Roscoe Holcomb – Stranger in a strange land
On the day we were to drive out from Kentucky, we stopped off to say goodbye to Roscoe, who was at work helping to dig a sewer line just outside Hazard. Roscoe, who was over fifty years old at that point, was waist-deep in a ditch, with a shovel. One of his fellow workers commented, “This is a mean old place.” But Roscoe was doing exactly what he wanted to do, and that was to work as hard as he could.
The next time Roscoe came to the Chicago Folk Festival, I really wanted the audience to hear him sing a lining hymn. So Roscoe became both leader and congregation, reading the words from his hymnbook, while my friend Martha Ansara and I stood behind him singing the part of the congregation. One of John Cohen’s photographs amid the liner notes to The High Lonesome Sound, a CD reissue of Holcomb’s music, finds Roscoe and Ralph Stanley sitting side by side on a bus, traveling through Germany, singing together from the same hymnbook.
When we brought Roscoe to Chicago for a solo concert, I played the opening set and performed “The Train That Carried My Girl From Town”, originally recorded by a West Virginia coal miner named Frank Hutchison. I had always felt a close personal connection with that song, since trains still carried girls from town, and when I finished, Roscoe leaned over and said, “That was good,” which was all I needed to hear. In the end as in the beginning, it was the music that united us.
I always felt that a line from “Man Of Constant Sorrow”, which Roscoe sang so well, described him most perfectly: “Some of your friends think I’m just a stranger.” He was so much of the mountains and their culture, but the artist within him that had created such unique music ultimately set him apart from his family and neighbors.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, the coughing spell that interrupted Roscoe’s front-porch singing in the summer of 1962 was not an isolated incident. The liner notes to the High Lonesome Sound reissue explain that Roscoe suffered from asthma and emphysema, and in a 1978 concert, he left the stage in a spasm of coughing. A winter trip back to Kentucky in a bus with a stuck open window left him with an illness from which he never recovered. Roscoe died in 1981.
When John Cohen returned to Daisy in 1995, he found a modern house built on the foundation of Roscoe’s old home. There he met a woman to whom he showed his video with shots of Roscoe. When she saw him on the screen, she said, “That’s my uncle Rossie. He was my favorite. I loved him.”
So at the spiritual level that exists between the musician and the child, Roscoe was not a stranger at all.
Mike Michaels is currently working with his wife, Steffy Michaels, on a book about country music singer, harmonica player and songwriter Wayne Raney.