roscoe holcomb interview

An interview with Miles is accompanied by this terrific mix: ... Amanda Petrusich on discovering Roscoe Holcomb: ‘Bob Dylan has described Holcomb’s work as exhibiting “a certain untamed sense of control, which makes him one of the best.” I think Dylan was equivocating. He worked as a coal miner and farmer for much of his life, and was not recorded until 1958, after which his career as a professional musician was bolstered by the 1960's folk revival. An excerpt of Nelson's review can be found here: . . Would you please furnish us with the amount of money he received, the amount of his expenses, tax deductions. While Cohen embraced and encouraged Agee to read Issac Babel's short story about a young Jew conscripted into a Red Army detachment of Cossacks who had to prove his grit with violent acts, Agee responded with the poetry of William Butler Yeats and in particular a line from "The Second Coming" that reads: ". Course it don't matter with me. He applied this guiding notion while documenting music and society in Kentucky. Cohen passed the first days of his trip establishing supportive connections.35Cohen interview; Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 175-176. Halcomb's art seemed to display for Cohen the same force, dynamism, and vitality of artists like Jackson Pollock or Robert Rauschenberg. Cover Letter for Jobs For more on this generation's search for authenticity and an experience to break through the confines of contemporary middle class culture see Doug Rossinow's study of the New Left and the Civil Rights Movement, The Politics of Authenticity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). All. "The songs spoke of Honky Tonk life and cheating wives and husbands on the one hand, and of the longing for home, farm and tradition, on the other." The combination of pulse-like rhythm, coupled with the high, tight singing, and the insistent droning notes of the guitar had its effect. The New Lost City Ramblers. ———. John Cohen wrote the obituary for Sing Out!, the folk revival magazine that had spread the word about Halcomb in 1960. "Oh, well you're going to places where they don't have electricity," he warned, telling of carrying heavy batteries up steep hills.30Cohen interview. 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.75Cohen interview. "As I see it," Cohen reflected in the mid-1970s, "the underlying question is whether one views music and local traditions as either commodities or spiritual achievements. Only here could we push our own people out of their homes and force them to work low paying hard labor jobs for next to nothing. When Cohen and his friends listened to the Anthology's songs they heard the "voices of people from the rural tradition" facing their own anxieties and singing about them in their own style. Through photographs, films, and appearances at folk music festivals, Halcomb became the image of the solitary existential hero who expressed life's dilemmas in anguished, uncompromising music. Cohen's father had purchased a wire recorder for him, and he would make recordings of Brand's show and send them to his brother who attended college at University of California, Berkeley. Cunningham compared it to To Hear Your Banjo Play (1947), produced by Irving Lerner and Willard Van Dyke with dialogue by Alan Lomax. 13, no. Cohen stood on top of a long table with the camera set on a tripod as Halcomb sat playing on the porch. . "What Romanticism did," according to Berlin, "was to undermine the notion that in matters of value, politics, morals, aesthetics there are such things as objective criteria which operate between human beings. "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 . Cohen went to Kentucky in part because of its mining culture, which he believed produced the closest thing he would ever get to a setting reminiscent of the 1930s. Brooklyn: powerHouse Books, 2000. William Goodell Frost's 1899 article for the. 90, No. The article shows how Cohen's representation of the depressed conditions that shaped Halcomb's existence contributed to the power of Halcomb's mythic image during this time. Though the liner notes indicate the interview was recorded in April of 1964, the interview itself took place between Cohen and Halcomb in Kentucky in the summer of 1962 and then appeared three years later in the liner notes to The High Lonesome Sound LP. On romanticism's rejection of universal truths and absolutes see Isaiah Berlin, Jens Lund and R. Serge Denisoff, "The Folk Music Revival and the Counter Culture: Contributions and Contradictions,". It became a combination eucharist and shibboleth, and Rolling Stone loved it. This lack of a social "perspective" had more to do with a predominant concern with aesthetics rather than politics. Early on, the "hoots" attracted only a few art and graduate students, but word spread and the next thing Cohen knew "two or three hundred students were showing up to sing with us on Friday nights. L.A.'s Ash Grove club, where the Ramblers played, retained a copy of the film, and Cohen later learned from Paul Rothschild, an A&R man for Elektra Records, that Jim Morrison of The Doors viewed it there on many occasions while a film student at UCLA. Cohen's and Agee's aesthetic interests flowed from different sources. Timeline. Scott Matthews examines the documentary work John Cohen (August 2, 1932–September 16, 2019) produced in eastern Kentucky from the late 1950s into the 1960s, particularly the image he created of singer-musician Roscoe Halcomb, who is prominently featured in Cohen's 1963 film The High Lonesome Sound (made in collaboration with Joel Agee). Frost believed Appalachia had finally awoken from a "Rip Van Winkle sleep" and needed the guidance of northern missionaries to bring progress to the region while sustaining unique cultural customs. It makes me sad sometimes when I get all caught up in someone I’m researching who is dead and gone. The Lomaxes, according to Filene, promoted Leadbelly as a symbol of "actual folk," and created a "cult of authenticity" and a "web of criteria for determining what a 'true' folk singer looked and sounded like and a set of assumptions about the importance of being a 'true' folk singer." Long as I’m able to work and do, it ain’t so bad – been used to it all my life. If Agee winced at the sight of their "dinner still half alive mangled and fluttering in the bushes," he believed Cohen thought he was "ignorant of the inseparable beauty and cruelty of life." He had heard Flatt and Scruggs before, but never so close to the source. No, I don’t think they’d (the people) ever like it back like it one time was, cause the coal mine has given an awful lot of work in this country. Towards the end of his 1959 trip, he wrote again to his friend Ross Grosman about the impressions and ideas that shaped this documentary vision, revealing the tension between his desire to depict reality and a tendency toward romanticism. That's the way a lot of them feel about it. One of the first musicians he recorded, Bill Cornett, told him that folk song collectors were suspect. and depressions . "94Cohen interview. When I can't do nothing it worries me and you don't feel like playing anymore. And  I sit and think of what it must have been like being active in a time where self sufficiency was your key to survival in rural America. Though Cohen recalled that Frank had an idea of structure, ultimately, "improvisation seemed to dominate the production." 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. Cohen told Agee: "we'll make a man of action of you." . "Wasn't That a Time! They spent their days shooting footage at coal mines, churches, roadhouses, train yards, and in the homes of local residents including Halcomb's. Hereafter cited as Cohen Interview. 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. Other revivalists who heard Halcomb's music in the coming years also created a romantic image. . He left for another commercial center, Hazard, about thirty miles away, partly because it was close to the Ritchie family's village of Viper where he had contacts. "It was the most moving, touching, dynamic, powerful song I'd ever experienced . 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. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Agee wondered about Cohen's fascination for rough, mountain living. "I thought I was getting better but it was just a thought. He wrote about the ongoing depression and labor struggles in his liner notes to Mountain Music of Kentucky. . "62John Cohen, liner notes to Roscoe Holcomb and Wade Ward (Folkways Album No. Ritchie left Kentucky in the early 1950s to live in New York City and get involved with the burgeoning folk scene. United States, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 2004. CD & DVD are part of 260 pages hard-cover book including photographs & texts about the life of Roscoe Holcomb. Sep 05, 1912 - Feb 01, 1981 (age 68) Other popular celebrities. Writing for Mademoiselle magazine in 1960, Susan Montgomery wondered what lurked at heart of the folk revival: "Why American college students should want to express the ideas and emotions of the downtrodden and the heartbroken, of garage mechanics and mill workers and miners and backwards farmers. This set up an internal dialog, a debate between conceptual and creative thinking. Whoa Mule. "In order to experience an economic depression firsthand, I visited eastern Kentucky and made photos and field recordings for six weeks in 1959," he recalled.1Ronald Cohen, ed. "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. The tune here is played on Hicks’s handmade Kentucky Mountain banjo, built at the beginning of 2020. Next, I explore Cohen's first attempt at documentary film. "Her tales are unaffected, often poetic recollections of a community that was slow moving but often quickened by the vitality of human contact," Shelton wrote. But what first attracted Cohen to Kentucky was its seeming difference. Sexton, Lee. He often returned home from these trips poorer than he left. 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. Leaving from Huntington, West Virginia, a traveler passed "ramshackle cabins, swinging footbridges extending to similar cabins on the other side, abandoned carcasses of Fords and Chevrolets, piles of garbage on the riverbank, and black-faced coal-diggers crawling out of dog-hole mines. Their destination was the home of an old fiddler whom Cohen wanted to photograph and record. Viewers see him seemingly at ease and indifferent to Cohen's camera. The film is both a paean and an elegy to Halcomb.72In a 1968 interview John Cohen conducted with Bob Dylan in Sing Out!, Dylan referred to Halcomb as having an "untamed sense of control." From your friend, Roscoe." Madison County Project: Documenting the Sound, DV Mini. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1520_74').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1520_74', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Cohen thought their impromptu performance conveyed multiple messages: "This is what you missed, or this is what you came for." Cohen mentioned to Lomax his intention to travel to Kentucky to record and photograph musicians. "The people, when you take these old things . . Fred Price & Roscoe Holcomb on the beach. Neon, Bulan, Vicco, Viper, Daisy, Defiance — tiny coal and timber towns with sonorous names popped up around each bend before giving way to the Cumberland Mountains. . Folk music for them represented a "slight loosening of the inhibitions, a tentative step in the direction of the open road, the knapsack, the hostel." How was it when the coal came in?/  Well, farming’s about all there was in this country til the coal mines  come in here. The Old Regular Baptists of Central Appalachia: Brothers and Sisters in Hope. "the most moving, profound, and disturbing of any country singer in America." . An excerpt of Nelson's review can be found here: http://www.johncohenworks.com/films/reviews.html. I passed by it and went browsing for a while. UMW officials in Washington gave him the name of the regional director in Pikeville, the first place Cohen stopped when he got to Kentucky. Cohen's booklet that accompanied the LP constituted an early example of independent, self-published photography. However, for this particular category, they are arranged with the oldest posts at the top in order to clarify the sequential nature of the posts. "11John Cohen, There Is No Eye: John Cohen Photographs (New York: Powerhouse Books, 2001): 15. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1520_11').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1520_11', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); I conclude with a look at Halcomb's relative fame, and after the film, his continued struggle to survive amid the poverty of eastern Kentucky and his failing health. Letter in John Cohen's posession, copy provided for author. . John, g[e]t all the work you can for me. Cohen to Grosman, second letter; Cohen interview. Beck’s album Mellow Gold was just being released so I had to pick that up. . A time of desperation to perservere and not complain and just live your life day to day as you do any other. Cohen countered these images through documentary realism, depicting the diversity and vitality of eastern Kentucky's cultural life while revealing the poverty that an exploitative mining economy created. Cohen's assignments were mostly dull and unsatisfying, although he did get an eight-page spread in Esquire for a photo essay on motorcyclists at a rally. ." Cohen interview. On romanticism's rejection of universal truths and absolutes see Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999): 138, 140, 146-147.
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