All the extant recordings of Roscoe, which most of us rely on for our evaluation of his music, are simply stunning. However, I am ever reminded of the review of 'Close to Home' by Tony Russell, one of the world's foremost authorities on old-time music, in the autumn of 1976. Tony was astounded by the quality of what he was listening to. I don't know whether he later heard Roscoe in the flesh but, for those who do not have access to the long-gone Old Time Music magazine, I will reproduce his review for consideration. I have capitalise words that were underscored in the original.

As well as the power of his music, Roscoe Holcomb offers the lover of traditional forms the satisfying and suggestive embodiment of a sort of biculturalism: he, if anyone, is a white bluesman. Not in the crude sense that he sings the blues - though when he does borrow from black sources he is always as much a transformer as a reproducer - nor even in the fact (though it is relevant) that he sings almost everything with the inflections we associate with the blues; it is that when he acts out a song and an accompaniment - but no, it's precisely not that that he does: when he offers a complete performance, song and music all interwoven, it is somehow in the spirit of the blues - total, unimaginable except at THIS moment, from THIS man, THIS experience, THIS life. It's the blues spirit of many (but not all) bluesmen; of Roscoe Holcomb and Dock Boggs; transmuted, of Hank Williams. (It is exactly NOT the spirit of Jimmie Rodgers).

So pleasing is it to be able to contemplate such a phenomenon, that I'm inclined to hope I can trust my ears when they confirm it; for it cannot be gainsaid that a firm outline of this aspect of Roscoe Holcomb has been drawn, both in the manner of his recordings and in the notes appended to them, by John Cohen, and it may be naive to suppose he has not set Holcomb before us selectively, as you might say, lighted. Fieldwork and theories can be a delusive combination, and it must be tempting, when your discovery is something more than a medium, to try and portray him as something not much less than a message.

Records are a highly vulnerable channel of communication, and a repute substantially based on them, like Holcomb's, can be moulded by subtleties of presentation, explication and suppression. I wish I could be a little more sure that the Roscoe Holcomb known from the carefully husbanded and gradually released recordings is a true creature. He is thrilling, sometimes devastating, in any case; but that only quickens one's curiosity.
[Tony Russell OTM #22, Autumn 1976, p22]

--Stewie.