ND: You’ve made some films practically as a no-crew one-man show. Do you relate this approach to your music — a do it yourself, make it yourself aspect?
JC: It’s a way to make it all more personal, less a “media” relationship. When you’re photographing or filming professionals, like Bill Monroe, you want to find a way to get around this professionalism –to find another kind of bond that’s more important than media and contracts. In my first film, The High, Lonesome Sound, it was just like in a dream, because I had never even heard of editing! I just did it — put music and images together.
II. I WANTED IT TO BECOME REAL
ND: You call the climate in the Long Island suburbs in the early 1950s “suffocating. Mass-manufactured and pre-ordained. Too given.”
JC: There I was, the lone cat in high school that listened to Woody Guthrie and old hillbilly records, and learned to play the guitar. Understand that nobody in high school played the guitar at that time; I was alone.
ND: Mightn’t there have been a romanticized aspect to love of the country that a suburban kid developed, even to searching for roots music?
JC: Where I started out this morning, up in Putnam County, I split wood; I feed my fire. I have a garden. Last night, with my flashlight, I was cutting broccoli. I didn’t want it to become romantic; I wanted it to become real.
ND: Something beyond mass-marketed music — in some rural place that was Not Here.
JC: When I’d listen to a country music station from somewhere far away, late at night, always there would be these ads for the Lord’s Last Supper on a plastic tablecloth. You wouldn’t hear those ads in the middle of New York City, but you’d always hear them on country stations. At first, I clearly felt that this was stuff that wouldn’t have been in my house! We have a different set of values. That’s cheap! But I came to say, “Who the hell am I to say things like that?” I loved this music, and I suddenly had to question my values.
ND: There are things to learn from a plastic tablecloth…
JC: For me, the discovery of America was the fact that everybody whose music I liked owned a plastic tablecloth with the Lord’s Last Supper on it! When I made up the name New Lost City Ramblers, the same kinds of questions were in motion.
ND: There are a lot of words in that name. The “Ramblers” suggested Charlie Poole’s North Carolina Ramblers and other string bands. But what was it that was lost, anyway — the city or the ramblers? City boys lost in the country?
JC: Or the music that was lost to the city! And if they heard New Lost City Ramblers the wrong way, people would think we said New York City Ramblers. All of those possibilities added another facet.
III. WE LEARNED IT FROM EACH OTHER, AND FROM THE ORIGINAL PERFORMERS
ND: You’ve said, “We were engaged in a struggle for the image of American music. If people could experience the real thing in all of its complexity, they would see beyond the mass-marketed entertainment which dominated the airwaves.” Sounds like a tough mission.
JC: Yes, there was that. A struggle even within the thing they called the “folk music revival,” which then would have meant the Kingston Trio!
ND: People thought that group and their adaptation of the old “Tom Dula” song were American music. Which part of that really bothered you?
JC: The way the Kingston Trio did it, and the way they presented themselves, and the image they provoked, which was sort of mocking.
ND: You saw them looking down at the material by the musical approach, their nightclub settings, the clothes very much from elsewhere?
JC: All of those things added up to the presentation. And even the way they introduced it — it was sort of like a “mockumentary.”
ND: So you went to the source — or brought them to you.
JC: The Friends Of Old Time Music came out of that. We would bring these singers up from the country and let them sing on their own terms. Greil Marcus was wrong, thinking we all learned the music from the [Harry Smith] Anthology. We learned it from each other, and from the original performers. You would have an image of how they were done, and not just from a record. This is a many-pronged issue, the image of American music, even in the clothes that the Ramblers wore.
