Roscoe Holcomb - Biography
By Bob Fagan
He looks out at you dead-on from the CD cover, looking for all the world like William Burroughs with a banjo in his hands, and a combination of hurt and uncertainty in his eyes. He’s dressed like an undertaker, with white pressed shirt buttoned to the neck, skinny tie, and deep wrinkles creasing his face. He seems dreadfully serious in almost all the jacket photos, until you turn the CD over and catch him wearing a more colorful necktie and a smile that reveals a gold tooth and something of a prankster’s delight – the young man looking out through the old man’s eyes and face.
Bob Dylan famously once remarked that Roscoe Holcomb possessed “an untamed sense of control.” The description, in fact, serves as the title of the second volume of the CD reissues of Holcomb’s recorded work. (An Untamed Sense of Control, 2003 Smithsonian Folkways Recordings). To understand what Dylan means, give a listen to Holcomb’s acapella rendition of “Moonshiner,” Now get out Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volumes I-II, and listen to Dylan’s version of the same tune. It’s one of Dylan’s finest vocal performances ever, full of bent notes, hollers and tightly controlled interval leaps - and one can clearly hear how deeply influential Holcomb was and is on Dylan’s distinctive swooping, dramatic vocal style.
Roscoe Holcomb was born in 1911 in Daisy, Kentucky, a farming and mining community of maybe 100 or so inhabitants. He lived there all his life. He performed various types of hard physical labor throughout his life, and never considered himself a professional musician until his “discovery” in the late ‘50s by John Cohen, guitarist for the New Lost City Ramblers, as well as an accomplished photographer and filmmaker. His film The High Lonesome Sound (1962) featured Holcomb performing several tunes. Cohen invented the term “high lonesome” to describe Holcomb’s eerie falsetto and distinctive playing; it has since come to describe bluegrass music in general.
Following his discovery by Cohen, Holcomb began to play various old-time, folk and bluegrass festivals across the US. He also toured through much of Europe, on bills that included Cohen’s New Lost City Ramblers as well as The Stanley Brothers. He developed an abiding friendship with the Stanley Brothers birthed in their mutual love of Baptist hymns. Holcomb is sometimes accompanied on his recorded songs by Cohen on rhythm guitar.
When Smithsonian Folkways re-released Harry Smith’s seminal Anthology of American Folk Music (1997 Smithsonian Folkways), John Fahey, who provided Grammy-winning liner notes to the reissue, was said to have wondered aloud why Dock Boggs was getting all the attention while Holcomb, whom he thought much more accomplished and interesting, was virtually overlooked.
Of course, Holcomb did not begin recording until a year before the Anthology was released on Folkways. Still, there’s a lot to be said for Fahey’s viewpoint. The appeal of Boggs seems rooted in his uniquely nasal voice and a deadpan delivery seemingly at odds with the words he is singing - a style not as uncommon as is thought. For instance, one hears the same flattening of affect in the Blue Sky Boys, who deliver the lyrics of the murder-filled ballad “Down on the Banks of the Ohio” as if reciting a nursery rhyme. A similar disconnect between words and style abides in Charlie Poole’s version of “Whitehouse Blues,” in which he relates the circumstances of President McKinley assassination in a wry, joking manner, while the band plays the song as a dance tune. Holcomb himself considered Boggs one of his primary influences; it can be argued that the student came to outshine the master in time.
Where Boggs approaches the song “Sugar Baby” with the doom-laden despair of a man contemplating his own mortality in the face of a dead lover, Holcomb performs the piece like a jazz saxophonist might; spontaneously improvising within the simple melody, bending and pulling notes into long slurs, often not resolving the lines at the tonic, but rather hanging a step or two above the note, like the unanchored African blues of Ali Farke Toure. Instrumentally, Holcomb exhibits a great facility on both banjo and guitar, using a number of different right hand styles on banjo – clawhammer, frailing, and certain idiosyncratic techniques common to musicians from his area of Kentucky. He also would occasionally play slide guitar with a pocket knife. His tunings, as well as his sere, keening voice, remind one at times of the high-voiced blues guitarist/pianist Skip James, who utilized an uncommon Dm tuning for his guitar pieces. Holcomb also was adept at playing high-speed dance tunes on banjo, a part of his repertoire seemingly at odds with the strict voice-only rules of his Baptist faith. His vocal style, indeed, resonates with the influence of church singing. Of all his work, perhaps the most compelling are his acappella performances; he sings these pieces in a stark style stripped of every shred of sentimentality or concession to commercialism. Seldom has a singer cut so deeply to the core of a lyric or song as Holcomb in his unaccompanied performances. A parallel might be drawn between Holcomb’s singing and John Fahey’s guitar playing, both show an unusually developed and sophisticated style for folk music, and both have the effect of taking the listener on a deep journey through dark emotions.
The paradox is that Holcomb never really considered himself to be a professional musician, yet his singing and playing evince a strong self-awareness of the artistry of his own work. It’s said that his singing and playing was not noted as anything special by his community; this lack of appreciation, as well as the strictures of his Baptist faith, may have contributed to his self-effacement regarding his music.
Holcomb’s recorded output runs to about 60 or so songs; he accompanies himself on banjo and guitar, plays an instrumental harmonica number or two, and sings accapella. The bulk of his recorded output is available on two CDs: The High Lonesome Sound (1998 Smithsonian Folkways) and An Untamed Sense of Control (2003 Smithsonian Folkways). The film The High Lonesome Sound is available on DVD from Shanachie.
Holcomb toured and performed until the late 70s. In increasingly poor health in his last years, he passed away in 1981 from complications of a cold, asthma and emphysema. As noted before, his influence can be heard in the music of Bob Dylan, who also recorded his own versions of several Holcomb songs early in his career, and in the Holy Modal Rounders, whose cover of “Black-eyed Susie” hews close to Holcomb’s version. Red Allen’s early 60s work with mandolinist Frank Wakefield reveals in their soulful, no-nonsense vocals an echo of Holcomb as well. While the re-release of The Anthology of American Folk Music and the success of the movie Oh, Brother Where Art Thou? both rekindled a popular interest in bluegrass and old-time music, Holcomb was mostly ignored, and the release of the two CDs covering nearly all his recorded oeuvre garnered only a fraction of the hoopla attending the two former releases. He is an artist and performer deserving of much greater and widespread appreciation..
