The New Lost City Ramblers

All four Ramblers were born in New York City, and none grew up in the rural South. Seeger, the son of the musicologist Charles Seeger and the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, was raised in suburban Washington, D.C., on the field recordings his parents spent years transcribing. Cohen, from Queens and suburban Long Island, heard folk music at summer camps in the Catskills and earned his degrees in art and photography at Yale. Paley, from the Bronx, collected hillbilly 78s and followed Woody Guthrie around before going to Yale to study mathematics. Schwarz grew up in New Jersey and Vermont listening to country radio, learned the fiddle in the 1950s and spent his college years in the Washington, D.C., bluegrass scene.

The name came at the request of Moe Asch of Folkways and combined J. E. Mainer’s “New Lost Train Blues,” Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, and the city where they played. After their first public appearance, at Carnegie Recital Hall in September 1958, they were at the forefront of the “traditionalist” wing of the folk revival, copying the instrumentation, styles and repertoires of mountain string bands and early bluegrass groups with unusual accuracy at a time when the revival was dominated by polished popular interpreters. In their first four years the original trio made nine Folkways LPs and two EPs, starting with The New Lost City Ramblers (1958) and Songs from the Depression (1959), and played more than 150 engagements at festivals, clubs and colleges. Bob Dylan later wrote of hearing their records in 1960 and listening to them for days on end.

Paley left in the summer of 1962. Schwarz, a fiddler and singer, freed Seeger to spend more time on banjo and mandolin, and he widened the repertoire to more bluegrass and 1940s country songs, older ballads he sang unaccompanied in a mountain style, and Cajun music. With Schwarz the band made seven more Folkways LPs, among them Gone to the Country (1963), String Band Instrumentals (1964), Rural Delivery No. 1 (1965), Remembrance of Things to Come (1966), Modern Times (1968) and an album with Cousin Emmy (1968), and played hundreds of shows. By the late 1960s the members were working more with other musicians; Seeger and Schwarz formed the Strange Creek Singers with Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, and the Ramblers cut back their touring in the mid-1970s.

The Ramblers did not learn only from records. They took tape recorders and cameras south to document traditional musicians, issued many of those recordings on Folkways, and arranged for Southern artists to play festivals and folk venues in the Northeast, Midwest and West. Elizabeth Cotten, Roscoe Holcomb, Dock Boggs, Tom Ashley, Cousin Emmy, Eck Robertson and Maybelle Carter were among those who reached the revival’s audiences this way. Cohen made his own field recordings in Kentucky and Peru and became known as a photographer and filmmaker as well.

The band kept coming back together after it stopped touring: 20th Anniversary Concert appeared on Flying Fish in 1978 and There Ain’t No Way Out on Smithsonian Folkways in 1997. In 2009, for the band’s fiftieth anniversary, Smithsonian Folkways issued 50 Years: Where Do You Come From? Where Do You Go?, a three-disc set joining The Early Years, 1958–1962 and Volume II, 1963–1973 to a disc of further Ramblers performances and the field recordings of the Southern musicians who inspired them. Mike Seeger died in August 2009, Tom Paley in 2017, John Cohen on 16 September 2019 at 87, and Tracy Schwarz on 29 March 2025 in Elkins, West Virginia, at 86.