Roscoe Holcomb – The High Lonesome Sound

Noted archivist John Cohen claims that Roscoe Holcomb is the man he had in mind when he coined the term “high lonesome.” But Holcomb has never been the subject of the same study or praise as similar practitioners such as Dock Boggs or Buell Kazee. Strange, because in a way, his challenges were greater than theirs.

Holcomb began recording three decades after Boggs (this collection draws on sessions from 1961, ’64 and ’74), and by then times had indeed changed. His was a life of poverty (Holcomb subsisted on temp construction work in Daisy, Kentucky, his whole life), straddled between man and machine, between the old and new South, between the Old Regular Baptist Church and the New Holiness Church. These conflicts cut him to his core, and they inform every song he ever committed to posterity.

In performance and on tape, Holcomb split his repertoire between an older a cappella tradition and the devil’s instrumental music — guitar, harmonica, and, most eloquently, banjo. But no matter the accompaniment, Holcomb’s voice is his greatest instrument. Ranging from scratchy, salty howl to piercing falsetto, his is one of those voices that bypasses the head and shoots straight for the soul.

With his slight frame, time-carved cheeks, and ubiquitous wide-brimmed hat, Holcomb bears more than a passing resemblance to William Burroughs. The similarities don’t stop there. A Holcomb-rendered tune evokes the same conflicting emotions that defined his own life — elation and fear, comfort and loneliness. Like an effective piece of Burroughs prose, the effect is positively disorienting. But there’s always solace among the confusion. Holcomb once told Cohen, “You know, music — it’s spiritual.” Absolute truth from an absolute channeler of the stuff.