Mountain Music of Kentucky (Folkways Records FA 2317, 1960) is a field recording album documenting traditional musicians in eastern Kentucky recorded by John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers during a 1959 survey of the region's living folk music. Roscoe Holcomb — the Daisy, Kentucky banjoist, guitarist, and singer whose performances Cohen captured here for the first time — is the most prominent of the fourteen musicians documented across the album's twenty-nine tracks, and Cohen's encounter with Holcomb led him to coin the phrase "high, lonesome sound" for the raw, untempered singing style Holcomb exemplified. Other performers include fiddler Lee Sexton and several traditional vocalists from the region's Regular Baptist and Pentecostal communities singing unaccompanied. The album introduced a pre-commercial strain of Appalachian music to folk-revival audiences and helped establish the case that traditional mountain music still existed as a living practice in the communities that had shaped the commercial country music that descended from it.
Tracklist
- 1 Across the Rocky Mountain alt version