Roscoe Holcomb – An Untamed Sense of Control

Though it may sometimes be hard to believe, most of the old-time hillbilly records of the 1920s and 1930s that we cherish as raw and unpolished were made with at least half an eye, and often more, cocked in the direction of commercial appeal. Intent on escaping poverty, especially after the bottom dropped out of the recording business with the onset of the Great Depression, the musicians who made these records didn’t exactly compromise their traditionally-based aesthetics, but they were certainly alert and open to a range of influences. Most importantly, they were keenly aware of audience reactions — most of them worked primarily in radio and live venues — and shaped their work accordingly.

Not so Roscoe Holcomb, who consequently didn’t come into view until 1959, and whose music served, in the words of “discoverer”/compiler John Cohen, as a “weapon” in the battle against the urban folk revival’s “commercially misdirected collegiate brother groups.” For Holcomb, a musical career seems never to have been an option, the result of both inclination and circumstance. Instead, he remained in his native eastern Kentucky, where he lived a hardscrabble life, working in mining and construction and alternating between devotion to church and to his music.

In abstract terms, then, his career (or, better, non-career) stood in absolute contrast not only to that of clean-cut folk revivalists, but even to fellow mountaineers such as the Stanley Brothers, with whom he toured not long before Carter Stanley’s death.

It’s no surprise, then, that Holcomb’s performance style is strikingly personal, whether he’s accompanying his strained, high voice on banjo or guitar, blowing a harmonica tune, or sawing one out on the fiddle. Still, his music has little of the “purity” assigned to it by commentators less knowledgeable (and more contentious) than Cohen, whose annotations make clear how widely Holcomb listened in the course of assembling his repertoire — more widely, for instance, than the comparatively sophisticated and polished Stanleys, never mind stars such as Bill Monroe.

To be sure, there are some old songs here — or, more properly, songs with old roots, such as “Born And Raised In Covington”, traceable to British broadside ballads. But there are blues, too (and the kickoff to “Graveyard Blues” surely came straight from Monroe’s pre-bluegrass recording of “Muleskinner Blues”), as well as “new” songs such as “I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow”, learned from the Stanley Brothers’ Columbia 78.

Though he gathered songs from many sources, Holcomb had only one way of doing them: his own. His playing was not artless, but it was without artifice. He had a lick on the banjo, it was sufficient to accompany his voice in the way he wanted it to, that was enough — and the same was true of his singing. It is that self-sufficiency and self-interest, not an impossible purity or cloistered fidelity to tradition, which really marked Holcomb as a folk singer, and accounts for the Bob Dylan phrase that gave this collection its title.

What makes this record such a riveting listening experience is simple: Though he knew he was being recorded, Holcomb sang and played for himself. It was a rough way to go, but it surely had its rewards.