ND: The much-imitated black vests and so on. So where did that come from?
JC: From three schleps — Tom Paley, Mike Seeger, and myself. When we played at the very first Newport [Folk Festival], we looked like we were off the street in New York! A club said, “I will hire you, but not if you don’t dress better”. And I looked at this old photograph of the Stoneman Family, with their vests and their ties. It wasn’t guys in blue jeans.
The photo of Roscoe Holcomb in the book, the one I simply took of him at home, his wife said about it, “You people come here from outside and show the worst side of our lives!” Which wasn’t in my mind at all! But the next time I photographed him, it was in his shirt and tie.
ND: That picture is now the cover of the standard collection of his recordings, which you produced. He looks like…a performer.
JC:. And it was taken, by the way, exactly where the South Tower of the World Trade Center had been. I lived there on that spot. Ground Zero! But it shows how I saw Roscoe, and I think it’s a totally dignified picture.
IV. “I’M BLOOMIN’ AGAIN!” (ASHLEY)
ND: Country songs came into the “folk world” vocabulary, and bluegrass bands came to the festivals, but the fact that Bill Monroe, the Delmore Brothers and their songs were from mainstream commercial country music was downplayed or avoided. Why was that?
JC: We were doing a huge educative process at that time. We weren’t preaching to the people, we were giving them instruments and songs and sharing them, so they could step into the music and have it as their own thing, first. Unlike the pontificating from Alan Lomax, for instance, who, in retrospect, is very responsible for the use of that word “folk.” I’m very proud of the fact that in all fifteen films I made, I never used the word. It’s an upper-class way of describing what poorer classes do.
ND: Commercial country music was looked at as more manufactured product — just another version of the pop you were trying to avoid.
JC: There was something more down-to-earth that we preferred.
ND: But the Ramblers weren’t academics or human tape recorders either. There’s a playfulness captured in that new live record chronicle, particularly.
JC: It’s all relative. If in those days people might say we were slavishly imitating the originals…
ND: It doesn’t strike us that way now…
JC: No! People have heard a lot more of what the originals were! We sound like sloppy interpreters!
ND: Recent books have raised the issue of the relations of the revivals’ “rediscovered” performers and their discoverers, of “intermediation,” suggesting that maybe the image seems to have been somewhat edited. You were in the middle of that. So what’s your overall take on that now, of the treatment of a Clarence “Tom” Ashley and his music, for instance.
JC: Ashley had a very nice response to those questions himself: “My life is like a rose! I bloomed when I was young, and then I faded. Now, I’m bloomin’ again!”
