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You Can't Eat Coal, and Other Lessons from Appalachian Women's History

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John Cohen in Eastern Kentucky: Documentary Expression and the Image of Roscoe Halcomb During the Folk Revival

...High Lonesome," Folkstreams, http://www.folkstreams.net/context,92, 2-3. Roscoe Halcomb allowed Cohen to visit him at home on a number of occasions to record, photograph, and film him. Cohen produced a remarkable documentary, The...

References
1.	Ronald Cohen, ed. "Wasn't That a Time!": Firsthand Accounts of the Folk Music Revival(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1995): 38.
2.	John Cohen, interview by the author, Putnam Valley, New York, September 1-2, 2006. Hereafter cited as Cohen Interview.
3.	Halcomb's name appears as "Roscoe Holcomb" on the Folkways records he recorded for John Cohen. I learned of another spelling of his name while visiting Halcomb's friends and relatives in his native Perry County, Kentucky during the summer of 2006. His nephew took me to his gravesite where I saw his name spelled "Rosco Halcomb" on his tombstone. In his letters to John Cohen, Halcomb would also spell his name "Roscoe" or "Rascal." The variety of spellings is due in part to Halcomb's handwriting. The spelling of his correct last nam — Halcomb —is not in question. The Halcomb name is prevalent in that part of Kentucky. In the 1920 census, when he would have been seven years old, he is listed as Rossie Halcomb. Cohen kept his last name as Holcomb for presentation purposes, believing that Roscoe Holcomb looked and sounded better than Roscoe Halcomb. Throughout this essay, I will refer to Halcomb in the way that he most often addressed his letters to Cohen: Roscoe Halcomb.
4.	Tom Davenport and Barry Dornfeld, Remembering the High Lonesome (2003), film from Folkstreams, http://www.folkstreams.net/film,42; "Transcript to Remembering the High Lonesome," Folkstreams, http://www.folkstreams.net/context,92, 2-3.
5.	Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1962); Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963); John Cohen liner notes in Roscoe Holcomb: An Untamed Sense of Control (Smithsonian Folkways CD 41044, 2003): 8-9.
6.	When I use the word "romantic" or "romanticism" in this essay, I am taking my definition from Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre who argue in Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, that "Romanticism represents a critique of modernity, that is, of modern capitalist civilization, in the name of values and ideals drawn from the past (the precapitalist, premodern past)." Romanticism in their view represents a "modern critique of modernity." The implication is that "even as Romantics rebel against modernity, they cannot fail to be profoundly shaped by their time. . . . Far from conveying an outsider's view, far from being a critique rooted in some elsewhere, the Romantic view constitutes modernity's self-criticism." Further, romanticism means "to flee bourgeois society," to leave cities or modern conveniences or jobs behind for the seeming purity of rural areas, trading the modern for the "exotic," "abandoning the centers of capitalist development for some 'elsewhere' that keeps a more primitive past alive in the present." Romanticism also represents an effort to patch together the "modern fragmentation" of folk cultures. The documentary form, whether in writing, photography, film, or sound recording provides a way to preserve aspects and images of folk culture before they disappear. Consequently, documentary expression in the South has, at times, resembled an ethnographic salvage project that tries to give coherence and meaning to a way of life constantly on the brink of extinction. See Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, translated by Catherine Porter, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 17-24.
7.	The creation of Roscoe Halcomb's image provides a perfect example of what historian Benjamin Filene refers to as the "cult of authenticity" surrounding roots musicians during the twentieth century; see Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). As the title suggests, Filene's book is about how a diverse cross-section of folklorists, musicians, record executives, and other Americans remembered the country's musical past, how they transmitted these memories, and the role they played in American cultural life. Though he does not address Cohen or Halcomb, his chapter on the relationship between Leadbelly and John and Alan Lomax provides an interesting comparison with valuable insights. 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." (49). Though not directly influenced by the Lomaxes, Cohen's own promotion of Halcomb fits into the broader cultural trend identified by Filene. As "isolated cultures became harder to define and locate in industrialized America, the notions of musical purity and primitivism took on enhanced value . . ." (3). One thing that distinguishes Cohen from the Lomaxes is Cohen's independence from any institutional affiliation like the Library of Congress. He always worked as an independent artist or musician and conducted documentary work on his own terms, even though he promoted Halcomb by getting him record deals with Folkways Records, which then circulated his image and music to consumers.
8.	According to W.K. McNeil, Will Wallace Harney's 1873 article, "A Strange Land and a Peculiar People," is significant "not so much for the material he reports but in his characterization of Appalachia as a place in, but not of, America." William Goodell Frost's 1899 article for the Atlantic Monthly titled "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains," reinforced the idea of Appalachian distinctiveness and homogeneity for a new generation. 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. Both articles are collected in W.K. McNeil, Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995). For more on the construction of the image of the Appalachian folk during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries see Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the America Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); David Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990); Jane S. Becker, Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940(University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
9.	For more on the "folk" and authenticity see Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); Gene Bluestein, Poplore: Folk and Pop in American Culture(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994); Filene, Romancing the Folk; Becker, Shared Traditions.
10.	The myth of Appalachia as an isolated region in America has deep roots that reach back into the nineteenth century. Henry Shapiro and Allen Batteau among others have demonstrated how fiction writers beginning in the 1870s created the enduring myth of isolation and "otherness." As Shapiro notes, isolation was never just a "descriptive characteristic" but also a way to refer to "a state of mind, an undesirable provincialism resulting from a lack of contact between mountaineers and outsiders" (77). Other Appalachian historians have in recent years produced probing histories that undermine ideas of the region's social and economic isolation from the rest of America. Ronald L. Lewis has reviewed recent scholarship on Appalachian history and discovered "little empirical evidence for the proposition that Appalachian culture was the product of continuing frontier isolation." See Ronald L. Lewis, "Beyond Isolation and Homogeneity: Diversity and the History of Appalachia," in Dwight B. Billings, et al, eds., Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 21-43; Dwight B. Billings, Mary Beth Pudup, and Altina L. Waller, "Taking Exception with Exceptionalism: The Emergence and Transformation of Historical Studies of Appalachia," in Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina Waller (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 3. For the cultural and literary origins of the myth of isolation see, Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind; Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine; Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia; McNeill, ed., Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture.
11.	John Cohen, There Is No Eye: John Cohen Photographs (New York: Powerhouse Books, 2001): 15.
12.	Cohen interview; Cohen, There Is No Eye, 22.
13.	Cohen interview.
14.	Cohen interview; John Cohen, "A Visitor's Recollections," in Allen Tullos, ed., Long Journey Home: Folklife in the South (Southern Exposure, Vol. 5, Nos. 2-3, 1977): 115; Cohen, There Is No Eye, 24.
15.	Susan Montgomery, "The Folk Furor," Mademoiselle (December 1960): 100.
16.	Cohen interview; Cohen, There Is No Eye, 82.
17.	Cohen interview; Cohen, There Is No Eye, 82-83. 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. 41, No. 1 (Spring 1981): 55-63; Tod Papageorge, Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1981); John Bromfield, "The Americans' and the Americans," Afterimage Vol. 8, No. 1/2 (Summer 1980): 8-15.
18.	Cohen interview; Cohen, There Is No Eye, 106.
19.	Cohen, There Is No Eye, 82 and 118; Cohen interview; Blake Eskin, "His Worst Critic Proved Wrong," New York Times, November 18, 2001: 38.
20.	Jon Pankake, "The New Lost City Ramblers: The Early Years, 1958-1962," liner notes to The Early Years, 1958-1962, perf. The New Lost City Ramblers (Smithsonian Folkways CD SFW 40036, 1991).
21.	Gura, "Southern Roots and Branches," 62-63; Goldsmith, Making People's Music, 259. For more on popular and critical reception of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music during its release in 1952 and its reissue in 1997, see, Katherine Skinner, "'Must Be Born Again': Resurrecting the Anthology of American Folk Music," Popular Music, Vol. 25, No.1 (2006): 57-75.
22.	John Cohen, "The Revival," part of a symposium titled "Folk Music Today," Sing Out!, vol. 11, no. 1 (Feb – March 1961): 23.
23.	John Cohen, "In Defense of City Folksingers," Sing Out! vol. 9, no. 1 (Summer 1959): 32-33.
24.	For more on the different contexts, politics and aesthetics of twentieth century folk music revivals in America, see Robert Cantwell, "When We Were Good: Class and Culture in the Folk Revival," in Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, Neil Rosenberg, ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Ron Eyerman and Scott Baretta, "From the 30s to the 60s: The Folk Music Revival in the United States," Theory and Society Vol. 25, No. 4 (August 1996): 521-522. For more on twentieth century folk revivals in the United States see Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and America Society, 1940-1970 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Philip F. Gura, "Southern Roots and Branches: Forty Years of the New Lost City Ramblers," Southern Cultures vol. 6, no. 4 (Winter 2000); Ray Lankford, Folk Music U.S.A.: The Changing Voice of Protest (Schirmer Books, 2005); Robbie Lieberman, My Song Is My Weapon: People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Neil Rosenberg, ed. Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Dick Weissman, Which Side Are You On?: The Inside History of the Folk Revival in America (Continuum, 2005).
25.	Cohen, "In Defense of City Folksingers," 32-33. 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. "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 notion that there are many values, and that they are incompatible; the whole notion of plurality, of inexhaustibility, of the imperfection of all human answers and arrangements; the notion that no single answer which claims to be perfect and true, whether in art or in life, can in principle be perfect or true – all this we owe to the romantics" (140,146).
26.	Jens Lund and R. Serge Denisoff, "The Folk Music Revival and the Counter Culture: Contributions and Contradictions," Journal of American Folklore, vol. 84, no. 334 (Oct. – Dec., 1971): 400. Robert Cantwell, a historian of the folk revival, has placed its participants in historical context, showing how their yearnings and cultural expressions sprang from the particular "psychosocial and economic setting of postwar America." Folk revivalists, those born towards the end of the depression to around the late 1940s (Cohen is on the older end of this time frame), "grew up in a reality perplexingly divided by the intermingling of an emerging mass society and a decaying industrial culture." New technologies, new familial structures, new networks of communication, new neighborhoods, and new forms of entertainment erased the world in which their parents had grown up where, for many, a sense of community and belonging revolved around ethnic identity, work, or small town and rural life. The 1930s and the Depression seemed like another country, a more authentic place, a place where the struggle for survival sharpened experience. The behemoths of bureaucratization, conformity, and consumerism threatened to crush the search for an unmediated life. Robert Cantwell, "When We Were Good: Class and Culture in the Folk Revival," 45-47; see also Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996): 328-337.
27.	Montgomery, "Folk Furor," 99 and 118. 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).
28.	John Cohen, "Field-Trip – Kentucky," Sing Out!, vol. 10, no. 2 (Summer 1960): 13.
29.	Cohen, "A Visitor's Recollections," 116.
30.	Cohen interview.
31.	See for example, Josephine McGill, Folk Songs of the Kentucky Mountains: Twenty Traditional Ballads and Other English Folk-Songs (New York: Boosey & Co., 1917); Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway, Twenty Kentucky Mountain Songs (Boston: Oliver Ditson, Co., 1920); Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles, English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians (London: Oxford University Press, 1932. For a historical overview of these early collectors see Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine and Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and the Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978).
32.	Cohen, There Is No Eye, 120; Cohen, ed., "Wasn't That a Time!", 26; Cohen, "Field Trip — Kentucky," 13.
33.	Robert Shelton, "From Old Kentucky," New York Times, February 1, 1959: X17.
34.	Cohen interview; Jean Ritchie, e-mail correspondence with the author, October 19, 2006. For an overview of Kentucky's folk and country music history see Charles K. Wolfe, Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982).
35.	Cohen interview; Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 175-176. Batteau says a "trip to Pikeville, Kentucky, in 1959 was an expedition into the heart of darkest Appalachia." 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. . . ." (176) His source for this description is unclear.
36.	Cohen interview; Henry C. Mayer, "Coal Mining," in John E. Kleber, ed. The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 210.
37.	John Cohen to Ross Grosman, June 1959. Letter in John Cohen's possession, photocopy made by author, January 2008.
38.	Cohen interview; Cohen to Ross Grosman; Cohen, "Field Trip — Kentucky," 13; Cohen, liner notes to Mountain Music of Kentucky (Smithsonian Folkways CD 40077, 1996), 24.
39.	John Cohen, "The Lost Recordings of Banjo Bill Cornett," liner notes to The Lost Recordings of Banjo Bill Cornett (2005), Field Recorders' Collective, http://www.fieldrecorder.com/docs/notes/cornett_cohen.htm; Cohen, liner notes, Mountain Music of Kentucky, 26.
40.	Cohen, "Field Trip — Kentucky," 13.

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