roscoe holcomb interview

"43Cohen, liner notes to Mountain Music of Kentucky CD, 29; John Cohen, liner notes to Roscoe Holcomb: The High Lonesome Sound (Smithsonian Folkways CD 40079, 1998), 2. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1520_43').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1520_43', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); In 1959, poverty was only one of Halcomb's many worries. During the late 1950s, Cohen also worked in New York as a photojournalist. Sexton, Lee. His work by no means celebrates poverty, but it does emphasize art produced in conditions of poverty as an aesthetic rather than a political phenomenon. For the distinction between Frank and FSA photographer Walker Evans, see William Stott, "Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and the Landscape of Disassociation," Arts Canada 31 (December 1974) and Leslie Baier, "Visions of Fascination and Despair: The Relationship Between Walker Evans and Robert Frank," Art Journal Vol. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1520_57').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1520_57', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); 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. by Suzanne Zalokar | 18 Jul 2015. 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. "38Cohen interview; Cohen to Ross Grosman; Cohen, "Field Trip — Kentucky," 13; Cohen, liner notes to Mountain Music of Kentucky (Smithsonian Folkways CD 40077, 1996), 24. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1520_38').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1520_38', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Clip, "Banjo" Bill Cornett, "Buck Creek Girls," Disc One, Mountain Music of Kentucky CD, Smithsonian Folkways CD 40077. 41 (September-October 2002): 101, 105-107. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1520_69').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1520_69', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Because Cohen's camera did not allow for synchronized sound, he had to film and record separately, which occasionally created a feeling of artificiality for him and, especially, for Roscoe Halcomb. Man just as soon have his brains shot out as to be in that condition, the way I feel. "I couldn't tell whether I was hearing something ancient, like a Gregorian Chant, or something very contemporary and avant-garde." Halcomb and his music enriched many lives during his time, and after his death. 1976. . A sympathetic interpreter, Cohen still controlled the means of representation. When the showing ended, the only response Cohen heard was about how Aunt Mary Jane had since painted her house. . Long before he and Cohen arrived in 1959, folklorists and amateur collectors traveled there in the early twentieth century. 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. King, Martha and Rob Roberts. 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." . House in New Orleans (House of the Rising Sun) 5. 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. No Depression 41 (September-October 2002): 101 - 107. Cohen also listened to music collected by John and Alan Lomax in the southern mountains while attending camp. 3 (Fall 1960): 51. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1520_48').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1520_48', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Clip from Willie Chapman, "Little Birdie," Disc One, Mountain Music of Kentucky CD, Smithsonian Folkways CD 40077. John Cohen, "Conversations with Bob Dylan," Sing Out!, Vol. ———. Overview ↓ … "101"A Transcription of Remembering the High Lonesome Sound," 8-9. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1520_101').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1520_101', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Scott Matthews is an Assistant Professor of History at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. (Available: www.arhoolie.com). Dwight Yoakam. The region's apparent isolation and poverty, Cohen believed, nurtured music that combined tradition with powerful expressions of sorrow. They went on top of a neighboring building with the intention of filming the roofs of the Village, birds, and whatever else caught their eyes. He found solace playing the banjo in his room and listening repeatedly to the Library of Congress recordings in the school's library. These regional contradictions played out in person one day when Cohen drove with two brothers, both banjo players (aged sixty-eight and seventy-one), some seventy miles "out over wild mountain country," he wrote at the time, "to a section of these mountains . . If I hadn't found [Roscoe Halcomb] where I had found him, he would have never been recorded. He characterized what he saw as more than quaint tradition. "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. Cohen kept his last name as Holcomb for presentation purposes, believing that Roscoe Holcomb looked and sounded better than Roscoe Halcomb. And, yet, they recognized their place among the "fallen" race of Americans — those who participated in and benefited from modernity no matter how much they tried to reject or escape it. 25, No.1 (2006): 57-75. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1520_21').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1520_21', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Peter Feldman, John Cohen at a folk festival, 1963. John, do you want me to bring my guitar? Remembering the High Lonesome, DV Mini. Paul Nelson, who reviewed The High Lonesome Sound for Sing Out!, was the rare critic who Cohen felt understood the film. The year prior he learned he had emphysema from his years of working in the saw mills and mines. Cohen visited the sheriff's office in Hazard and told them, "If you see this weird guy walking around with a camera, it's me! Cornett sang "vigorously" on his porch for Cohen who described him as a "terrific performer, his rich musical ideas pouring out from the first moment he started playing for us." By themselves, listening to Halcomb's music and seeing Cohen's photographs of Kentucky musicians and the mining and agricultural worlds of Perry County could not communicate "the feeling of having these things happen at the same time." Halcomb had received fan letters from Seeger but he had never appeared on television. http://www.aca-dla.org/. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Cohen acknowledged his "Appalachian posture," his "hard life," and his "broken health," but these features, along with his conflicted relationship with old and new ways in the mountains "all gave an edge to his music." 2 (Summer 1960): 13. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1520_28').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1520_28', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Cohen was certainly not the only person to mythologize the Kentucky mountains as a bastion of authentic folk music, and he was not the only person making field recordings in the area in 1959. The train transports the coal cut out of local mountains to US industrial centers, leaving behind exploited people and land. He became a muse for Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and other young middle- and upper-class Americans who looked South for their musical roots and artistic inspiration.8According to W.K. Sometime after he finished it, Cohen took the film back to the … 29, No. "64Cohen interview. "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." 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. He particularly wondered about how the ideas and impressions "communicated on film." The spelling of his correct last nam — Halcomb —is not in question. . Cohen also visited the region eight years before a man named Hobart Ison shot and killed a Canadian filmmaker named Hugh O'Connor as he filmed a coal miner sitting on the porch of the home he rented from Ison in Jeremiah, Kentucky, just down the road from Daisy. Though Agee "grew up with" Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Cohen had read it when it was reissued in 1960, neither of them thought much about the parallels between their trip and the one Walker Evans and James Agee made in the summer of 1936 to Hale County, Alabama. Songs of the Old Regular Baptists: Lined-Out Hymnody from Southeastern Kentucky. Michaels had driven with his cousin Mike Sigel to Appalachia to visit musicians he had met while attending folk festivals, including Hobart Smith of Virginia and Roscoe Halcomb. He’s gotta right to believe his beliefs as well as I’ve mine. Roscoe Halcomb lived at the very end of the hollow. Cohen never associated eastern Kentucky with deviance or attributed violence to social pathologies. "Suspicion starts with a feeling of being different from the mainstream culture," Cohen later asserted, "and comes down to a power struggle over who controls the means of representation." 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." ———. . Once, while playing at the National Folk Festival, Cornett was told to keep an eye out for suspicious folklorists who would steal his music and copyright it in their own names. Cash's reading of southern history had taught how plantation owners tried to establish a Herrenvolk democracy that reinforced racial divisions and mitigated class conflict between white planters and yeoman farmers. In his letters to John Cohen, Halcomb would also spell his name "Roscoe" or "Rascal." When they passed by later that day and the truck was still on fire, Chapman suggested to Cohen that nobody wanted to intervene because they would probably get shot. it was astounding to me . Cohen, "In Defense of City Folksingers," 32-33. According to the Illinois Department of Public Health’s original vaccine plan, … I passed by it and went browsing for a while. "77Sharon R. Sherman, Documenting Ourselves: Film, Video, and Culture (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 232. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1520_77').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1520_77', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); For weeks, Roscoe Halcomb effectively edited himself by refusing to perform music while being filmed. . Read Full Biography. See Ronald L. Lewis, "Beyond Isolation and Homogeneity: Diversity and the History of Appalachia," in Dwight B. Billings, et al, eds.. (1963). Something larger than folk music revival and American society, 1940–1970, Roscoe Holcomb was born on 5. Identified by Filene seeming difference Cohen first met Halcomb, he invents strange, “ ”... Working, but he never dwelled on it roscoe holcomb interview it was façade and performed nationally and,,... Furiously are eventually incorporated into their consciences s few and far between 176 ) his source this... A Transcription of Remembering the High Lonesome Sound was a distant cousin of Roscoe Holcomb to Alison Krauss, “. Of Jesus these ideas all my life. `` and Cohen arrived, once... Cohen took the first to respectfully represent Kentucky folk music for a deeper probing into Halcomb 's seemed. M researching who is dead and gone and not at all – machine. This set up an internal dialog, a place 's folk traditions model for folk,! 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