Pureness Of Sound
* Roscoe Holcomb: Moonshiner (2.0 mb) | Little Birdie (2.5 mb) | Walk Around My Bedside (4.0 mb)
From The High Lonesome Sound : Smithsonian Folkways Recordings : SF CD 40104
There’s something that’s just so magical to me about that old tyme sound. The idea that this whole musical style developed in relative backwoods isolation, with self taught musicians passing songs down from generation to generation, utilizing the oral traditions, is just incredible to me. And Mr. Roscoe Holcomb was one of the finest of them all.
Though he had been playing music all his life, content to sit on his back porch in Daisy, Kentucky, pickin’ music after a hard day at the mines, his “discovery” in 1959 changed a lot of that. John Cohen (the recorder of this here album), using a combination of intuition and information, drove down a dirt road that would introduce him to Roscoe Holcomb, a rail-thin ex-miner/lumber/construction worker. There, he proceeded to get to know Mr. Holcomb and record this amazingly pure music.
Appalachian posture, hard work, hard life, broken health, coal mines, lumber mills, moonshine, and conflict between old and new ways all gave an edge of his music. Although he rarely talked about the poverty he was raised in, it clearly shaped his outlook. He never saw himself as important, and he was neither assertive nor ambitious. Yet there was something heroic and transcendent in his singing. It had a power that went straight to the listener’s core. His spiritual concern was beautiful and always present, revealed with a sharp, cutting expression of pain. He said,
“You know, music-it’s just spirtual. You can take just a small kid, I’ve noticed, that can’t even sit alone, and you pull the strings on some kind of instrument, fiddle or banjo, you watch how quick it draws the attention of that kid. And he’ll do his best to get ahold of that. It draws the attention of the whole human race. You never see a man pick up an instrument but what everybody is looking and listening at this music. It sounds better to some than it does to others; some can learn it, and some can’t learn it, and that’s why I say it is a gift.
His inherent sense of musicality was highly developed; the finely honed quality of his voice coupled with the wildness it conveyed. As Bob Dylan commented, “Roscoe Holcomb has a certain untamed sense of contrl, which makes him one of the best.” (from the liner notes)
This “wildness” is readily apparent from even the first listen to this music, it strikes at the heart strings and never lets go.
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Cowboy Pete said,
September 20, 2006 @ 8:08 pm
Roscoe Holcomb was SO cool there’s no proper adjective to describe him. He’s right up there with Dock Boggs. By the way, are we gonna be hearin’ any more of Hank tellin’ us about Mother’s Best?
Thanx for exposing such great music that we don’t get to hear anywhere else.
Goddamn said,
October 10, 2006 @ 4:54 pm
Goddamn, there’s a purity in this which is absent from most motherfucking music of today.
Goddamn.
cb said,
October 11, 2006 @ 11:41 am
Oh yeah, this guy’s the real deal. he’s an absolute treasure and it’s lucky that some people had the idea to go down and search for musicians like him. An absolute treasure. if you’re into this guy, Dock Boggs is another one to listen to.
also, we’ll get some more Hank soon. Definitely. Talk about another treasure, he was one-of-a-kind.
-cb
the of mirror eye » Group Sound said,
October 27, 2006 @ 5:26 pm
[...] Back in September, I posted a couple of songs by old tyme superstar, Roscoe Holcomb (look here). And since that time, I picked up this incredible compilation, Mountain Music Of Kentucky. I mostly bought it because I noticed that there were a bunch of Roscoe Holcomb tracks on the compilation and I suspected that anything that included the peers of Roscoe Holcomb would result in some damn fine listening. And, as I suspected, the whole compilation is really stunning. These 1959 recordings present the vigorous music of Kentucky mountain people. They sang and played banjo with a terrific energy that is almost unheard of now. They learned their music in a setting totally different from our contemporary life, in an era before people got their experiences from TV or their music from Nashville, when people plowed with mules, canned beans and tomatoes from their gardens, and reclined on front porches with slatted wooden swings attached to rafters by metal chains. Their musical memories provide us with a glimpse of a pattern which had endured for centuries. (from the liner notes) [...]