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
Conclusion:
Halcomb returned to eastern Kentucky where he died in 1981. John Cohen wrote the obituary for Sing Out!, the folk revival magazine that had spread the word about Halcomb in 1960. "He confirmed our belief that such a profoundly moving musician could grow and exist in America apart from the commercial art and music which surrounds us. His homemade music conveyed a precise clarity which reached people far beyond his home in eastern Kentucky. Roscoe's very closeness to his local tradition was the recognizable feature which permitted so many to understand the value and expressiveness of his, or any, regional sound. . . . He expressed for us our love of traditional art, the painfulness of life and the glory of music that comes from such a source. He enriched our lives and we will miss him."98
Cohen listed the characteristics he and others found in Halcomb during the 1960s: profound emotional depth, separation from popular culture, grounded in tradition, and personal pain as a precondition for powerful music. Halcomb and his music enriched many lives during his time, and after his death. How much was his life enriched by being documented and mythologized? He received praise from the vanguard of American culture and earned international acclaim, but died poor in Daisy. He traveled widely, not for self-promotion or to enrich young, middle-class lives, but to try to earn a living. He often returned home from these trips poorer than he left. |
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Closeup of Roscoe Holcomb playing guitar
from The High Lonesome Sound |
Cohen did not grapple with many of the ethical dilemmas intrinsic to doing documentary work when he first visited eastern Kentucky in 1959. He acknowledged he was a spy, a characterization that James Agee also copped to in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men some twenty years earlier. "Spying, intruding, poking my camera into the lives of people," Cohen admitted in the pages of Sing Out! in 1960, "getting farmers and miners to give their music into my tape recorder — and I couldn't promise them anything in return except my interest which they had done pretty well without until then. (If it wasn't for the fact that something worthwhile might come out of this, something that will cause people to look with open eyes — and open their hearts to sounds other than those they already know — then I would never want to put myself in such a situation.)"99 Cohen justified his trip with motives that transcended his personal emotional and aesthetic needs and fulfilled a more altruistic and communal purpose. A half-century later, we know Cohen's hopes were confirmed: his work opened eyes, ears, hearts, and continues to draw people from all over the world into the life and music of Roscoe Halcomb and the changing culture of southern Appalachia.
Long after his first Kentucky trip, Cohen delved deeper into the ethical quandaries and said he had "always wondered about the implicit arrogance of any collector's stance, for in this role you have no choice but to be part confidence man, part academic, part spy. . . . In the most self-critical light, collecting music from innocent informants is an exploitative act — taking from them to serve a function such as a term paper, or credits toward a degree, writing a book, or producing a record" — or in Cohen's case, filling out an old-time music group's repertoire and satisfying personal, emotional, and aesthetic desires.100 Cohen attempted to resolve the tension between the documentarian as exploiter and appreciator, and perhaps placate his conscience, by understanding songs, people, and places not as things or objects to be collected, catalogued, and torn from their human sources but, rather, as more ethereal and "spiritual" traces. This interpretation allowed him to see his documentary work not as cultural theft but as a cultural gift to audiences who might be similarly moved by the people and the music. In turn, these audiences would develop an appreciation and respect for people and places about which they previously knew little. One of Cohen's teachers told him, "To distribute material goods is to divide them, while to distribute spiritual goods is to multiply them." He applied this guiding notion while documenting music and society in Kentucky.
Looking back on his work, Cohen finds a mixture of pride and confusion. His body of photographs, films, and recordings revealed a wealth of artistic and musical vitality in the hollows and hills of Appalachia, but doing documentary work did not give him a clean break from the people and places he visited. His work still resonates and provokes, from the classroom to the mountains. "And in the South in recent years," he said, "there's been a very confusing — to me confusing — resentment that I was down there before some of them were born. 'What right do you have to make The High Lonesome Sound? You're an outsider.'" To these criticisms, Cohen replies, "Nobody was interested in documenting that music back then. So I did it. If I hadn't found [Roscoe Halcomb] where I had found him, he would have never been recorded. No one was interested in him, and he wasn't interested in coming out. No one was interested in coming to listen. He didn't want to go make records or anything."101
Long after his first Kentucky trip, Cohen delved deeper into the ethical quandaries and said he had "always wondered about the implicit arrogance of any collector's stance, for in this role you have no choice but to be part confidence man, part academic, part spy. . . . In the most self-critical light, collecting music from innocent informants is an exploitative act — taking from them to serve a function such as a term paper, or credits toward a degree, writing a book, or producing a record" — or in Cohen's case, filling out an old-time music group's repertoire and satisfying personal, emotional, and aesthetic desires.100 Cohen attempted to resolve the tension between the documentarian as exploiter and appreciator, and perhaps placate his conscience, by understanding songs, people, and places not as things or objects to be collected, catalogued, and torn from their human sources but, rather, as more ethereal and "spiritual" traces. This interpretation allowed him to see his documentary work not as cultural theft but as a cultural gift to audiences who might be similarly moved by the people and the music. In turn, these audiences would develop an appreciation and respect for people and places about which they previously knew little. One of Cohen's teachers told him, "To distribute material goods is to divide them, while to distribute spiritual goods is to multiply them." He applied this guiding notion while documenting music and society in Kentucky.
Looking back on his work, Cohen finds a mixture of pride and confusion. His body of photographs, films, and recordings revealed a wealth of artistic and musical vitality in the hollows and hills of Appalachia, but doing documentary work did not give him a clean break from the people and places he visited. His work still resonates and provokes, from the classroom to the mountains. "And in the South in recent years," he said, "there's been a very confusing — to me confusing — resentment that I was down there before some of them were born. 'What right do you have to make The High Lonesome Sound? You're an outsider.'" To these criticisms, Cohen replies, "Nobody was interested in documenting that music back then. So I did it. If I hadn't found [Roscoe Halcomb] where I had found him, he would have never been recorded. No one was interested in him, and he wasn't interested in coming out. No one was interested in coming to listen. He didn't want to go make records or anything."101
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
