Scott Matthews, John Cohen in Eastern Kentucky: Documentary Expression and the Image of Roscoe Halcomb During the Folk Revival; Southern Spaces

By 1961, Mountain Music of Kentucky had sold only 362 copies nationwide, despite enthusiastic reviews from national publications. This meant paltry compensation for the singers, which Cohen regretted. "I'm glad the money we sent you came in handy," Cohen wrote to Halcomb after the record sold some copies, "I only wish I could've sent more." While sales were slow, Cohen told Halcomb that the "record is serving as a calling card and people are hearing it. The New York Times published your photograph and said you were a singer who should be heard at folk festivals." As a way to capitalize on the revival's fascination with Halcomb and possibly generate more income for him, Cohen brought him to a festival at the University of Chicago in February of 1961. The festival's "key words," according to the Times' Robert Shelton, "were tap-roots, tradition, authenticity, and non-commercial." Those who bought Halcomb's records believed he embodied all these attributes.58

Royalties statement, Mountain Music of Kentucky, 1961

Royalties statement for Mountain Music of Kentucky, 1961.

In many ways, Cohen and his peers projected themselves onto Halcomb. Cohen's portrayal of Halcomb as a solitary, romantic, creative artist mirrored in many ways his own existence and resonated with participants in the revival. When he first heard Halcomb sing, he believed he had found someone in the mountains who shared a need for personal expression. "At the first song he sang for me, with his guitar tuned like a banjo and his intense, fine voice, I knew this was what I had been searching for — something that went right to my inner being, speaking directly to me. It bridged any cultural differences between us . . . his sentiment was profound and not at all detached . . ."59

Cohen could erase the "cultural differences" because Halcomb powerfully expressed the loneliness and alienation that Cohen sometimes experienced as a young man. But what made Halcomb's music authentic and powerful for Cohen was not only its emotional force, but its alien origins a world away from urban and suburban New York. If Halcomb's musical emotion seemed to erase cultural difference, the particular Appalachian poverty that seemed to fuel his emotion reinforced this difference and contributed to the mythic image which Cohen's work spread.

Other revivalists who heard Halcomb's music in the coming years also created a romantic image. John Pankake and Paul Nelson, who attended Halcomb's first public concert at the University of Chicago in 1961, mythologized him because of his difference from them in terms of geography, class, and culture. "Roscoe is a man's man," they wrote in 1961 for the Little Sandy Review, "who returns your handshake firmly and looks you straight in the eye when he speaks to you." Their description of Halcomb then continues to highlight his physical appearance, presence, and poetic language.

He is slender and soft-spoken — yet tough enough to have endured a hard life in the Kentucky coal mines. . . . His feeling for people and his complete immersion in life give his conversation a sensitive, almost visionary quality. There is really only one topic of conversation with him and that is the meaning of human experience. His every word is a reflection of his thoughtfulness and deep insight. . . . He speaks of the people of his region with the poeticism of a good writer, and he knows and understands their poverty, their violence and their loneliness. . . . We watched him walk away wondering if we had talked to a great man — or to a man who only seemed so because he had miraculously come to us from a time and place before the race of Americans had fallen."60

Smithsonian Folkways, The Music of Roscoe Holcomb and Wade Ward

Album cover for The Music of Roscoe Holcomb and Wade Ward (1961)

In 1961 Halcomb also made his first trip to New York City to record for Cohen a follow-up to his appearance on Mountain Music of Kentucky. The new record, The Music of Roscoe Holcomb and Wade Ward, a split-release with a Virginia fiddler, "was made . . . when he was here in person to present his music to the city people," Cohen wrote in the liner notes. "On one hand, Roscoe had been wrenched out of his own ordinary background and thrown into the nervousness which seems to particularize the city," he said, "and which brought out this same quality in him." Of course, Halcomb was a worried man back in Kentucky. His physical decline from long years of manual labor left him unemployed, poor, and unsure as to how he would provide for his family. Cohen emphasized the centrality of work and manual labor in his life. For Halcomb, work was more important than music. Few, if any, of Cohen's compatriots in the folk revival could claim a blue collar background, but Cohen still believed he and his peers felt "something of ourselves . . . in his music . . . qualities and ideas inherent in this music, seldom stated but strongly evident, which give direction and meaning. . ."61

Cohen also portrayed Halcomb for the first time in terms of the primitive. He emphasized his art's "simplicity," "directness," and its "care" and "honesty which are found in the works of true primitive painters," but in the same breath he argued that Halcomb transcended the primitive and folk art in general. Halcomb's music was a sophisticated and dynamic example of creativity with a parallel "in classical western art, and deserves similar critical consideration." Cohen, a modernist, represented Halcomb as both primitive and avant-garde, folk and high artist, a simple man who worked with his hands and "close to the land," someone whose music's "lack of refinements" and "errors" produced an "artistic statement" full of "brutal reality."62 Robert Shelton argued that "young collectors" like Cohen continued to find in the "Southern Highlands a bottomless reservoir for music and for the whole ambiance of romanticized rural life that so often embellishes the interest of the music."63