Mountain Music of Kentucky (Folkways FA 2317) was issued in 1960 as a single LP compiled, recorded and annotated by John Cohen from field recordings he made in 1959 around Hazard, Kentucky. Cohen taped musicians in living rooms, on front porches, in dance halls and in churches, in mining communities, lumber camps and isolated houses. The twenty-nine tracks include six by the banjo player and singer Roscoe Holcomb, among them “Across the Rocky Mountain,” “East Virginia Blues,” “Wayfaring Stranger” and “I Wish I Were a Single Girl Again”; four by Bill Cornett (including “Old Age Pension Blues”); and tracks by James D. Cornett, Martha Hall, Granville Bowlen, Willie Chapman, Lee Sexton, Marion Sumner, George Davis, James Crase, and the duo of Corbett Grigsby and Martin Young.
In his notes Cohen wrote that he left the widely known ballads off the 1960 LP, looking instead for music he had not heard before. Of the fiddler Marion Sumner, he noted that Sumner had returned to Hazard after playing country fiddle in Nashville for the duo Johnny & Jack. Smithsonian Folkways reissued the album in 1996 as a two-CD set (SFW 40077) with more than an hour of previously unreleased material and expanded notes. Cohen went on to make a documentary about Holcomb, The High Lonesome Sound.
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
