The steep ridges and narrow valleys of the Cumberland Plateau separate the coal country of eastern Kentucky from the rolling hills of the Appalachians to the south. Strip mining has leveled many of the ridges and washed rock and gravel into many of the hollers, making a tough place even tougher. Thus it has set the scene for the hard life that has often come upon the land and its people.
It is no surprise that some of our country's most intense music has come from its most tragic places. The Mississippi delta and eastern Kentucky form an axis of poverty and passion that continues to resonate in American song.
I had just finished my first year at the University of Chicago the summer of 1960. I traveled to the town of Hamilton, in southern Ohio, to meet Harlan County (Kentucky) banjo player Pete Steele. This was a logical step for a child of the old left who grew up with the music of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Lead Belly, whose parents refused to allow balloon bread or even a television into their home.
Steele had been recorded for the Library of Congress in the late 1930s and had been an inspiration and teacher to the young Pete Seeger. Steele referred to Seeger's then-recent run-in with the House Un-American Activities Committee with the most localized kind of language; you would have thought Seeger had been down at the county courthouse rather than in the halls of Congress.
For northern lovers of southern music, 1960 seems to have been a watershed year. The Newport Folk Festival presented Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs, and Sam Charters' seminal The Country Blues had just been published (in 1959). Meanwhile, I heard from a fellow student and banjo player named Manny Meyer that John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers had been in eastern Kentucky to record an incredibly intense banjo player and singer named Roscoe Holcomb.
I bought the Folkways album Mountain Music Of Kentucky, which featured Holcomb. "Incredibly intense" barely describes his performances of "Stingy Woman Blues", "I Wish I Were A Single Girl Again", and "Across The Rocky Mountains". On the last song, he had tuned his guitar like a banjo, picked it like a banjo, and made the instrument drive and whine in a way I have never heard before or since.
In a 1968 Rolling Stone interview, Eric Clapton cited Roscoe Holcomb, a "bluegrass" musician from Kentucky, as his favorite country musician. Although Holcomb was not a bluegrass musician, Clapton had hit on a partial truth. When Mike Seeger interviewed "Lummy" Thornberry, another banjo player from the Hazard, Kentucky, area, he also described Holcomb's music as "bluegrass," not "old-time"; and in fact the drive of Holcomb's performances, as well as his high pitched singing, went beyond previously recorded mountain folk music and mirrored the postwar intensity of Bill Monroe.
John Cohen coined the phrase "high lonesome sound" to describe Holcomb's music; of course, that phrase has been appropriated to describe Monroe's bluegrass music, and thereby completes the circle.
Cohen brought Holcomb to the first University of Chicago Folk Festival in February 1961, and the simple fact that he was invited back to other festivals and concerts speaks for his effect on the audiences.
Roscoe stayed with me for his second Chicago appearance in 1963, my first opportunity to spend time with him. I was interested in his reaction to different types of recorded old-time music, so I played him Blind Lemon Jefferson's 1927 recording "Match Box Blues", which Roscoe had echoed both lyrically and instrumentally on his own "Stingy Woman Blues". "Match Box Blues", Jefferson's most famous song, had influenced black and white musicians throughout the south. In 1962, it still had a future as well as a past, because the Beatles would soon record it, copying Carl Perkins' rockabilly version.
Roscoe's comment about Jefferson's recording, beyond his evident admiration, was simply that musicians back then did not have "good ringing guitars."
Then I played him a recording by the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers from Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music. Sacred harp music, a form of southern church music with interweaving polyphonic lines, was distinctly different from the religious music of Roscoe's eastern Kentucky, where modal unison a cappella lining hymns were starkly monophonic. The best way to imagine a modal lining hymn would be to take "Man Of Constant Sorrow", leave out the chords and rhythm, slow it down, and have it sung in unison by a whole church congregation in the high lonesome style. Roscoe had never heard sacred harp music before, and his immediate reaction was that the performance was meaningless because the words could not be understood.
Roscoe had in fact hit the nail on the head, because sacred harp music is not really meant to be listened to by an outsider. It is participatory music in which congregations have daylong singing sessions and all the singers perform from books with the words right in front of them. The lining hymns Roscoe sang came from a tradition in which there were no hymnbooks for the congregation, whose members often couldn't read. The song leader would intone a line of the song in a recitative-like note pattern, and the congregation would follow with the full melody.
These hymns are very ancient; they originated in Scotland (many southern Appalachian settlers were Scots-Irish), and have a historical relationship to Gregorian and even earlier forms of Christian chant. I found myself drawn to them because they seemed to be the oldest and most essential distillation of mountain culture. Bill Monroe used the phrase "ancient tones" to describe the background of his music, and these hymns certainly fit that description.
In the summer of 1962, my cousin Mike Sigel and I drove south to visit several mountain musicians I had met at the festivals, including Roscoe. Although the practical purpose of this trip was to meet Virginia banjo player Hobart Smith and invite him to next year's festival, the real reason was to soak up as much of the music, people, and culture of the southern mountains as we could. In looking back at the whole experience, it gave me more than I ever could have imagined.
John Cohen was spending the summer in Roscoe's hometown of Daisy while working on his documentary film about eastern Kentucky, The High Lonesome Sound. John's assistant, Joel Agee, was the son of the writer and film critic James Agee, who in 1936 had traveled to the Alabama cotton country with photographer Walker Evans and wrote the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, about a group of white sharecropping cotton farmers and their families. Although Joel had spent very little time with his father, he was repeating his father's experience by working on this project.
We traveled through the hills of western North Carolina and Virginia, where the farmland was so deeply green that I thought that I might be in Ireland. Kentucky was another story altogether. It was tough country.
We had the radio on when we drove north from Virginia, and when we came down a mountainside crossing the border into Kentucky, our radio immediately picked up another station playing a very gritty sounding rockabilly song that fit right in with the change of terrain. We started seeing bulletholes in the road signs.
A holler is a small valley between short, steep ridges; it has the appearance and feel of a rural alleyway. The roads were dusty in the summer heat, and there was so little flat land that the houses were often jammed into the narrow space between the road and the steep grade of the hillsides. The soil seemed unable to support trees larger than secondary growth.
That was not how it had always been. Before the 20th century, great stands of hardwood trees such as white oak, poplar and beech had grown up to 175 feet high and seven or eight feet in diameter. There had been nothing wrong with the soil at all.
A few years after the Civil War, the mountain farmers were persuaded to sell off the logging rights of those forests for a tiny fraction of their true value. By the Second World War, there was nothing left but the second-growth timber we saw that summer.
But that was not all. As farmers had tilled the hillsides above the worn out flatland, there was no longer even secondary growth to protect the topsoil from erosion by the winter and spring rains. The rains naturally washed away that soil at an ever-increasing rate as steeper and steeper hillsides were farmed, creating the dust that collected on the roads.
It had become a hard place, had been a hard place for a long time. Frank Wilkeson, a Union soldier during the Civil War, described conditions caused by battles between Union and Confederate sympathizers in The Recollections Of A Private Soldier. Kentucky, a border state, was torn apart by that conflict. He wrote, "It was easy to foresee the years of bloodshed, of assassinations, of family feuds that would spring from the recollections of war, handed down from widowed mothers to savage tempered sons in the mountain recesses of Kentucky."
Harry Caudill wrote in his classic Night Comes To The Cumberlands that the Kentucky mountain feuds made the vendettas of Sicily look like children's parlor games. One of those feuds, the French-Eversole War, culminated in a gun battle in Hazard, with the two factions battling for the courthouse and its records.
That same ferocity fueled the battle to organize union miners at the beginning of the Great Depression. Sliding wages had combined with the enforced use of company stores, which charged double the prices of stores outside the coal camps. The once conservative and independent-minded miners finally came to believe that John L. Lewis's United Mine Workers Union offered the only way out of poverty.
"Bloody" Harlan County, right next to Roscoe Holcomb's Perry County, was the worst only in terms of the storm trooper tactics employed by the coal operators' "industrial peace officers." These company goons evicted, beat, or shot suspected union organizers whose bodies were left on creek banks or in alleys. But miners who had been raised with the lore of feuds were soon packing .38 Specials (or John L. Lewis Peacemakers) in their lunchboxes.
By 1934, the miners' virtually total commitment to the union cause ended in contracts signed with most of the coal operators who remained in business. Merle Travis immortalized the spirit of the times in "Sixteen Tons", with its signature line: "I owe my soul to the company store."
We met up with John Cohen, Joel Agee and Roscoe Holcomb at Roscoe's home in Daisy. John and Joel were staying in a cabin down the holler from Roscoe's house, which was located partway up a hillside and had a front porch that looked out across the holler. A coal company had actually once owned the cabin where we joined John and Joel; we were staying in a former company town.
Put in another setting, this cabin would have been perfectly appropriate for a summer camping trip, which for us it was. After all, we bedded down in sleeping bags on the floor. You had to think yourself into the situation of a mining family trying to make it through a mountain winter in a house with no insulation or running water in times that you might have to risk your life stealing coal to keep your family from freezing to death.
When I heard Harlan County singer Sarah Ogen Gunning at another Chicago festival, she talked about moving to New York and escaping the union wars of the 1930s. It was the first time she had ever seen the extra fat many of us carry on our hips and call "love handles."
That night we had dinner at Roscoe's house with his family. The meals at Roscoe's home and other mountain families we visited that summer were practically what we would call vegetarian. The Holcombs had a vegetable garden and the table was set with bowls of beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, and a little side meat with bread. This food was very fresh and was usually served with Kool-Aid or possibly soda.
The conversation turned to the coal mining union wars of the 1930s, during which dynamite was a common weapon. Abruptly the whole house shook with a thunderous shock, as if we had been transported back to those times. When we recovered our wits, Roscoe explained that there was an Air Force base nearby and a fighter jet had just broken the sound barrier.
The inside of Roscoe's home was furnished with a few basics, and the rooms were small and spare. There was no living room. The real living room was the front porch, where you could sit on a swing that was hung from the ceiling and gather in the sunlight and breeze in the daytime, or the moonlit darkness at night. On that front porch, you could stretch out your arms and legs -- or, in the case of Roscoe, your voice.
One morning, after a cup of coffee, Roscoe got out his guitar, leaned back against the porch railing and really cut loose on a song. Although it was the same high lonesome Roscoe we all knew, there was a relaxation in his stance that I had never experienced before. His legs were spread, feet squarely planted on the porch floor; his shoulders were laid back and so was his head. He was singing to the hills.
But this was not to last. Before Roscoe could finish the song, he was wracked by a fit of coughing so strong that he had to run into the house.
The next morning, as we sat on the same front porch, drinking our coffee, the sound of a lone woman singing a modal hymn came floating up from an unseen source in the holler. Her voice was strained with an eerie edge of hysteria, and the combination of such music with the peacefulness of the country morning was more than strange. Roscoe told us the singer was a mentally ill woman who lived in the cabin below, whose escape from a tortured life was expressed in her song. To this day, I cannot erase that sound from my mind.
Later on in the day, we attempted to help out on a little carpentry project with several of Roscoe's neighbors, who were amused with our inability even to drive a nail straight, and proud of their own ability to do so. They also talked with some pride about Kentucky mountain history. According to them, the colonial immigrants to eastern Kentucky had been too wild and ornery to fit into the communities of North Carolina and Virginia.
That night we were invited to come along to the funeral of a neighbor who had just committed suicide. Although the opportunity to hear the hymn singing was tempting, we decided not to impose ourselves. Roscoe and his friends praised the deceased man as being "a good worker," their highest compliment.
My cousin and I went south again the next summer and again drove north from Virginia into eastern Kentucky. This time we entered Kentucky from the Virginia coal town of Norton, where we had the chance to meet another banjo player, Dock Boggs, who had recorded in the 1920s and had recently been rediscovered by Mike Seeger.
We spent more time during our second trip, began to get a better feel for the community, and noticed more details. Evidence of coal mining injuries was pervasive. (John Cohen's liner notes to The High Lonesome Sound note that Holcomb's back had been broken twice in the mines.) It seemed that whenever we stopped at a gas station or grocery store, we noticed someone with a missing finger or a pronounced limp.
When we visited banjo player Lee Sexton, an active miner, he described his own mining accident when a slab of rock had fallen on his leg and put him out of work for a while. When recovering from his injury, he said that he "just couldn't wait to get back into the mines." His attitude echoed the Merle Travis song, "Dark As A Dungeon", with its assertion that mining "will form as a habit and sink in your soul, till the streams of your blood run as black as the coal," or that "a man will have lust for the lure of the mine." Although the song originally was recorded to reach the urban folk music market, it had traveled back home.
When my wife Steffy was a teenager, she had traveled through the coal country of West Virginia with her family, about a year before my southern trip. They stopped for gas, and the mechanic, while filling their tank, saw her with her guitar in the back seat of the car. He asked if he could play and sing something. She handed him the guitar, passing it over the front seat, and said, "Please sing whatever is in your heart." He put his foot on the door jam of the car and movingly sang "Dark As A Dungeon" for her right there in the parking lot.
As we settled into the relaxed social mood of the area, we were almost taken for local. In picking up a hitchhiker, we would invite him to "hop on in," without actually mimicking a southern accent. The hitchhiker would assume that if we were not from the neighborhood, at least we were from the next county over.
At one point while driving around, I felt compelled to ask Roscoe some rather "folkloristic" type questions about his background. Rather than saying anything directly insulting, Roscoe had the decency to talk about another northern visitor who asked these kind of questions, which he felt were so much hogwash. I got the point and put a lid on my attempt to become a "scholar."
From a musical point of view, I was very interested in attending a church service where I could experience the Baptist lining hymns. I was also fascinated with the idea that there were African-Americans in that area who sang this very "Anglo Saxon" music.
When I asked about local black musicians, Roscoe and his friends talked quite effusively about how much they admired their talent. Roscoe then offered to take us to visit a black Baptist preacher whose wife was known as a particularly good singer.
We had grown accustomed to the mountain cabins of people who were poor by any standard, but these people lived at a level that was several notches lower than what we had experienced. When we walked into the preacher's house, the sense of poverty was truly oppressive, and my cousin and I were consumed with guilt. We evidently hid our feelings well, for the preacher was very friendly in a gentlemanly way, and Roscoe was quite relaxed and rather chipper.
We were introduced to the preacher's wife, a slender and fragile-looking woman who appeared to be in her early 40s. She was happy to sing for us, but at the same time told us she was suffering from headaches that were so severe she was not able to go to church anymore. I sensed she was probably dying and couldn't do anything about it.
As I look back at the scene in that house, I realize that although there was poverty, the only shame was my own. The preacher was old, his wife was ill, and they could not attend to housekeeping and repairs. The moldy smell that hit me when I walked in probably came from a leaky roof that had let water seep into the newspaper that lined the walls. The living room that the preacher and his wife greeted us in was dark because the cracked windows were stained and encrusted with dust. The old couch we were invited to sit on had holes in the upholstery, but it was perfectly comfortable. Here were two southern black people who took two white strangers into their home without a shred of distrust.
Then this woman sat on a chair in the middle of the room. She rested her hands delicately on her thighs, and leaning forward, sang for us. She sang from her heart and soul, closing her eyes, and putting herself completely into the hymn. I knew I was hearing something very rare both musically and spiritually: A black singer with a black voice singing a kind of music that was as "Anglo" as you could get. However, there was no doubt that this was her music, and her way of expressing her religion. As I sat there, I felt that with every note, she was truly drawing nearer and nearer to that heaven she longed to enter.
I had a tape recorder in the trunk of the car, but a perverse sense of guilt kept me from asking to record her, as though I would be "using" her if I did. When I saw Roscoe about six months later, I asked about this woman, and he told me that she had in fact died of something connected to her headaches.
The next day Roscoe introduced us to another preacher, who invited us to his church the following Sunday so that we could finally hear those hymns sung by a whole congregation. When I said something to the effect that the preacher seemed to be a man who stayed within the "straight and narrow," Roscoe's oblique response was that the man's brother had recently been found dead in the bottom of a creek with a jug of liquor in each hand.
On Sunday morning we followed the directions we had been given and soon saw a small church. We parked, went inside where the service was starting, and noticed there were black as well as white people in the congregation. When we mentioned the name of the preacher who had sent us, we were told this was not his church. So we got back in our car and drove down the road until we came to another church.
The service was being held outside on a hillside, and there were no black people among the congregation. When the congregation sang a song about the loss of a mother, I remember a man, dressed in overalls, standing there with tears streaming down his face. Roscoe later told us the two churches had once been one, but had split over the issue of whether to allow blacks to remain in the congregation.
One night at the dinner table, Roscoe mentioned in a rather offhand way that my father "owns some kind of factory up there," which he knew from a previous conversation in Chicago. We then heard the harsh scrape of a chair on the floor. It was Roscoe's wife, Ethel, who had reacted strongly to the fact that she was sharing her table with someone from such a different and even foreign economic class.
In an interview regarding his wife's displeasure with a photo of Roscoe in front of an old shed, Roscoe explained how his wife and neighbors would resent "taking the worst you can find to make a picture," but then he concluded, "course it don't matter to me." And my father's factory didn't matter to him, either.
On the day we were to drive out from Kentucky, we stopped off to say goodbye to Roscoe, who was at work helping to dig a sewer line just outside Hazard. Roscoe, who was over fifty years old at that point, was waist-deep in a ditch, with a shovel. One of his fellow workers commented, "This is a mean old place." But Roscoe was doing exactly what he wanted to do, and that was to work as hard as he could.
The next time Roscoe came to the Chicago Folk Festival, I really wanted the audience to hear him sing a lining hymn. So Roscoe became both leader and congregation, reading the words from his hymnbook, while my friend Martha Ansara and I stood behind him singing the part of the congregation. One of John Cohen's photographs amid the liner notes to The High Lonesome Sound, a CD reissue of Holcomb's music, finds Roscoe and Ralph Stanley sitting side by side on a bus, traveling through Germany, singing together from the same hymnbook.
When we brought Roscoe to Chicago for a solo concert, I played the opening set and performed "The Train That Carried My Girl From Town", originally recorded by a West Virginia coal miner named Frank Hutchison. I had always felt a close personal connection with that song, since trains still carried girls from town, and when I finished, Roscoe leaned over and said, "That was good," which was all I needed to hear. In the end as in the beginning, it was the music that united us.
I always felt that a line from "Man Of Constant Sorrow", which Roscoe sang so well, described him most perfectly: "Some of your friends think I'm just a stranger." He was so much of the mountains and their culture, but the artist within him that had created such unique music ultimately set him apart from his family and neighbors.
Although I didn't know it at the time, the coughing spell that interrupted Roscoe's front-porch singing in the summer of 1962 was not an isolated incident. The liner notes to the High Lonesome Sound reissue explain that Roscoe suffered from asthma and emphysema, and in a 1978 concert, he left the stage in a spasm of coughing. A winter trip back to Kentucky in a bus with a stuck open window left him with an illness from which he never recovered. Roscoe died in 1981.
When John Cohen returned to Daisy in 1995, he found a modern house built on the foundation of Roscoe's old home. There he met a woman to whom he showed his video with shots of Roscoe. When she saw him on the screen, she said, "That's my uncle Rossie. He was my favorite. I loved him."
So at the spiritual level that exists between the musician and the child, Roscoe was not a stranger at all.
Mike Michaels is currently working with his wife, Steffy Michaels, on a book about country music singer, harmonica player and songwriter Wayne Raney.
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