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 Swanno Mountain 3:18
- 2 Across the Rocky Mountain alt version 5:22
- 3 Graveyard Blues 3:01
- 4 Single Girl Married Girl alt version 2:46
- 5 Little Maggie alt version 2:44
- 6 Born and Raised in Covington 2:16
- 7 Barbara Allen Blues 1:30
- 8 Coal Creek 1:31
- 9 Rock Island Prison 1:35
- 10 I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow alt version 3:10
- 11 Combs Hotel Burned Down 2:32
- 12 Hills of Mexico alt version 3:49
- 13 Knife Guitar 1:17
- 14 Mississippi Heavy Water Blues 2:16
- 15 Coney Isle 1:51
- 16 Train that Carried My Girl From Town alt version 3:45
- 17 Milk Cow Blues 2:08
- 18 Black Eye Susie 1:15
- 19 Darling Cory 3:40
- 20 I Ain't Got No Sugar Baby Now 2:50
- 21 Sitting on Top of This World 2:42
- 22 Frankie and Johnnie 5:11
- 23 Foggy Mountain Top alt version 3:10
- 24 Fair Miss in the Garden 3:53
- 25 Willow Garden alt version 3:12
- 26 True Love 6:24
