Terror and Beauty from Daisy, Kentucky

Roscoe Holcomb packed a vocal wail sufficient to puncture a hole in the fabric of the universe. Welling up out of a place of terror and beauty, that voice inspired folk song collector/New Lost City Rambler John Cohen to coin the phrase “high lonesome sound.” Once heard, it will haunt your dreams.

Cohen, who would film two documentaries about Holcomb’s life and art, discovered him in Daisy, eastern Kentucky, in 1959. But for that circumstance, Holcomb would have passed in obscurity, a small-statured man whose hard life of demanding physical labor had taken its toll. A relic of another time, he sang and played mostly for himself, otherwise in his local Primitive Baptist church where instruments were forbidden. With a handful of exceptions, family members and neighbors disdained his music, tolerating it as “Rossie’s” eccentric indulgence, of no interest next to whatever was playing on country radio.

Under Cohen’s direction, Holcomb recorded three Folkways LPs (reissued in two expanded CDs by Smithsonian Folkways in 1998 and 2003). He performed at assorted folk venues, and in 1966 he toured Europe with other traditional Southern musicians. Still ranked among the revival’s major discoveries, hailed in a 2015 speech by no less than Bob Dylan, Holcomb died in 1981 at the age of 70.

San Diego State Folk Festival 1972 is a vinyl release, otherwise available in download, from the roots-preservationist label Tompkins Square. The only Holcomb recording devoted solely to live performance, it consists of eight songs from his core repertoire, carrying mostly familiar titles (“Black-Eyed Susie,” “Little Birdie,” “Single Girl”). If you think you know the material, Holcomb’s fierce, extravagantly imagined readings will persuade you otherwise.

From its first note, the opener, “Old Smoky,” a lyric folk song that was a 1951 hit for the Weavers in an arrangement as sappy as Holcomb’s is explosive, erupts at a level of intensity few songs attain. It’s backed by his rowdy, eccentrically tuned banjo – Pete Seeger was not the only banjo-picker to marvel that he had never heard its like – awash in the kind of existential despair one associates with the deepest blues. Did anyone besides Holcomb ever even think to perform “Smoky” this way? If he was not sui generis, no John Cohen equivalent ever stumbled upon another Roscoe Holcomb.

The mountain hymn “The Wandering Boy,” clocking in at eight minutes+, is sung with Jean Ritchie in a reading so bleak it seems to suck all light from the world. A small warning: each number appears in another version on one or the other Smithsonian Folkways release. Holcomb injected little variety into his performances of individual songs.

If you’ve heard Holcomb, you won’t encounter much new except, here and there, his speaking voice, usually given to complaints about his health.  Once he mumbles a brief musicians’ joke. But if you haven’t heard Holcomb before, this recording will afford you the chance to know why he’s an enduring legend of the American true vine.