"The music of Roscoe Holcomb transcends daily life. Although it is grounded in Appalachia, in East Kentucky, in his little town of Daisy, his music travels like it is on a path towards a distant star." John Cohen In 1959 John Cohen travelled to East Kentucky looking for what he calls "old music". Cohen asked for names at local gas stations but soon ran out of leads and drove off the highway onto the next dirt road. Here he stumbled across Roscoe Holcomb playing the banjo and singing on his front porch in a way, says Cohen, "that made the hairs on my neck stand up on end". And so, by pure chance, began the lifelong friendship that is the background for The High & Lonesome Sound. Cohen visited Holcomb frequently over the next three decades and made many photographs, films and records of his music. In time Holcomb, a poor coal miner by trade, became a regular feature on the American concert and festival circuits. The "strange beauty and discomfort" of his music-a mixture of blues, ballads and Baptist hymns, unique through his high-strained voice-was exposed to a larger audience. Nevertheless, Holcomb died alone in a nursing home in 1981.
The High & Lonesome Sound combines Cohen's vintage photos, film and musical recordings as well as an anecdotal text into a multimedia tribute to this underappreciated legend of American music whose every performance was in Cohen's words "not just a rendition of music, but a test of something to be overcome". John Cohen, born in 1932 in New York, is a photographer, filmmaker, and founding member of the "New Lost City Ramblers". A master's graduate from Yale University, Cohen was active in the artistic circles of late 1950s and early 1960s New York, and worked with Robert Frank on his film Pull My Daisy (1959). Steidl has published Cohen's Past Present Peru (2010).