resembling that featured on Walker Evans's 1938 collection American Photographs, which he greatly admired. Like Agee's and Evans's collaborative Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was reissued the same year, Cohen wanted to include documentary photographs alongside information about the artists and a socioeconomic description of the Kentucky mountains. Cohen's booklet that accompanied the LP constituted an early example of independent, self-published photography. It circulated his work to an audience beyond the New York art world. The complete control Asch allowed "for the material, the documentation, and the interpretation along with the visual representation" established a "pattern of independence and setting values," Cohen said, "that made it difficult" for him to "ever work in any other fashion."51
Cohen also wrote an "Introduction to the Photographs," part of which he later read during the opening scenes of his film The High Lonesome Sound: "Hazard, Kentucky in 1959 is an area reminiscent of the Depression of the 1930s. People there say that these are the worst times they have ever seen. They see no prospects for the better ahead of them." He describes labor tensions in the local mines and mentions other means of making a living. His photographs try to present a cross-section of life in this particular area of eastern Kentucky and reveal the paradoxes of a place he was confronting for the first time. Photographs of an agrarian world clash with images of soot-darkened miners who wear grave and tired expressions.
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In one photograph, a farmer plows a field with a mule while a train passes behind. Although the railroad arrived in Perry County more than forty years earlier, the juxtaposition of train and horse signifies the intrusion of the industrial capitalist age upon the region's agricultural heritage. The train transports the coal cut out of local mountains to U.S. industrial centers, leaving behind exploited people and land. In another image, children stand inside the doorway of their home, blocked from the porch by three battered planks while a broom rests against the door. The photograph conveys entrapment in poverty, passed to a new generation. Another photo shows that the movie Hard Man is being screened at the theatre in the town of Neon. Kentucky folklorist, D. K. Wilgus, who claimed the state "couldn't have asked for a more sympathetic interpreter than Cohen," praised the liner notes for "insight, sympathy, and analysis" and the photographs that "dramatically pointed out depressed conditions." Cohen, wrote Wilgus, "presents the core without the peeling."52
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Cohen, Perry County, Kentucky, 1959.
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The core of the record is not only Halcomb's music but his image. He does not appear in any of Cohen's small photographs contained in the booklet, but a photograph of him graces the record's cover, the same photograph that the New York Times printed with its review of Mountain Music of Kentucky. Halcomb became the new face of Kentucky mountain music as well as the face of the region's poverty, a force that Cohen believed gave the music its power. The former politician "Banjo" Bill Cornett, the housewife Martha Hall, the miner Lee Sexton, the farmer Granville Bowlin, the horse trainer Willie Chapman, the disc jockey George Davis – none of them possessed Halcomb's combination of intense, emotional singing with the hard-worn physical expression of poverty.
As the sound and image of Halcomb began to circulate, he came to "symbolize an ideal of the folk song revival," according to Cohen, "a bed-rock 'roots' musician free from adulteration by the commercial recording and academic worlds. He had a backwoods 'purity' sustained by isolation, and if I hadn't found him and recorded him, he would never have looked outside his home community for listeners."53 Cohen's "discovery" certainly granted Halcomb notoriety he would not have otherwise received, but the exposure created an image that reinforced the romantic myths many folk revivalists held about folk music and folk musicians. Halcomb shared poverty and "backwoods purity" with some of the other singers on the record. But what gave his music its unique power and emotional force, its credibility, was his ability to express the psychological toll of poor mountain living not through direct and explicit lyrics about economic depressions, mining conditions, strikes, and poverty but through a quavering high-pitched voice that channeled the pathos and emotion of old traditional ballads and blues and revitalized them with his own feelings of anguish. Stylistically, his voice drew from the Old Regular Baptist hymn singing, the blues, and old-time "country," the same forces which gave rise to Bluegrass. Even if Halcomb did not mention the sources of his pain, his emotion seemed a personal response to his condition, certified by his image on the record's cover. For consumers who equated apparent isolation and poverty with powerful music, the photograph of Halcomb standing with his banjo in front of a deteriorating wooden shack near his house only heightened the authenticity. Producing Mountain Music of Kentucky, Cohen enjoyed a level of independent creative control he relished and would never relinquish. Appearing on the record, Halcomb relinquished creative control of his music and image, something he would never regain.
Halcomb's wife, Ethel, objected to Cohen's depiction of her husband and her home. She resented that the shed was shown rather than her nice white house, Roscoe Halcomb said. "Why do the people around here object to the photograph of your shed on the record cover?" Cohen asked him two years after the record was released. "The people, when you take these old things . . .," Halcomb replied, "you see, we live in these old mountains here and we've been raised up pretty rough and a lot of them does the best they can do and they take it as if you take the worst you can find to make a picture to take back to New York to show the people. That's the way a lot of them feel about it. Course it don't matter with me."54 Although Halcomb said the image did not matter to him, he was not in a position to protest. He wanted Cohen's cooperation and to call into question the ethics or motives behind Cohen's work would upset their amicable relationship. Many eastern Kentuckians felt resentment about their media portrayals, especially during the 1960s as the country tried to address persistent poverty in an "affluent society." Some believed they were being shamed for not fitting the white middle-class ideal of mainstream American culture.55
Soon after the record's release, Halcomb's image began to circulate widely, appearing not only on the cover of the album but in the New York Times on April 24, 1960 where Robert Shelton reviewed Mountain Music of Kentucky and described the singers as being "rooted in the earth" with the "lusty propulsion of their music reflect[ing] it."56 What Halcomb's wife and others in the Kentucky mountains found offensive or exploitative, the New York art world to which Cohen belonged during the late 1950s and 1960s found beautiful and poetic. In the fall of 1959, the Image Gallery exhibited Cohen's Kentucky photographs and Jacob Deshin reviewed the exhibition for the Times. "The dreary world of a Harlan County [Perry County], Kentucky community down on its luck is the major theme of John Cohen's one-man exhibition . . .," Deshin wrote. "Suggesting the documentary approach of the early Thirties, when photographers were faced with similar material, the pictures are reminiscent of work in that period, but with a difference. Mr. Cohen adds the poetic touch and the vision of the artist that have become associated with his photography."57
The distinction between Cohen's work and 1930s photography that Deshin alludes to here is tied to the influence of such photographers as Robert Frank and Helen Levitt on Cohen's vision and his seemingly more apolitical motives compared to Farm Security Administration photographers working for the Roosevelt administration. Cohen's search was for beauty, not propaganda, but the unintended consequences of his photographs were no less persuasive. Perhaps in response to Ethel Halcomb, Cohen shot another photograph of Halcomb in 1964, again holding his banjo, but this time dressed in a suit and tie and wearing a fedora. The shot is close up and presents the musician as the larger-than-life figure many in the folk revival imagined. Having established Halcomb's rural Kentucky roots, Cohen perhaps felt compelled to temper the image of a poor, aging musician with a photograph that represented eastern Kentuckians' desire to seem less like caricatures to the eyes of outsiders.
Listen to a clip of
Granville Bowlin, "Charlie's Neat" (20 sec.)
Disc Two, Mountain Music of Kentucky CD (Smithsonian Folkways CD 40077), 1996. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime |
As the sound and image of Halcomb began to circulate, he came to "symbolize an ideal of the folk song revival," according to Cohen, "a bed-rock 'roots' musician free from adulteration by the commercial recording and academic worlds. He had a backwoods 'purity' sustained by isolation, and if I hadn't found him and recorded him, he would never have looked outside his home community for listeners."53 Cohen's "discovery" certainly granted Halcomb notoriety he would not have otherwise received, but the exposure created an image that reinforced the romantic myths many folk revivalists held about folk music and folk musicians. Halcomb shared poverty and "backwoods purity" with some of the other singers on the record. But what gave his music its unique power and emotional force, its credibility, was his ability to express the psychological toll of poor mountain living not through direct and explicit lyrics about economic depressions, mining conditions, strikes, and poverty but through a quavering high-pitched voice that channeled the pathos and emotion of old traditional ballads and blues and revitalized them with his own feelings of anguish. Stylistically, his voice drew from the Old Regular Baptist hymn singing, the blues, and old-time "country," the same forces which gave rise to Bluegrass. Even if Halcomb did not mention the sources of his pain, his emotion seemed a personal response to his condition, certified by his image on the record's cover. For consumers who equated apparent isolation and poverty with powerful music, the photograph of Halcomb standing with his banjo in front of a deteriorating wooden shack near his house only heightened the authenticity. Producing Mountain Music of Kentucky, Cohen enjoyed a level of independent creative control he relished and would never relinquish. Appearing on the record, Halcomb relinquished creative control of his music and image, something he would never regain.
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Cohen, Roscoe Holcomb, Daisy, Kentucky, 1959.
This is the photograph that appears on the cover of the Mountain Music of Kentucky LP from 1960.
This is the photograph that appears on the cover of the Mountain Music of Kentucky LP from 1960.
Halcomb's wife, Ethel, objected to Cohen's depiction of her husband and her home. She resented that the shed was shown rather than her nice white house, Roscoe Halcomb said. "Why do the people around here object to the photograph of your shed on the record cover?" Cohen asked him two years after the record was released. "The people, when you take these old things . . .," Halcomb replied, "you see, we live in these old mountains here and we've been raised up pretty rough and a lot of them does the best they can do and they take it as if you take the worst you can find to make a picture to take back to New York to show the people. That's the way a lot of them feel about it. Course it don't matter with me."54 Although Halcomb said the image did not matter to him, he was not in a position to protest. He wanted Cohen's cooperation and to call into question the ethics or motives behind Cohen's work would upset their amicable relationship. Many eastern Kentuckians felt resentment about their media portrayals, especially during the 1960s as the country tried to address persistent poverty in an "affluent society." Some believed they were being shamed for not fitting the white middle-class ideal of mainstream American culture.55
Soon after the record's release, Halcomb's image began to circulate widely, appearing not only on the cover of the album but in the New York Times on April 24, 1960 where Robert Shelton reviewed Mountain Music of Kentucky and described the singers as being "rooted in the earth" with the "lusty propulsion of their music reflect[ing] it."56 What Halcomb's wife and others in the Kentucky mountains found offensive or exploitative, the New York art world to which Cohen belonged during the late 1950s and 1960s found beautiful and poetic. In the fall of 1959, the Image Gallery exhibited Cohen's Kentucky photographs and Jacob Deshin reviewed the exhibition for the Times. "The dreary world of a Harlan County [Perry County], Kentucky community down on its luck is the major theme of John Cohen's one-man exhibition . . .," Deshin wrote. "Suggesting the documentary approach of the early Thirties, when photographers were faced with similar material, the pictures are reminiscent of work in that period, but with a difference. Mr. Cohen adds the poetic touch and the vision of the artist that have become associated with his photography."57
The distinction between Cohen's work and 1930s photography that Deshin alludes to here is tied to the influence of such photographers as Robert Frank and Helen Levitt on Cohen's vision and his seemingly more apolitical motives compared to Farm Security Administration photographers working for the Roosevelt administration. Cohen's search was for beauty, not propaganda, but the unintended consequences of his photographs were no less persuasive. Perhaps in response to Ethel Halcomb, Cohen shot another photograph of Halcomb in 1964, again holding his banjo, but this time dressed in a suit and tie and wearing a fedora. The shot is close up and presents the musician as the larger-than-life figure many in the folk revival imagined. Having established Halcomb's rural Kentucky roots, Cohen perhaps felt compelled to temper the image of a poor, aging musician with a photograph that represented eastern Kentuckians' desire to seem less like caricatures to the eyes of outsiders.
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
