Appalachian Figures
In the summer of 1959 a young New York musician and photographer named John Cohen turned his car off the hardtop road in Perry County and followed a dirt lane into the little lumber mill village of Daisy. He had spent weeks driving through eastern Kentucky looking for songs about hard times. Neon, Bulan, Vicco, Viper, Defiance, and other coal and timber towns had already slipped past his windshield. That afternoon, as Cohen later told it, his search list of local pickers was exhausted and the boarding house in Hazard did not look inviting. So he followed the side road to see who might be playing music at its end.
What he found on that porch in Daisy was a wiry middle-aged man in a work shirt, banjo in hand, with a voice that seemed to bind together Old Regular Baptist hymns, blues, British ballads, and something modern that Cohen could not quite name. When the man sat down and sang “Across the Rocky Mountain,” Cohen remembered that his hair stood up and he could not tell if he was hearing something ancient or something avant-garde.
Cohen would borrow a phrase he had been using for intense bluegrass singing and fix it permanently to the man from Daisy. In his notes and films he called the sound “high and lonesome,” then shortened the tag to “the high lonesome sound.” Before long the term began to float free, used for a whole bluegrass vocal style, but it had started with a specific miner, farmer, and construction worker from Perry County: Roscoe Halcomb, better known on records and festival posters as Roscoe Holcomb.
Bob Dylan later said that Holcomb’s singing carried “a certain untamed sense of control,” a phrase that Cohen adopted for his final compilation of Holcomb’s work. Eric Clapton reportedly called him his favorite country musician. For listeners who discover him through grainy film clips or Smithsonian Folkways reissues today, that description still fits. His sound is both razor sharp and fragile, grounded in Daisy but heard in New York lofts, San Diego festivals, and a Portland church.
Daisy, Perry County, and a man called Halcomb
Most reference works now give Roscoe’s birth as September 5, 1912 at Daisy in Perry County, Kentucky, under the family name Halcomb. The Halcomb name runs through that part of the Kentucky mountains, and a visit to his grave in Perry County shows “Rosco Halcomb” on the stone.
In the folk revival world, however, he appeared almost everywhere as “Roscoe Holcomb.” Cohen admitted that he chose to regularize the spelling on Folkways releases and concert publicity because he thought Holcomb looked and sounded better in print. Letters preserved in the John Cohen collection at the Library of Congress show that the musician himself wrote his name in several ways, sometimes as “Roscoe,” sometimes as “Rascal,” but always with the Halcomb family roots in Perry County behind him.
As a child Roscoe grew up at the far end of the hollow in Daisy in a world shaped by mixed subsistence farming, the coal economy, and tightly knit church communities. Cohen’s later accounts and photographs show a family house perched on the hillside, outbuildings stitched together from scrap lumber, and neighbors who shared land, labor, and music along the creek.
Like many men of his generation in Perry County, Holcomb spent time in the mines and in construction, sometimes working out of state to support his family. Official biographies list him as a coal miner, construction worker, and farmer long before they ever call him a musician. By the time Cohen arrived, the older man’s lungs already carried the damage of that labor. Later accounts describe Holcomb coughing from asthma and emphysema, conditions that would eventually push him into the Hazard nursing home where he died in 1981.
Yet neighbors in Daisy remembered him first as someone who played for his own satisfaction and for worship services, not as a traveling performer. In interviews and letters cited by scholars such as Scott L. Matthews and William Ferris, Cohen emphasized that Roscoe did not have a strong local reputation as a professional musician when they met. His music grew out of daily life in a community where singing and playing were woven through workdays, evenings on the porch, and church meetings, rather than out of any commercial career.
Old Regular Baptist hymns, Holiness meetings, and the voice from Daisy
The sound that caught Cohen’s ear in 1959 had been forming for decades in the churches and houses of eastern Kentucky. Holcomb grew up in the Old Regular Baptist tradition, where congregations practiced lined-out hymn singing. A leader would chant a line from the songbook and the people would follow in a long, ornamented unison. There were no instruments in those services, only human voices bending and stretching melody and rhythm in ways that outsiders often heard as strange or dissonant.
Writers on his music have pointed out that the “high lonesome” edge in Holcomb’s voice owes much to that Old Regular Baptist training. When he sings unaccompanied hymns on later recordings, the drone and improvisation recall the church house more than the stage. Yet as he grew older he gravitated toward Holiness and Pentecostal congregations that welcomed guitars, banjos, and other instruments into worship.
That move helped fuse sacred and secular strands in his style. On film and tape he can move from a stark lined-out hymn to a bluesy banjo number or a British-derived ballad without changing the intensity of his delivery. Record reviewers and fellow musicians have noted that those shifts make it hard to pin him inside later genre boxes. His repertoire ranges across old time dance tunes, Child ballads, spirituals, early country numbers, and blues, with songs learned from family, neighbors, commercial records, and the radio.
In one oft-quoted remark, Holcomb said that hearing Blind Lemon Jefferson let out blues that had only been inside him before, a line that hints at how African American music circulating through records and radio waves fed into his mountain repertoire.
Cohen in Perry County: Mountain Music of Kentucky
When Cohen drove into Daisy in 1959 he was already part of the New Lost City Ramblers, a group that specialized in reviving older southern string band music for urban audiences. He had come to eastern Kentucky hoping to encounter music that spoke directly about economic depression and mine work and to photograph the social landscape of the coalfields.
The six weeks he spent traveling through Perry County and surrounding areas produced a set of field recordings that Folkways issued in 1960 as Mountain Music of Kentucky. The LP gathered 29 tracks recorded in churches, houses, porches, and yards. It included Old Regular Baptist congregational singing, fiddle tunes, ballads, and several of Holcomb’s first commercial recordings. On the expanded Smithsonian Folkways CD reissue, listeners can still hear him sing pieces like “Across the Rocky Mountain” and “Graveyard Blues” alongside his neighbors and church communities.
The original liner notes for Mountain Music of Kentucky, later expanded in the Smithsonian edition, function as a kind of field journal. Cohen supplied song texts, descriptions of the settings where he recorded, and commentary on the economic conditions in the area. Those notes, together with the photographs that would later appear in his book The High and Lonesome Sound, form one of the earliest sustained documentary portraits of Holcomb and Daisy.
From the beginning Cohen understood that he was not just gathering songs. He was editing a story about Appalachia for audiences far from Kentucky. In essays and later interviews he admitted feeling uneasy about that power. He chose which images of Daisy to print, which performances to include, and even how to spell the musician’s name. Matthews and other scholars have argued that his work both challenged and reinforced national myths about the mountains, portraying Perry County residents as complex modern people while also packaging Holcomb as a symbol of stark, authentic poverty.
The High Lonesome Sound on film
Mountain Music of Kentucky introduced Holcomb’s voice to listeners who bought Folkways LPs. Cohen’s next major project made him visible as well. In 1963 he released the black-and-white film The High Lonesome Sound, shot in and around Daisy, Old House Branch, Jeff, Delphia, and Hazard.
The film follows Holcomb through a series of scenes that juxtapose work, worship, and music. There are shots of coal tipples and idle machinery, of families gathered in small houses, of Old Regular Baptist services and Holiness meetings, of children playing along the creek. One key sequence shows Holcomb on his porch picking banjo while Cohen’s narration describes him as an unemployed construction worker facing the same problems as his neighbors: no work and no desire to leave the mountains.
High Lonesome Sound circulated in 16mm prints among universities, folk clubs, and church discussion groups. At first it drew mixed reactions. Cohen later recalled that some prominent figures in folklore circles, including Alan Lomax, dismissed the film, while a handful of reviewers praised its starkness. Over time it became a staple in folklore and Appalachian studies courses and helped fix the phrase “high lonesome sound” in popular vocabulary. Folkstreams now hosts a streaming copy along with a full transcript, making it one of the most accessible primary visual sources for both Holcomb and early 1960s Perry County.
Cohen later returned to the same footage and outtakes to shape a second film, Roscoe Holcomb: From Daisy, Kentucky. Released in 2010 as part of a DVD package titled The Legacy of Roscoe Holcomb, it combines unused material from the early sixties with color footage of Roscoe and his family in the 1970s. Together, the two films show not only an individual musician but also the changing look of Daisy across two decades of economic and social shifts.
Records in New York and the folk revival circuit
Field recordings in Daisy were only the beginning of Holcomb’s documented career. Cohen soon helped bring him to northern cities for concerts, festivals, and studio sessions. In 1962 Folkways released The Music of Roscoe Holcomb and Wade Ward, a split LP recorded in New York. It featured Holcomb on ten tracks, presenting his voice and banjo without the background noise and interruptions of field recordings.
Performance photographs from the Berkeley and Monterey folk festivals show him onstage beside other revival-era musicians, including Bessie Jones and Jean Redpath, as part of mixed bills that paired Black and white southern traditions. Reviewers noted the shock many audiences felt when they first heard his keening, hard-edged singing. One Berkeley critic wrote that his set helped push the festival toward a deeper engagement with traditional performers rather than only with polished urban interpreters.
Television and film appearances extended that reach. Holcomb played for Alan Lomax’s cameras in New York in the short film On Top of Old Smoky, picked and sang on Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest alongside Scottish singer Jean Redpath, and turned up in Friends of Old Time Music concert footage now housed in archival collections.
The 1965 Folkways album The High Lonesome Sound, not to be confused with Cohen’s film, assembled recordings from several sessions in the early 1960s. Its original LP notes and later Smithsonian reissue included an extended interview with Holcomb that traced his work life, religious background, and musical influences. Those liner notes, together with material from the Appalachian Oral History Project and later obituaries, give historians one of the richest direct narratives of his life in his own voice.
Close to Home, San Diego, and The Old Church
By the early 1970s Holcomb’s health was deteriorating, but he continued to record and perform intermittently. Cohen’s fourth Folkways collaboration with him, Close to Home, documented performances recorded at or near Holcomb’s home in eastern Kentucky and appeared in 1975. The notes dwell on his failing health, the ongoing strain of unemployment, and the quiet routines of his domestic life during those years.
Other tapes from the period have surfaced more recently. In 1972 Holcomb traveled west with Mike Seeger and performed at The Old Church in Portland, Oregon, a nineteenth-century carpenter-Gothic sanctuary with resonant acoustics. The reels from that night sat for decades in a community radio archive before being rediscovered and released in 2021 as The Old Church by Jalopy and Mississippi Records. The album captures him in a relaxed, spiritually charged setting, moving through songs such as “Single Girl,” “John Henry,” and an extended unaccompanied rendition of “The Village Churchyard.” The room itself becomes part of the document, as truck rumbles and city sounds seep into the recording.
That same year he appeared at the San Diego State Folk Festival, where a full concert was recorded and eventually issued in 2015 as San Diego Folk Festival 1972 by Tompkins Square. Liner notes by festival organizer Lou Curtiss and new commentary from Cohen frame the set as one of the few complete live documents of Holcomb on a folk-festival stage.
Taken together, Mountain Music of Kentucky, The Music of Roscoe Holcomb and Wade Ward, The High Lonesome Sound, Close to Home, An Untamed Sense of Control, The Old Church, and the San Diego festival recordings show a musician whose voice and technique remained remarkably consistent even as age and illness wore on his body. They also trace his movement from a Daisy porch to far-flung stages and back home again.
Oral histories, archives, and Alice Lloyd College
For historians and students in eastern Kentucky, one of the most intriguing Holcomb sources sits close to home. The finding aid for the John Cohen collection at the Library of Congress lists an “Appalachian Oral History Project of Alice Lloyd College, 1978 – Roscoe Holcomb interview transcript” as Box-Folder 7/67. That transcript emerged from the wider Appalachian Oral History Project that Alice Lloyd College students and faculty carried out in the late twentieth century.
Although the full text is not readily available online, its presence in Cohen’s papers means that researchers can read a long, structured conversation with Holcomb recorded not long before his final years in the Hazard nursing home. Combined with the earlier interview printed in The High Lonesome Sound LP and with the New York Times Oral History Program’s Appalachian Oral History Project tape cited by musicologist Benjamin Jones, it offers a layered oral record stretching from the folk revival’s height into the late 1970s.
The Cohen collection as a whole holds a dense cluster of Holcomb material. There are notebooks from field trips in Perry County, song lists, correspondence from Roscoe and his family, photographic prints, draft scripts for Roscoe Holcomb: From Daisy, Kentucky, and folders of press clippings and reviews. For anyone tracing how Daisy looked through Cohen’s lens and how Holcomb’s image circulated, these manuscripts are as important as the commercial records.
Other repositories extend the trail. The University of Washington’s Ethnomusicology Archives preserves a 1972 performance under the title “Roscoe Holcomb/Banjo, Guitar,” recorded on April 14 and cataloged with multiple reels and films. Appalshop’s archive in Whitesburg holds video elements for Headwaters: A Tribute to Roscoe Holcomb and related extra footage of Mike Seeger playing for residents at the Hazard nursing home, where Roscoe spent his final years.
Death, tribute, and the long afterlife of the high lonesome
Holcomb gave his last live performances around 1978. Breathing problems and the accumulated injuries of a lifetime of manual labor left him unable to work or tour regularly, and he spent his final period in a nursing facility in Perry County. He died on February 1, 1981, at the age of sixty-eight.
Soon after, Appalshop produced Headwaters: A Tribute to Roscoe Holcomb, a memorial program that combined clips from High Lonesome Sound with new footage of Mike Seeger playing for Holcomb and other residents at the Hazard nursing home. The broadcast, preserved today on the Internet Archive, gives a brief but moving glimpse of how locals remembered him as a neighbor as well as an icon.
In the decades that followed, Cohen returned again and again to his Daisy photographs and tapes. His book The High and Lonesome Sound: The Legacy of Roscoe Holcomb, published by Steidl in 2012, gathers over two hundred pages of images with essays and an accompanying CD and DVD. Essays in journals such as Southern Cultures and Southern Spaces have stepped back from the photographs and films to ask what it meant for an independent documentarian from New York to shape the image of a Perry County laborer for global audiences.
Those studies do not always agree. Some critics see Cohen’s work as part of a romantic “cult of authenticity” that framed Holcomb as a medieval or premodern figure in order to satisfy folk revival fantasies. Others stress Cohen’s commitment to showing the everyday realities of Daisy and to resisting the comic hillbilly caricatures that still dominated American media in the 1950s and 1960s. Both readings share a common starting point: they take seriously the power of a single voice and body, recorded at close range in eastern Kentucky, to reshape how outsiders imagined Appalachia.
Hearing Roscoe Holcomb today
For listeners coming to Holcomb in the twenty-first century, it can be easy to encounter him only as a haunting sound floating free from context, a clip that appears on a playlist or in a documentary. The sources left by Cohen, Holcomb himself, and contemporary archivists invite a different approach.
Mountain Music of Kentucky remains the best way to hear his voice situated in the religious and social soundscape of Perry County at the end of the 1950s, where Old Regular Baptist congregational singing, fiddle tunes, and porch ballads weave together. The later Folkways albums The High Lonesome Sound and Close to Home offer more focused portraits, pairing his songs with interviews and photographs that reveal his thoughts on work, faith, and family.
High Lonesome Sound and Roscoe Holcomb: From Daisy, Kentucky give visual form to those recordings, showing the house at the end of the hollow, the road to Daisy, the interior of Old Regular Baptist and Holiness churches, and the gestures of a man singing with his whole body. The Old Church and San Diego festival releases let us hear what happened when that sound traveled west and, for a night, filled a Portland sanctuary or a California campus hall.
Behind and around those recordings sit the archives in Washington, Whitesburg, and Seattle, and the oral history transcript that began at Alice Lloyd College. Together they remind us that the high lonesome sound did not arise from some timeless “other world” of mountain poverty, as early newspaper profiles sometimes suggested, but from the very specific world of Daisy and Perry County in the middle of the twentieth century.
For Appalachian historians the story of Roscoe Holcomb is therefore not only about a singular musician. It is also about how a coal-patch community and an outside documentarian together produced one of the most influential images of mountain culture in the modern era, and about how that image continues to echo every time someone drops a needle on Mountain Music of Kentucky or streams The Old Church.
Sources & Further Reading
Mountain Music of Kentucky, Folkways FA 2317 (1960) and Smithsonian Folkways CD reissue (1996), recorded by John Cohen in eastern Kentucky in 1959, with extensive liner notes, photographs, and song texts. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings+2Smithsonian Folkways Recordings+2
The Music of Roscoe Holcomb and Wade Ward, Folkways FA 2363 (1962), studio recordings from New York that introduced Holcomb as a solo artist to Folkways listeners. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings+1
The High Lonesome Sound, Folkways FA 2368 (1965) and Smithsonian Folkways CD reissue (1998), featuring early 1960s recordings along with a multi-page interview with Holcomb and notes by Cohen. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings+2Folkstreams+2
Close to Home, Folkways FA 2374 (1975), recorded in and around Holcomb’s home in Perry County in the early 1970s, documenting his later health and family life. Southern Spaces+1
An Untamed Sense of Control, Smithsonian Folkways SFW 40144 (2003), a posthumous compilation assembled by Cohen with extensive notes that trace Holcomb’s life, influence, and reception by musicians such as Dylan and Clapton. folkways-media.si.edu+3Discogs+3folkways-media.si.edu+3
The Old Church, Jalopy Records JR011 / Mississippi Records MRI-135 (recorded Portland, Oregon, 1972; released 2021), a live concert recorded in a Portland church that captures Holcomb in an intimate acoustic setting while touring with Mike Seeger. Mississippi Records+2KLOF Mag+2
San Diego Folk Festival 1972, Tompkins Square (2015), the first full commercially released live concert from Holcomb, recorded at Lou Curtiss’s San Diego State Folk Festival on April 29, 1972. Discogs+3Tompkins Square+3Amazon+3
The High Lonesome Sound (1963, dir. John Cohen), documentary film centered on Holcomb and Daisy’s churches and mining communities, now streaming with transcript and contextual essays through Folkstreams. Folkstreams+2Folkstreams+2
Roscoe Holcomb: From Daisy, Kentucky (dir. John Cohen, 2010), a later film built from unused 1960s footage and 1970s color film, released on the DVD set The Legacy of Roscoe Holcomb. downhomeradioshow.com+2Southern Cultures+2
Headwaters: A Tribute to Roscoe Holcomb (Appalshop, 1981), a memorial broadcast that mixes clips from High Lonesome Sound with footage of Mike Seeger playing for Holcomb and other residents at the Hazard nursing home. Internet Archive+2Appalshop Archive+2
John Cohen Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress (AFC 2011/059), especially series relating to Mountain Music of Kentucky, the Daisy film project, correspondence with Holcomb, and the Appalachian Oral History Project of Alice Lloyd College transcript listed as Box-Folder 7/67. Library of Congress+2The Library of Congress+2
UW Ethnomusicology Archives: “Roscoe Holcomb/Banjo, Guitar, 1972-04-14,” performance tapes and films preserved in the Archives West network. Archives West+2Archives West+2
Headwaters and other Appalshop holdings related to Roscoe Holcomb and Mike Seeger, Appalshop Archive, Whitesburg, Kentucky. Appalshop Archive+2Appalshop Archive+2
Scott L. Matthews, “John Cohen in Eastern Kentucky: Documentary Expression and the Image of Roscoe Halcomb During the Folk Revival,” Southern Spaces (2008), a richly illustrated essay that reconstructs Cohen’s 1959 trip to Daisy, examines his representation of Holcomb, and situates the work within broader debates over Appalachian authenticity. Southern Spaces+1
William R. Ferris et al., “The High and Lonesome Art of John Cohen and Roscoe Halcomb,” Southern Cultures (2014), an extended reflection on Cohen’s photographs, films, and the modern visual iconography of Holcomb. Southern Cultures
Benjamin J. Jones, “Finding the Avant-Garde in the Old-Time: John Cohen in the American Folk Revival,” American Music 28, no. 4 (2010), which links Holcomb’s image to avant-garde art discourse and discusses oral history sources such as Appalachian Oral History Project no. 146. Library of Congress+1
Joshua Guthman, Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture (2015), especially the chapter that pairs Holcomb’s Old Regular Baptist singing with Ralph Stanley’s Primitive Baptist background to explore mountain religious sound and modernity. Michael J. Kramer+1
Charles K. Wolfe, Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky, which places Holcomb among a broader constellation of Kentucky musicians who bridged old time, country, and folk revival circuits. Wikipedia+1
Amanda Petrusich, “The Discovery of Roscoe Holcomb and the ‘High Lonesome Sound’,” The New Yorker (2015), a narrative essay on Cohen’s first encounter with Holcomb and the later resurgence of interest in his work. The New Yorker+1
Library of Congress Folklife Today blog posts on John Cohen and his Vega Whyte Laydie banjo, which include photographs of Holcomb on Daisy porches and links to films and recordings. The Library of Congress