Excerpt from “John Cohen in Eastern Kentucky,” by Scott Matthews
In 1948, at the age of sixteen, John Cohen first heard Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads at summer camp at a site called Turkey Point, north of New York City. The music entranced him. Guthrie’s ballads and other albums of old songs and fiddle tunes sparked not only Cohen’s fascination with old-time music, but also his rebellion against mainstream culture.
At the same camp, Cohen also got an introduction to Kentucky mountain music and learned how to both build and begin to play a banjo. Woody Wachtell, a camp counselor, had been to Kentucky with Margot Mayo, founder of the American Square Dance Group, whose uncle, Rufus Crisp, was a banjo player from Allen, Kentucky. Crisp had recorded for the Library of Congress during the 1940s and ’50s.
Wachtell and Mayo made recordings of Crisp who, in turn, taught Wachtell about the banjo. Wachtell, as Cohen remembered, “conveyed such joy with his music . . . it was astounding to me . . . it had the feeling that it was something that I could do.” Cohen also listened to music collected by John and Alan Lomax in the southern mountains while attending camp.
A record called Mountain Frolic gave Cohen his first glimpse into the world of old-time music and string bands. When Cohen returned to his suburban high school in the fall, familiar with sounds from Appalachia, and interested in playing the guitar and banjo, he began to feel alienated from his peers. “I was the only person — the only person — playing a guitar in high school,” he recalled, “and the only one singing these kinds of songs . . . which didn’t make me special . . . it made me seem weird, you know, strange.”
Cohen’s sense of alienation persisted when he attended Williams College in 1950. Fraternities dominated the school’s social scene and he met no one who shared his fascination with folk music. He found solace playing the banjo in his room and listening repeatedly to the Library of Congress recordings in the school’s library. At night, he tuned his radio to WWVA and listened to country music broadcasted many miles to the south. The sounds seemed alien, but deepened his fascination for Appalachian music.
“The songs spoke of Honky Tonk life and cheating wives and husbands on the one hand, and of the longing for home, farm and tradition, on the other.” Enraptured, Cohen spent his first summer after college hitchhiking south to experience the music firsthand. When one of his rides stopped for gas somewhere in Virginia late at night, Cohen noticed the bugs swarming around the station’s lights as a radio outside blared Flatt and Scruggs. He had heard Flatt and Scruggs before, but never so close to the source. They hit him hard.
Fed up with the preppy culture of Williams, Cohen transferred to the art school at Yale in 1951 and fell in with a group of students and professors who played a profound role in shaping his career. Cohen found Tom Paley, a mathematics graduate student, who shared his passion for southern folk music. Cohen, Paley, and other enthusiasts started hosting and promoting “hootenannies” in 1952 and 1953. Early on, the “hoots” attracted only a few art and graduate students, but word spread and the next thing Cohen knew “two or three hundred students were showing up to sing with us on Friday nights.”
Old Time Party 