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
The High Lonesome Sound:
The artificial feeling of being filmed played a role in
Halcomb's resistance to performing for Cohen, but there were more pressing
problems in the summer of 1962. Halcomb was unable to work. More so than
music, work gave meaning to his life. His body had suffered the consequences
of years spent working in the coal mines and on construction jobs — hard
labor, as he said. He loved to work, but that summer he was unable.
"I don't know what's gonna happen," he told Cohen. "I thought
I was getting better but it was just a thought. If I's to get a job
I couldn't
hold it — be
more worries. Man just as soon have his brains shot out as to be in that
condition, the way I feel. I don't know whether you know how I feel or
not, but it's rough. It's a rough life . . ." Sometimes the depression
that would fall over Halcomb during periods of idleness prevented him
from playing music. "I like it [music] and I don't like it; I love
to hear it and I love to play sometimes but after so long a time I get
burnt out
with it.
Long as I'm able to work and do, it ain't so bad — been used to it
all my life. When I can't do nothing it worries me and you don't feel
like playing anymore."71 |
 |
John Cohen, Roscoe Holcomb's hands, Daisy, KY, 1959. |
Kentucky mountain music may have been the film's ostensible focus, but Halcomb's
presence, though limited, provided its human face. His interior monologues early
in the film and his singing of an Old Regular Baptist hymn at its conclusion
give the documentary its emotional and psychological power. Cohen crafted the
film to reveal Halcomb not simply as a singer of ballads and blues but as a person
who lived in a particular part of Kentucky, who deeply felt and was largely shaped
by the region's social, economic, and emotional pressures, and whose music was
an intensely personal expression of pain and alienation. With The High Lonesome
Sound, Cohen created a romantic figure by portraying Halcomb as the introspective
and solitary creative genius maintaining his unique, seemingly avant-garde and
"untamed" (to
quote Bob Dylan) musical style in the face of daunting pressures and obstacles,
ranging from poverty to indifference. The film is both a paean and an elegy to
Halcomb.72
Cohen also balanced his voice-over narration with Halcomb's voice, describing in his own words his life and the role music plays in it. Following some opening scenes of a baptism at a nearby river, the focus turns to Halcomb who Cohen shows sitting in his front porch swing. "This is Roscoe Holcomb," Cohen narrates, "an unemployed construction worker who's no one different from his neighbors. He is faced with the same problems that they are — no work and no desire to move out of the mountains." Unlike prior folklore films or documentary representations of folk singers, Cohen establishes the social and economic context in which Halcomb lived before even mentioning his music. He is immediately portrayed as similar to his neighbors in terms of class, but soon distinguishes himself with insights into his music and life. Halcomb's class standing as well as his poverty almost disappears because the film emphasizes his uniqueness as a musician.
After focusing on Halcomb's face, Cohen meditates on a spider web stretching across porch frames, then on a lone cornstalk, and two butterflies fluttering nearby. Then viewers enter the private order and simplicity of home and bedroom. Dresses hang against a wall adorned with a picture of Jesus. Two neatly made beds are separated by a table supporting an electric lamp beside a window covered with lace curtains. These are not the images of squalor and of sunken and rotting homes Harry Caudill described in Night Comes to the Cumberlands and the national media depicted in popular magazines and television documentaries. The Halcombs may be poor but they maintain a dignity. When the camera returns to Halcomb's face, he reflects on the spirituality of music in a voice-over while he's pictured sitting silent and forlorn on his porch: "You know music — it's spiritual. . . It draws the attention of the whole human race."
The technological limitations of Cohen's equipment meant that he could not get Halcomb's recorded monologue in sync with the filming. Consequently, the scene focuses on Halcomb's face which wears a pensive expression as he stares out from his porch into the hollow below. The lack of synchronization allows for a deeper probing into Halcomb's interior life, revealing more of his personality. Viewers see him seemingly at ease and indifferent to Cohen's camera. The scene lacks any sense of being staged. This early image, combined with Halcomb's monologue, produced an emotional effect Cohen never intended. "I was pleased it worked so well," he later recalled, "and when I showed my film to other people they said, 'Look. That can work. You can do it that way.'" Cohen's technical naivety and restrictions ultimately made the scene more powerful than if Halcomb's voice and image had been synchronized.73
The High Lonesome Sound captured a range of musical styles. It showed the distinct religious experiences of Kentucky mountain people by depicting Old Regular Baptist and Holiness services. And it revealed the influx of modernity into the mountains with scenes of mechanized coal mines, pop music playing on Halcomb's radio, and Bill Monroe's band playing bluegrass in downtown Hazard. Nevertheless, it was not enough to provide a representative overview of a place's folk traditions. In Cohen's documentary work, the search for the authentic and moving aesthetic experience was paramount. Roscoe Halcomb himself formed the heart of the film.
The High Lonesome Sound closes with Halcomb's image and voice, providing a somber parting shot of a "worried" man caught between a faded past and uncertain present. Halcomb sits alone with thoughts and memories and his Baptist hymn book. He sings "The Wandering Boy" in the lined-out, Old Regular Baptist manner in which his family raised him. The scene begins in silence as the camera pans across the exterior of Halcomb's house and then towards a distant mountain, ominous in the day's dimming light. It then shifts to the interior of the house where Halcomb sits alone. He begins reading and singing from the hymnal and then, towards the end of the scene, slouches on the couch, his face bisected by shadows as he stares off in reverie. His singing of "The Wandering Boy" continues in the background, adding poignancy to the scene. The song's themes of longing for a lost mother and yearning for home make it particularly personal for both Halcomb, who lived at home with his mother until he was in his mid-forties, and for Cohen, whose mother's death in his early twenties prompted his own search in the wider world for meaning:
While Halcomb's singing of "The Wandering Boy" was the film's finale, it was not the last scene Cohen and Agee shot in Kentucky. On a muggy, overcast Sunday morning in September, Cohen returned to Daisy from the Little Zion Old Regular Baptist church in Jeff where, after five Sundays of being told no, the congregation (to which Jean Ritchie's mother belonged) finally allowed him to document their church service. Back in Daisy, Cohen and Agee packed their Volkswagen and prepared to head back to New York after six weeks in eastern Kentucky.
The Baptist church had not been alone in denying Cohen free reign. Roscoe Halcomb, while he permitted Cohen to film him around the house and sitting on his porch, had refused to be filmed playing music after the first encounter with Cohen's camera and recording machine when he played and then replayed "Across the Rocky Mountain." On this Sunday morning as Cohen and Agee packed their car, Roscoe, Odabe, and Mary Jane Halcomb sat on their porch watching these two young men stow their equipment and bags. And then, without request, Roscoe picked up his banjo and started "playing up a storm" while Odabe and his aunt Mary Jane danced along together on the porch. "And I just dived into the car and grabbed the camera," Cohen recalled, "and no sound."74
Cohen thought their impromptu performance conveyed multiple messages: "This is what you missed, or this is what you came for." Or, perhaps, "This is what we wanted you to get, but we couldn't find a way for you to get it," or, "This is what we really do. Bye." It happened so quickly that Cohen did not think about the reasons as he filmed. But the scene, and the Halcombs' motivation to perform as a parting shot, highlights the conflicted relationship between documentarian and documented. Were the Halcombs revealing the reality of their lives, or were they performing what they knew Cohen and Agee were after? While Cohen and Agee may have spent the past five weeks walking around with cameras and recorders, the Halcombs still exerted some control over their image.75
Cohen also thought that the Halcombs' performance signaled a sigh of relief that he and Agee were leaving "because we were chasing around with [Roscoe] so much," while also suggesting a way to assuage any guilt Halcomb felt for refusing to play music for almost the entirety of their visit. "I'm not sure if guilt is the word," Cohen recalled, "as much as the fact that he agreed that we were making a film and that he hadn't come through."76 Well after Cohen completed The High Lonesome Sound, he reflected on these tacit understandings of obligation. Cohen says he always informed the subjects of his films in advance about what he wanted to do and then asked about their wishes. "The concerns for the people who are in the film are very important. . . If you're really open, then I think people will edit themselves."77 For weeks, Roscoe Halcomb effectively edited himself by refusing to perform music while being filmed. On that Sunday morning, as Cohen and Agee prepared to leave, perhaps he felt like he got the final word.78
Cohen also balanced his voice-over narration with Halcomb's voice, describing in his own words his life and the role music plays in it. Following some opening scenes of a baptism at a nearby river, the focus turns to Halcomb who Cohen shows sitting in his front porch swing. "This is Roscoe Holcomb," Cohen narrates, "an unemployed construction worker who's no one different from his neighbors. He is faced with the same problems that they are — no work and no desire to move out of the mountains." Unlike prior folklore films or documentary representations of folk singers, Cohen establishes the social and economic context in which Halcomb lived before even mentioning his music. He is immediately portrayed as similar to his neighbors in terms of class, but soon distinguishes himself with insights into his music and life. Halcomb's class standing as well as his poverty almost disappears because the film emphasizes his uniqueness as a musician.
 |
Opening clip of Roscoe (described above) (30 sec.)
From The High Lonesome Sound (1963). Courtesy of John Cohen. Distributed through Berkeley Media LLC and Shanachie Entertainment. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime |
After focusing on Halcomb's face, Cohen meditates on a spider web stretching across porch frames, then on a lone cornstalk, and two butterflies fluttering nearby. Then viewers enter the private order and simplicity of home and bedroom. Dresses hang against a wall adorned with a picture of Jesus. Two neatly made beds are separated by a table supporting an electric lamp beside a window covered with lace curtains. These are not the images of squalor and of sunken and rotting homes Harry Caudill described in Night Comes to the Cumberlands and the national media depicted in popular magazines and television documentaries. The Halcombs may be poor but they maintain a dignity. When the camera returns to Halcomb's face, he reflects on the spirituality of music in a voice-over while he's pictured sitting silent and forlorn on his porch: "You know music — it's spiritual. . . It draws the attention of the whole human race."
 |
Clip of Roscoe at home (described above) (3:18 min.)
From The High Lonesome Sound (1963). Courtesy of John Cohen. Distributed through Berkeley Media LLC and Shanachie Entertainment. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime |
The technological limitations of Cohen's equipment meant that he could not get Halcomb's recorded monologue in sync with the filming. Consequently, the scene focuses on Halcomb's face which wears a pensive expression as he stares out from his porch into the hollow below. The lack of synchronization allows for a deeper probing into Halcomb's interior life, revealing more of his personality. Viewers see him seemingly at ease and indifferent to Cohen's camera. The scene lacks any sense of being staged. This early image, combined with Halcomb's monologue, produced an emotional effect Cohen never intended. "I was pleased it worked so well," he later recalled, "and when I showed my film to other people they said, 'Look. That can work. You can do it that way.'" Cohen's technical naivety and restrictions ultimately made the scene more powerful than if Halcomb's voice and image had been synchronized.73
The High Lonesome Sound captured a range of musical styles. It showed the distinct religious experiences of Kentucky mountain people by depicting Old Regular Baptist and Holiness services. And it revealed the influx of modernity into the mountains with scenes of mechanized coal mines, pop music playing on Halcomb's radio, and Bill Monroe's band playing bluegrass in downtown Hazard. Nevertheless, it was not enough to provide a representative overview of a place's folk traditions. In Cohen's documentary work, the search for the authentic and moving aesthetic experience was paramount. Roscoe Halcomb himself formed the heart of the film.
The High Lonesome Sound closes with Halcomb's image and voice, providing a somber parting shot of a "worried" man caught between a faded past and uncertain present. Halcomb sits alone with thoughts and memories and his Baptist hymn book. He sings "The Wandering Boy" in the lined-out, Old Regular Baptist manner in which his family raised him. The scene begins in silence as the camera pans across the exterior of Halcomb's house and then towards a distant mountain, ominous in the day's dimming light. It then shifts to the interior of the house where Halcomb sits alone. He begins reading and singing from the hymnal and then, towards the end of the scene, slouches on the couch, his face bisected by shadows as he stares off in reverie. His singing of "The Wandering Boy" continues in the background, adding poignancy to the scene. The song's themes of longing for a lost mother and yearning for home make it particularly personal for both Halcomb, who lived at home with his mother until he was in his mid-forties, and for Cohen, whose mother's death in his early twenties prompted his own search in the wider world for meaning:
"As I've traveled this wide world over
Friends I've found wherever I roam
But to me there's none like mother
None like mother dear at home
They may treat me very kindly
And bid me welcome everywhere
But it just only reminds me
Of a loving mother's care."
 |
Clip of Roscoe singing "The Wandering Boy" (described above) (2:13 min.)
From The High Lonesome Sound (1963). Courtesy of John Cohen. Distributed through Berkeley Media LLC and Shanachie Entertainment. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime |
While Halcomb's singing of "The Wandering Boy" was the film's finale, it was not the last scene Cohen and Agee shot in Kentucky. On a muggy, overcast Sunday morning in September, Cohen returned to Daisy from the Little Zion Old Regular Baptist church in Jeff where, after five Sundays of being told no, the congregation (to which Jean Ritchie's mother belonged) finally allowed him to document their church service. Back in Daisy, Cohen and Agee packed their Volkswagen and prepared to head back to New York after six weeks in eastern Kentucky.
The Baptist church had not been alone in denying Cohen free reign. Roscoe Halcomb, while he permitted Cohen to film him around the house and sitting on his porch, had refused to be filmed playing music after the first encounter with Cohen's camera and recording machine when he played and then replayed "Across the Rocky Mountain." On this Sunday morning as Cohen and Agee packed their car, Roscoe, Odabe, and Mary Jane Halcomb sat on their porch watching these two young men stow their equipment and bags. And then, without request, Roscoe picked up his banjo and started "playing up a storm" while Odabe and his aunt Mary Jane danced along together on the porch. "And I just dived into the car and grabbed the camera," Cohen recalled, "and no sound."74
 |
Clip of Roscoe, Odabe, and Mary Jane (described above) (1:00 min.)
From The High Lonesome Sound (1963). Courtesy of John Cohen. Distributed through Berkeley Media LLC and Shanachie Entertainment. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime |
Cohen thought their impromptu performance conveyed multiple messages: "This is what you missed, or this is what you came for." Or, perhaps, "This is what we wanted you to get, but we couldn't find a way for you to get it," or, "This is what we really do. Bye." It happened so quickly that Cohen did not think about the reasons as he filmed. But the scene, and the Halcombs' motivation to perform as a parting shot, highlights the conflicted relationship between documentarian and documented. Were the Halcombs revealing the reality of their lives, or were they performing what they knew Cohen and Agee were after? While Cohen and Agee may have spent the past five weeks walking around with cameras and recorders, the Halcombs still exerted some control over their image.75
Cohen also thought that the Halcombs' performance signaled a sigh of relief that he and Agee were leaving "because we were chasing around with [Roscoe] so much," while also suggesting a way to assuage any guilt Halcomb felt for refusing to play music for almost the entirety of their visit. "I'm not sure if guilt is the word," Cohen recalled, "as much as the fact that he agreed that we were making a film and that he hadn't come through."76 Well after Cohen completed The High Lonesome Sound, he reflected on these tacit understandings of obligation. Cohen says he always informed the subjects of his films in advance about what he wanted to do and then asked about their wishes. "The concerns for the people who are in the film are very important. . . If you're really open, then I think people will edit themselves."77 For weeks, Roscoe Halcomb effectively edited himself by refusing to perform music while being filmed. On that Sunday morning, as Cohen and Agee prepared to leave, perhaps he felt like he got the final word.78
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
