There was something in what he came to call that “high lonesome sound” which drew John Cohen to the back porch of a coal town in Kentucky, and something in the sound of those gospel meetings in Harlem in the late fifties. There was also something high or lonesome in the mountain music of the people he met in Peru back then, and something else entirely in the slap and sting of beat poets like Jack Kerouac. Mix in the early days of Bob Dylan, with the final days of Woody Guthrie, bring along the cameras and the tape recorders of John Cohen, and you have packed all you’ll need for a journey into the roots of roots music, where characters like the Reverend Gary Davis, Hazel Dickens and Roscoe Holcomb touch the strings and hit the original notes of – that high lonesome sound
Guests:
John Cohen, photographer, musician, writer, and filmmaker.