To Thread - Forum Home

The Mudcat Café TM
https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=69113
8 messages

A Quote From Roscoe Holcomb

23 Apr 04 - 04:34 PM (#1169340)
Subject: A Quote From Roscoe Holcomb
From: Peter T.

just listening to the recent Smithsonian release of Roscoe Holcomb material called "An Untamed Sense of Control", notes by John Cohen. In the liner notes, Cohen publishes some of the letters Roscoe sent to him towards the end of his life, which are heart-wrenching about his poverty and sickness and hope for a better life. In the last letter, he ends with this:

"It takes a long time to make a musician...me especially. I ain't never made it yet."

This from Roscoe Holcomb....

yours,

Peter T.

23 Apr 04 - 11:13 PM (#1169456)
Subject: RE: A Quote From Roscoe Holcomb
From: Amos

I know how he feels.

A

24 Apr 04 - 01:30 AM (#1169498)
Subject: RE: A Quote From Roscoe Holcomb
From: Art Thieme

Mark Twain said, "There never was a life lived on the face of the planet that wasn't a failure in the eyes of the one who lived it."

Roscoe was a great and a fine artist. There just aren't many of us who know that. John (and Tracy and Mike) brought him and his amazing high lonesome sound to a place where we could not only notice the man and his singular talents, we could also mourn his passing in poverty while never knowing what impact he did have on a few of us. (Too few of us.)

Heather Wood, just today, e-mailed me what she wrote about Bob Copper's memorial in Rottingdean, Sussex (U.K.). She wrote it for the New York Pinewoods Folk Club's newsletter. Bob Copper was a man who experienced and knew that he and his family had made some large waves in our little folk pond. --- On both sides of it actually. Bob Copper was the exception to Mr. Twain's bit of doggeral/insight. If there had been bumpers in Mark Twain's time, his blurb would've surely made it onto a B.S.---(a bumper sticker.)

I'm left wishing that Roscoe Holcomb could've had the benefits of Zoloft. That's no joke. I really mean it.

For a few interesting photos of Roscoe, please look into some photos I took at the web space Bruce Kallick provided on his site for those photos:

http://rudegnu.com/art_thieme.html

24 Apr 04 - 01:53 AM (#1169506)
Subject: RE: A Quote From Roscoe Holcomb
From: SmokinBill

Nice, photo collection, Art. You've captured some priceless musical moments.

Bill

Smokin' Bill's Digital Depot

24 Apr 04 - 03:11 AM (#1169528)
Subject: RE: A Quote From Roscoe Holcomb
From: GUEST,Tunesmith

I know it is a curse of many great artists: Never being satisfied with their work. I read somewhere that jazz/rock guitarists Alan Holdsworth ( probably the most amazing guitarist on the planet ) is never contented with the music he produces. I guess a lot of us feel we can/could have done some little/big thing to improve our performance.

24 Apr 04 - 06:21 AM (#1169605)
Subject: RE: A Quote From Roscoe Holcomb
From: Stewie

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.

24 Apr 04 - 09:14 AM (#1169667)
Subject: RE: A Quote From Roscoe Holcomb
From: Peter T.

Nice quotation.

In this release, John Cohen discusses his own ambivalence about the kinds of things he found himself asking Roscoe to do, because of his own personal interest (in odd tunings, for example), as well as the bitter ironic moments -- Roscoe made just enough money from the concerts for him to be thrown off of welfare, making his situation even more desperate.

It is something of a blessing that we have a film or two of Roscoe at work.

yours,

Peter T.

24 Apr 04 - 11:12 PM (#1170154)
Subject: RE: A Quote From Roscoe Holcomb
From: Art Thieme

Smokin' Bill----

What a nice site. I'll be sure to look into it seriously soon. I think you and I must have many similar views on this music. Lately, I don't get out much and Mudcat has been the source of some grand friendships for me. I've reconnected with old frinds from 40 years back and enhanced my musical awareness at least a thousand fold for having found this place. I'll take note of your e-address and be in touch.

Stewie,

That's a fine view of Holcomb and his music. Thanks so much for posting it here. I think it was the second University Of Chicago Folk Festival in 62---no later than '63 certainly--that the Ramblers brought him to our attention. As soon as he began to sing at the Friday night concert, I knew that this was like nothing I'd ever heard before. As it turns out, he was a singular presence and I've never heard anything like that ever again. Wouldn't it have been amazing if he was only the tip of an iceberg and EVERYONE around Daisy, Kentucky sang that way too??

After a workshop at that festival, Roscoe borrowed my guitar, tuned it to an open chord, took out his pocket knife and made some music that just had me speechless. (I was in my early 20s and easily impressed I guess. ;-) We were in an alcove on an upper floor, but by the time he was on his second song, the other floors had migrated to our location. His was a style that could never develop in a city with close neighbors. (I took those shots of Mr. Holcomb at a workshop he did with the NLCR in that same building.)

Art Thieme