FEATURE-John Cohen records 50 years of bards, Beats
Monday November 12 2:29 PM ET
By Mike Miller
dailynews.yahoo.com
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bob Dylan, propped against a New York City apartment wall at floor level, drags on a cigarette and holds his head, looking world-weary beyond his 21 years. Woody Guthrie, dwarfed by perspective, cuts a small figure between two towering guitar players. Allen Ginsberg clowns on a couch with fellow poet Gregory Corso.
These images are part of John Cohen's new book of photographs that chronicles an era in American musical and bohemian culture. Cohen, 69, has intertwined careers as a musician, professor, photographer, painter, filmmaker and ethnomusicologist. His photographs are in the collections of major museums in New York, Washington and London.
As a collector of traditional music, he recorded a wedding song in a Peruvian village that was included on a gold-plated disc aboard the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 to convey Earth sounds to any extraterrestrials who might intercept it thousands or millions of years hence.
The title of both Cohen's book and an accompanying compact disc, ``There Is No Eye,'' echoes a line from Dylan's notes to his 1965 album ``Highway 61 Revisited.'' In scantly punctuated prose, Dylan wrote, ``you are right john cohen ... I cannot say the word eye anymore ... there is no eye.''
``The title is open to lots of interpretations,'' Cohen said in an interview from his home north of New York City. ``It suggests that just seeing, making good pictures, isn't what it's about -- it's something beyond that. There's probably some impulse that's deeper than both vision and hearing, about meaning.''
To aficionados of the American tradition of fiddle and banjo stylings known as old-time music, Cohen is best known as a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers. The group, formed in 1958, was one of the first outside of the music's native southern Appalachian mountains to draw on the rich traditions of ``hillbilly'' music that first became known to a wider audience through radio and records in the 1920s.
THE QUEST FOR 'UNCLE JOHN'
The New Lost City Ramblers influenced more than a generation of folk music buffs. ``Deadheads'' who pore over the lyrics of the Grateful Dead have speculated that the rock group's 1970 song ``Uncle John's Band'' referred to John Cohen and the Ramblers.
Robert Hunter, who wrote the lyrics to the song (the late Jerry Garcia wrote the music), said he didn't have Cohen in mind at the time, but he acknowledged the Grateful Dead's debt to the Ramblers.
``The New Lost City Ramblers were a large influence on the development of our music, since there was no way to get hold of the old source records we craved back in the sixties,'' Hunter said in an e-mail interview. ``The Ramblers collected and gave renditions of the old tunes with great faith to the originals. John and his band helped provide us with the traditional strains we incorporated -- in the manner of folk tradition -- into our own aesthetic.''
Cohen's 200-page book of photographs taken over the last 50 years, from powerHouse Books, is due out next month. Many of the musicians pictured can be heard on a new Smithsonian Folkways CD of the same name, a sampler of the music that has captivated Cohen for half a century.
The selections, many of them recorded by Cohen himself, range from northern black gospel to southern white bluegrass, from Scottish ballad singers to the soundtrack of a 1959 movie, ''Pull My Daisy,'' celebrating the Beat Generation.
One song, ``Roll On John,'' is a never-before-released number by Bob Dylan, accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar. Others feature gospel singers in New York's Harlem and bluesmen Muddy Waters and Reverend Gary Davis. Texas fiddler Eck Robertson, whose 1922 recordings are considered the first country music records, is heard here at his Amarillo home in 1963.
North Carolina guitar legend Doc Watson sings a haunting song accompanied only by his father-in-law Gaither Carlton on fiddle. Kentucky banjo player Roscoe Holcomb sings ``Man of Constant Sorrow,'' a song that found new currency in last year's Hollywood movie ``O Brother, Where Art Thou?''
In 1962, Cohen made a movie about Holcomb, whom he had met three years earlier.
``Life magazine rented a look at my photographs -- they didn't run them -- and the money I got from that I used to finance my trip to Kentucky, and that's where I came across Roscoe,'' he said.
Cohen called his movie ``The High Lonesome Sound,'' a phrase that came to describe the mournful style of singing heard in the southern mountains.
DYLAN ON THE SILENT SCREEN
Cohen has made 15 films about traditional music and folk culture. His first test roll of movie film captured the antics of a young Dylan on Cohen's rooftop in New York City. The silent three-minute sequence -- the first known footage of the singer -- will be included in another filmmaker's documentary due out next year, Cohen said.
The original lineup of the New Lost City Ramblers featured banjo player Tom Paley and fiddler Mike Seeger, whose family included fabled folk musician and political activist Pete Seeger and several singing sisters. Cohen married one of the sisters, Penny Seeger. The New Lost City Ramblers made 15 albums -- two of them nominated for Grammy awards -- and still perform together on occasion.
Alice Gerrard, the editor of the Old-Time Herald, a North Carolina-based quarterly magazine devoted to old-time music, said of Cohen: ``He had a huge influence on the old-time music revival. On his own, John has always been a major source in collecting southern traditional music and filming it. He's always been interested in not only traditional musicians but also younger people carrying on the tradition.''
Joe Hickerson, the retired head of the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress (news - web sites), said of the Ramblers: ``They weren't the first band to play in the style of old-time music, but they clicked on a variety of fronts. They were in New York City, which was a good place to click and to develop a bit of a cult.''
For Cohen, the music serves as a pathway to connection with others. As he puts it in his book, ``In traditional societies, when you get close to the musician you are close to the heart of the people.'' |
