A year and a half ago I was sitting in a university library listening to some new Smithsonian Folkways recordings when I stumbled upon a statement that took me by surprise. The remarkable quotation appeared in the liner notes of an album by Kentucky folk musician, Roscoe Holcomb. The account came from bluegrass patriarch Bill Monroe [Figure 1], who asked: “How can Roscoe go out on stage without any idea of what he is going to do?”

The fact that this quotation struck me as bizarre might itself seem rather odd to any reader unfamiliar with the history of these two men. At the time, I myself had very little means of distinguishing the two. From some cursory research, I knew that both men were born in Kentucky in 1911. Both grew up poor in small rural towns, attended church regularly, and learned music informally—from watching relatives, neighbors and fellow churchgoers. Both expanded their musical horizons by listening to the radio and recordings. In many ways the two men had comparable backgrounds and led similarly humble, working-class lives common in Kentucky in the mid-twentieth century; however, both men experienced drastically differing careers. Monroe experienced fame and modest fortune, traveling around the world and making a name for himself as the progenitor of bluegrass music, while Holcomb [Figure 2] continued his small town ways, looking for work and playing music for personal enjoyment, only to be discovered and paraded in urban folk music circles by folklorists and ethnomusicologists in the 1960s. While Monroe’s success and celebrity garnered a position in the country music and rock-and-roll halls of fame, Holcomb remained a rural curiosity from the backwoods of Appalachia, revered for the timelessness and ancient traditions of his music. He became more of a museum piece than a professional touring musician.

What caused such a discrepancy in these two musical careers? Could one simply chalk up the difference to Monroe’s competitive nature and drive to succeed as a professional musician versus Holcomb’s contentment with amateur musicianship? Or did the actions and intentions of the mediators who represented Holcomb to the public in any way limit the possibilities availed to Holcomb in a way that did not affect Monroe, who sought out his own career and had some control over the promotion of his music? More to the focus of this paper, in what ways does Monroe’s comment regarding Holcomb’s improvisatory performance style relate to the contrasting careers, desires, and public personas of the two musicians? Are Monroe’s comments and the strategies of representation of Holcomb’s folklorists both characteristic of attitudes and stigmas associated with Appalachian culture that has led to a marginalization of mountain communities not dissimilar to that of women, African-Americans, and other disenfranchised groups in the United States? What does studying how these two men have been memorialized reveal about nation formation and sub-cultural identity?

Growing up in rural Ohio, I learned the name Bill Monroe early in life. Bluegrass could be heard all over town, on the radio, and on local Christian cable access television stations, where evangelical churches sang religious tunes and testimonials, spreading the word of God. My interest in Roscoe Holcomb as a musician is much more of a personal discovery, stemming from the recreational research that I have undertaken as an amateur banjo player. I received my first banjo at the age of sixteen, as an unexpected and rather confounding present from my Grandpa Elmo. Growing up in Ohio, I knew only of the three-finger rapidly-arpeggiated banjo roll technique commonly associated with Earl Scruggs [Figure 3], a member of Monroe’s group, the Bluegrass Boys, who later went on to his own career with guitarist Lester Flatt after a fallout with Monroe over control issues. Scruggs learned to play in North Carolina and popularized a three-finger arpeggiated and heavily syncopated style derivative of Piedmont finger-picking guitar popular among African-American musicians and a variety of localized two- and three-finger banjo techniques used by musicians such as Snuffy Jenkins and Uncle Dave Macon.

The three-finger roll style, as Tobey King at Columbia University has noted, consists of the rapid combination of measure-long series of finger-picked notes, set in such a way so that the string on which the melody lands is hit at the right rhythmic moment. On the first track of the accompanying compact disc, we hear Earl Scruggs, Lester Flatt, and the Foggy Mountain Boys playing their signature tune, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” [Track 1] recorded in 1949, almost two years after the duo had left Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys. Here Scruggs’ constant banjo rolls are structured in a 2-3-3 eighth-note pattern with c sharps running on to d naturals – a pattern so distinct that it has come to be known as the foggy mountain roll.

Scruggs’ technique has been imitated by numerous musicians, becoming the predominant performance style of the banjo. It is a difficult and precise technique, requiring hours of practice and preparation before a smooth performance is possible. Like be-bop soloing—another musical genre that developed in the post-war years as a response to the changing pace of life and the increasingly modernist aesthetic ascending in American society—the notes pass by so quickly that the performer’s thinking has to move up a level, from melody to hypermelody, to paraphrase Fred Lehrdahl and Ray Jackendoff’s notion of hypermeter. They must switch from thinking about the notes to thinking about the line, at the level of the entire measure, an eight-note pattern. In order to hit melodic notes at the appropriate time, certain patterns must be used that place the correct finger at the correct string. A performer must know what patterns will fit the melody, and improvisation in this style is choosing which pattern to play. Spontaneity in three-finger style is only achieved by the very best musicians well versed in the many combinations of riffs that will work at any given time. For everyone else, including me, attempts to make it up only resulted in a knot of fingers and frustration.

In college, my interest in the banjo waned, as I discovered jazz and avant-garde improvisation and found the spontaneity of these styles much more fulfilling even without a lifetime of practice as preparation. Then, one night at Bandido’s Mexican Restaurant in Carrboro, North Carolina, I saw a woman playing the banjo in a way I had never seen before, one entirely foreign to the
Scruggs three-finger-roll, but amazingly similar to the slap electric bass technique I had learned while playing in jazz combos [Figure 4]. In slap bass, the player alternates between slapping a low string with the thumb and pulling a higher string away from the body with the index finger. In this new banjo style, which I soon adopted was sometimes known as “clawhammer,” the right hand is held in a static position, not unlike a claw, and alternates between plucking or strumming with the index finger and pulling up on the high drone string with the thumb.

The clawhammer style is centered on a basic pulse, only a few notes long, one hand movement repeated indefinitely with a number of variations possible on each repeat. The basic clawhammer pulse consists of a downward strum with the index finger on any string, followed by a multi-stringed chordal strum with the index finger and an immediate rebound, plucked on the string closest to the performer’s head with the thumb [Figure 5]. The thumb-sounded note always appears on the upbeat and is always an open string, resulting in a drone-like sound. Compared with three-finger, this was a revelation of spontaneity. Unlike the plug-and-play structure of three-finger, which requires the player to know in advance when and how she will play a melodic line, clawhammer playing can be altered on a note-by-note basis, meaning the performance can be immediate, with phrases extended or truncated at the player’s whim, and lines or individual notes added for ornamentation more freely than the three-finger style allows.

Roscoe Holcomb, a self-taught musician, plays a unique variation of clawhammer banjo. Here we can begin to understand how the music of Bill Monroe and Roscoe Holcomb differ. While Monroe and all of his bandmembers perform in a thoroughly-rehearsed and predetermined manner, with only the slightest room for spontaneous musical decisions and individual embellishments of their instrumental lines, Holcomb’s performance technique creates an expectation for and ease of spontaneous improvisation throughout the music, both at the structural and ornamental level. The second track of the CD features Holcomb playing “Hook and Line” on the banjo [Track 3]. We can hear the repetitive patterns of strumming and the constant drone of the high fifth, being plucked by the thumb. This technique easily contrasts with the arpeggiated perpetual motion of the Scruggs three-finger style.

It also texturally and rhythmically supports the vocal line, a series of long, drawn out melodic phrases that float over the banjo rhythm. John Cohen, the folklorist who went to Kentucky to record Holcomb’s performances called this vocal style, consisting of rough, high-register wails a “high lonesome sound,” a phrase that has consequently been attached to a wide variety of music coming out of Appalachia and the southern states, including the bluegrass of Bill Monroe. Describing Holcomb’s distinct sound, Cohen has further noted “his fine, thin voice, his clanky banjo licks, his rhythms built on pulses, his elongated phrases of breathing which have little to do with symmetry or balance, and the way he approaches the notes in a melody – shaped by both the blues and the Old Baptist singing traditions.” Bob Dylan, who was discovered as a folk singer at the same time that Cohen was recording Holcomb in Kentucky, described the Appalachian musician’s sound as “an untamed sense of control,” a phrase that simultaneously captures Holcomb’s reserved nature and the spontaneity and seemingly irrational structure of his music. This untamed performance is the element of Holcomb’s performances that Monroe, a firm believer in the discipline of musical rehearsal and the precomposition of musical works that are replicated accurately in the performance setting, could not understand.

What is the source of this “untamed sense of control”? What elements of Holcomb’s background in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky led to the development of this unique aesthetic style? I present what I believe to be two significant influences on Holcomb. The first is the religious backgrounds of the two musicians. Monroe grew up in Eastern Kentucky and his family attended Methodist church services, where Monroe and his brothers sang shape note hymns in a church choir. Many of the songs in Monroe’s repertoire were religious tunes that came from the canon of the Methodist Church. Holcomb, from Eastern Kentucky, grew up in the Old Regular Baptist church which “stressed singing but didn’t allow any playing of instruments”. Here Holcomb learned the soulful sound of Old Baptist hymns, which he sang to himself throughout life. But another denomination had sprung up in Appalachia, partially in response to the draconian restrictions of the Old Baptist Church. Holiness Churches, products of the Pentacostal revival of the turn of the century, emphasized personal communication with God and allowed the use of instruments in services. Holcomb leaned toward the Holiness Church, preferring the pleasures of happiness to the more ascetic mode of living associated with the Baptist Church. He once explained his opinions to Cohen:

I guess a lot of people doubts the Holiness, but I think Holiness is nothing more than living a good clean life. You have to be holy before you can be righteous. But they have a thing that everybody can’t see; some don’t believe in talkin’ in unknown tongues, some don’t believe in this shoutin’, jumpin’ up and down, dancin’ and so on. But that’s their belief, and I can’t fall out with a man because he believes something. He’s got a right to believe his beliefs as well as I’ve mine. Let him live his life and I’ll live mine.

The personal, private nature of religion and human relationships is reflected in the lonesomeness of Holcomb’s music, which demonstrates a personal relationship to God and a modesty and privacy common to Appalachian communities.

The second influence on the musical styles of Holcomb and Monroe is the often unstated presence of African aesthetics in Appalachia, a region seen by many as an isolated enclave of Scottish and Irish culture preserved within the mountains and unspoiled by popular culture. This is in fact far from the truth. Both Monroe and Holcomb, like many people in their respective communities, heard blues, jazz, rock and roll, and other forms of African-American musical genres on the radio and in performances by local musicians. Both were familiar with the popular hits of the mid-twentieth century, and both included blues numbers in their performance repertoires. Even earlier, before the twentieth century, as railroads were built to extract coal from the mines of Eastern Kentucky and the surrounding areas, a substantial number of African-American rail workers settled in the area and joined local communities. Cecilia Conway has noted the strong presence of African-American banjo players in western North Carolina, the region where Earl Scruggs grew up and developed his three-finger banjo style. The presence of African aesthetics in Appalachia is even as old as the banjo itself.

Two summers ago, right before I found the Monroe quotation, I caught an exhibit titled “The Banjo: The People and Sounds of America’s Folk Instrument” at the Museum of National Heritage of the thirty-second degree Scottish Rite Freemasons in Lexington, Massachusetts. There I saw videos of people in Senegal and Mali playing skin-headed lutes known as the ngoni in Mali, the akonting in Gambia, and the xalam in Senegal, and using a technique almost identical to the clawhammer style popular in Appalachia [Figure 6]. This personal discovery led me to the work of Dena Epstein, whose book Sinful Spirituals is still to date the best source of information on early documentation of the banjo in the antebellum United States.

I knew the banjo had been created in the New World by slaves who were prohibited from bringing instruments from Africa, but I had no idea that actual performance practices had been retained to such an extent on both sides of the Atlantic. And in the United States, these practices extend into Appalachia, resulting in a syncretic musical culture, combining with balled and dance traditions of the British Isles and popular recordings transmitted on the radio starting in the early 1900s to create the high lonesome sound that is heard throughout Kentucky. The African origins of the banjo and the incorporation of the instrument into minstrel shows during the nineteenth century led to a disdain for the instrument among middle-class white Americans. Karen Lynn has written on the transition of the banjo from African-American and minstrel instrument to a product that belonged in home parlors, university string bands, and ensembles in white society.

But African performance aesthetics existed as well alongside the physical instruments that slaves created in the United States. As many scholars have argued, metrical complexity, virtuosic improvisation, and the individual stylization of musical performance are all traits of an African musical aesthetic that has survived in the United States. Another important element of an African aesthetic is the importance of musical performance as a practice of everyday life. Unlike Western European classical aesthetic conventions, which treat musical performance as the re-creation of a preexisting work transmitted from composer to listener via the performer, the African musical sensibility often attaches personal, political, or spiritual value to the act of performance itself, as Christopher Small has pointed out. The importance of these aesthetic practices continues into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, even though they often go unmentioned. George Lewis has demonstrated the influence of an Afrological musical philosophy that holds improvisation and spontaneity in such high esteem on European avant-garde musical traditions, as well as the reluctance of white musicians in Europe and the United States to acknowledge the African influence on their music.

It was in this context that I situated Monroe’s comment. Was I hearing correctly, that what Monroe couldn’t understand about Holcomb was the improvisatory nature of his performances? Was Monroe too committed to the aesthetic conventions of Western European musical practice, too enmeshed in the world what Lydia Goehr has called the “work-concept” to understand the improvisatory nature of Holcomb’s make-it-up-as-you-go style? What exactly is different about each man’s musical practices, and why would Monroe choose to distinguish his own musical style from that of another musician? The first question can be explained with an examination of two recordings, one by each performer, of the song “In the Pines,” made popular in the 1960s by Southern guitarist and singer Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly.

In the first example by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys [Track 4], we can note the close harmony of the voices, the regular metric hypermeter of the verses, and the fills of the instruments in between vocal lines. Monroe’s version contrasts clearly with Holcomb’s version, which contains a lone voice over rhythmic guitar accompaniment. Both exhibit what John Cohen has called the “high lonesome sound” of Appalachian singing, but Monroe has voiced it in close harmony, reminiscent of the sacred harp songs with which he grew up. The Monroe version features evenly measured phrases, fitting traditional European strophic forms, while Holcomb’s version is much freer, with the lengths of phrases determined by the contour of his voice and lung capacity [Track 5]. Holcomb attended Holiness church regularly, where instruments such as the guitar and fiddle were used to invoke the spirit of the lord, and Old Baptist hymns were sung in a style similar to Holcomb’s interpretation of “In the Pines.” The Old Baptist hymnbook contains only lyrics; the music is learned and passed on orally. In the Methodist churches of Western Kentucky, where Monroe worshiped, the music was notated in shape-note close harmony, pre-composed rather than spontaneous. The church played a major role in both men’s lives, as the primary site of musical education. The Holiness and shape note traditions can be contrasted in the same manner as Monroe and Holcomb’s musical practices. These two examples give some factual weight to Monroe’s statement, as we can see how different their performing styles are.

The answer to the question of why Monroe would seek to distinguish himself from Holcomb in terms of musical methodology can also be found in the two men’s personal histories, both in terms of influences and training, and as allegory, supporting particular images within the public sphere. While Monroe, who has been canonized as the father of bluegrass music, is the subject of numerous bibliographies, edited collections of writings, and periodical articles, Holcomb is a much lesser known figure. Nearly everything that is to be found on Holcomb has been written by Cohen, the folklorist who discovered the Kentucky musician in 1959. A comparison of the stories of these two musicians and the extent to which each participated in the construction of these stories reveals much about the relationship between narrative and the cultural capital of authenticity.

Bill Monroe is from Western Kentucky, Rosine to be exact, which is neither in the Appalachian mountains nor in the central bluegrass part of the state for which his music is named. It is said that being born with estropia, or a hug-eye, led Monroe to more keenly develop his sense of hearing. Growing up, he heard his mother and uncle play the fiddle. He sang in the hollering style, high and forceful but still sweet, that he had picked up from men working and traveling on railroad lines. At twelve he began playing the mandolin with his brother and sister, who wouldn’t give up the violin or guitar to Bill. In church and school, where the students were taught shape note hymns with four part harmony, Monroe couldn’t read the music, due to his eyesight, but he picked up what he could by wrote. As a younger sibling with a physical handicap, Monroe was constantly competing, trying to catch up to everyone else, whether it be in school, baseball, hunting, or music.

Around this time Monroe met Arnold Schutz, a black blues guitarist considered by many to be one of the greatest guitarists ever, perhaps the greatest to elude the phonograph of early folklorists. From Schutz Monroe learned a bevy of new songs, in a myriad of styles, most notably the blues.

His musical career developed through barn dances, where his uncle invited Monroe to play along. Finding pleasure and profit in performing publicly, Monroe continued playing. When he moved with his older brother Charlie to Chicago for work, they played at dances for communities of immigrant Southerners looking for some down-home culture. This eventually led to a gig on Chicago radio station WLW’s weekly Barn Dance program. In Chicago Monroe heard more music, including the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Jelly Roll Morton and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. The Monroe brothers performed at burlesque halls, at square dances, and on the radio hocking laxatives. Their popularity increased and by 1937 the Monroe Brothers had recorded for RCA Victor, gotten into an argument, and broken up as a performing duet. At this point Monroe began forming a new group, called the Blue Grass Boys, and it is this group that is known as the source of the bluegrass sound. All the while, Bill Monroe was in charge of the sound, determining every aspect of the group’s routine and only hiring musicians that met his high expectations.

By the end of World War II, the bluegrass sound was immensely popular around the country, anywhere within earshot of the Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts. The Blue Grass Boys’ sound was praised as truly modern music, a synthesis of earlier forms and styles, sped up and streamlined like jets, trains, and automobiles. Alan Lomax once wrote in Esquire Magazine that bluegrass music was “folk music in overdrive with a silvery, rippling, pinging sound; the State Department should note that for virtuosity, fire, and speed, our best Bluegrass bands can match any Slavic folk orchestra.” Monroe was seen as the father of a genuinely American music, praised for his talents as a mandolin player, songwriter, and bandleader.

We can compare this image to that of Roscoe Holcomb. Nearly the same age as Monroe, Holcomb was born and lived in the small town of Daisy, in Hazard County, located in the mountains of eastern Kentucky and consistently one of the poorest counties in the country. Holcomb lived with his parents until around the age of forty. Attending Holiness church regularly, he sang Old Baptist hymns and played the banjo at barn dances late into the night. He worked hard, as a coal miner, carpenter, construction worker, and roofer, although he spent a considerable amount of time unemployed, as many eastern Kentuckians did and still do. Playing music at church and at home, he would carry an Old Baptist Hymnal while traveling, singing songs for self-consolation. Before touring the East Coast and Europe with folk revival shows in the 1960s, Holcomb’s primary source of external musical influences was the radio. In one scene in John Cohen’s film “High Lonesome Sound,” Holcomb is shown working in his garden while a teenage daughter twists to the sounds of Chubby Checker floating out of a small transistor radio. This is as much as we know about Holcomb’s life. Or, at least, that is as much as we have been told by John Cohen, the folklorist and member of the New Lost City Ramblers who traveled to Kentucky to find “pure” mountain music in the late 1950s.

Cohen was part of the second folk revival in the U.S., influenced by the earlier generation of singers including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and the Weavers, and artists recorded by Alan Lomax and other early folklorists. Also leaning left politically, the new folk revivalists, primarily young affluent white college students in the Northeast, saw folk music as an alternative form of expression to other popular musics of the time. In the 1950s, as Ron Eyerman and Scott Barretta explain, rock had yet to transcend the class boundaries and find appeal beyond its lower-class white southern teen fanbase, and jazz was becoming increasingly self-referential and abstract in response to the attention it had been receiving. The second folk revival scene was centered in Greenwich Village in downtown New York, where musicians sang in coffeeshops and hung out at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center on MacDougal Street.

It was here that Cohen, along with Mike Seeger and Tom Paley, formed the New Lost City Ramblers, a group devoted to playing old-time and traditional music in the style of the old recordings brought to New York from Kentucky and Virginia in the 30s and 40s [Figure 7] Figure 7: The New Lost City Ramblers (left to right: Tom Paley, Mike Seeger, John Cohen). This interest reflected a desire to salvage old musical practices which were dying out with modernity. Many second revival fieldworkers, including Cohen and Seeger, traveled to the country looking for performers who retained the old practice, often bringing them back to the Northeast to participate in folk festivals and concerts on university campuses. These college concerts and urban revivals often had political agendas reminiscent of the philosophical leanings of the Frankfurt School, looking to the common man for a sense of authenticity and reality in the face of corporate mass production, exploitation of labor, a widening divide of wealth in the U.S., and promoting socialist ideals reminiscent of the communist leanings of the first folk revival in the 1930s and 1940s. These simple backwoods musicians brought to the big city provided a viable foil for the big men of industrial America, regardless of their awareness, approval, or complicity in such a representation.

This is how the world found out about Roscoe Holcomb. Cohen traveled to Kentucky in 1959 and found Holcomb. Over the next nineteen years, Cohen traveled with Holcomb around the country, and eventually to Europe, organizing concerts in which the humble, provincial singer would awe audiences with his ancient sound and exotic backwoods manners. A romantic aura surrounded Holcomb, a poor, hardworking honest man who had lived a hard life of labor and struggle, who used music as a respite from the troubles of everyday life. As one musician once commented, “you could feel the smell of woodsmoke in that voice.” Compare this comment to Lomax’s description of bluegrass as “silvery, rippling, pinging sound”; the two sound as though they existed centuries apart.

In the book Writing Culture, James Clifford discusses ethnographic allegory, or the underlying narrative of written accounts and history. Particularly critical of conventional anthropological and ethnographic methods, he argues that allegories can be read as yet another voice within the written story, and that the desire pervasive in social sciences to document culture reflects a general allegory of Western redemption. The scholar arrives in the nick of time, capturing culture on film and in print before it is wiped out by the twin forces of modernization and globalization. This salvage ethnography has been the predominant narrative of American ethnographers and folklorists since the disciplines emerged in the late nineteenth century. The story of Roscoe Holcomb can be seen as a salvation narrative, in which the primary subject is not Holcomb but John Cohen, a real American hero, who traveled far and wide to capture a cultural practice before it disappeared forever, lost to the forces of commercial radio and the poverty left in the wake of a parasitic coal industry. Cohen’s story carries both allegorical narratives of the scholar as salvager and informant as a figure of romanticism, pastorality, and antiquity. The desire to portray Holcomb as a particular, two-dimensional character that serves the story of the folk revivalists and folklorists in the 1960s explains the lack of agency attributed to Holcomb in the stories that exist. While Holcomb is interviewed and his voice is parlayed in text, what he says is always anecdotal and quaint. He never tackles what the folklorists see as important issues, namely the problems of poverty, disease, corruption, musical influences, and performance traditions. At least, he doesn’t mention them directly. We learn of Holcomb only the things that support the relevant allegories. But taking into consideration Holcomb’s belief in minding one’s own manners and presenting a humble image to others, we can get some sense of what he thought about life around him.

Holcomb’s story, heavily mediated by John Cohen, is quite different from the story of (and, importantly, primarily by) Bill Monroe, which tells us of a small-town man who overcame all obstacles, from physical handicaps to the collapse of a filial partnership, to become one of the greatest musicians in American history. Monroe’s story is the big American allegory, of personal innovation, exceptionalism, and success. By the early 1950s, Monroe represented the ultimate American dream. But his story had changed some by the time he mentioned Holcomb in a 1963 interview.

When Elvis Presley hit the big time and brought rock and roll to young white southern teens, bluegrass quickly lost popularity, nearly disappearing from the national music scene. In the late 1950s through the 1960s, the story of Bill Monroe switches from a master of modern musical hybridity to a protector of authentic folk traditions, more in line with the narratives of the folk revival scene. Bluegrass, which developed less than twenty years earlier, was suddenly a traditional musical style, and Monroe was its most notable guardian. A 1970 article in Newsweek claims that bluegrass “conjures up visions of hazy mountains, ramshackle log cabins, unyielding, dirt poor farms, whisky stills and valleys wounded by abandoned coal mines,” apparently oblivious to the fact that coal mines didn’t operate in western Kentucky where Monroe lived. In the context of this revisioning of bluegrass as an antiquated traditional style, Monroe’s comments on Holcomb, from an interview with Ralph Rinzler, the second-wave folklorist and collector who soon became Monroe’s personal manager and promoted the musician in folk festivals around the country, are seen as a defensive strategy, an attempt to regain ground as a modern composer and artist. Despite Monroe’s efforts, the bluegrass allegory was changing, from the American dream to American history.

It is possible, then, that Monroe, ever the competitor, employed the “work-concept” and European notions of master musician/composer to distinguish himself from what he perceived to be uneducated, backwoods musicians exemplified by Holcomb. Monroe can’t understand Holcomb’s spontaneity because Monroe is a serious musician, composing complicated music which has been rehearsed with a rigor reflecting a strong puritan work ethic. Unfortunately, the elements of Holcomb’s music that Monroe chooses to emphasize as exotic are exactly those aesthetic traits that have been singled out as the distinguishing elements of an African musical aesthetic. It is therefore possible to see Monroe’s Othering of Holcomb as a racialized strategy, emphasizing elements associated with non-whiteness in Holcomb in order to make himself seem more in line with a modern Eurological aesthetic tradition.

In a similar way, folklorists and ethnographers who travel to the backwoods of Appalachia to find anachronistic and exotic musical styles fall into the very same traps that Anne McClintock has observed in the colonialist policies of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, namely the belief that one can see into the past and that the past can be observed in communities removed geographically. McClintock calls these notions panoptic time and anachronistic space. While Monroe is able to speak his mind and negotiate the media in such a way as to present his own history, Holcomb is stuck in a catch 22 position. Lacking the education and verbal eloquence to express what is being said on his behalf and grateful for the economic opportunities that performing abroad provide for him and his family, Holcomb is in a way dependent upon a representation of himself over which he has very little control.

How can the relationship between Monroe and Holcomb be informed by, contribute to, or problematize existing discourses of race/class/gender, and how can we situate it in the nexus of religion, authenticity, identity, and improvisation within American musical history? I have shown in some way how the treatment of Holcomb throughout his career and Monroe after the rise of Rock and Roll by second wave folk revivalists is related to strategies of Othering throughout American personal and institutional politics. As scholars, we must be aware of the allegorical power of the stories we tell, and how those stories affect the players within them.

We must also be critical of the narratives with which we are presented, always questioning the motives behind the narrators. In the careers of Bill Monroe and Roscoe Holcomb, we can see how musicians struggle to tell their own story while dealing with the stories other people want them to fit into. For Monroe, this meant the retention of modernist aura in the face of historical ossification, the freedom to change and adapt music and resist the pressures to become a museum artifact. One strategy Monroe chose to bolster his own standing was to marginalize Holcomb, a figure already relegated to the annals of American musical history by the folklorists who claimed to be on his side.

The contrast we find in Holcomb, who lacked the education and worldliness necessary to fend for himself in a world rapidly changing around him, is best represented by a letter he sent to John Cohen, his manager, primary employer, and personal friend. Through the typographic errors and unsophisticated writing style we can perceive fear, desperation, and loneliness in the voice of a man who is worried about life in eastern Kentucky and the resulting dependency of salvage ethnography:

… Johnie, I rather you would be with me for as you no that I never travel very much. If you can get some place for us both I had rather be with you…. John they are about to have more trouble at the coal mines. I hope they are no body killed if they are they will be a young war. I hope they get it settled.