such great heights with roscoe holcomb.
“Roscoe Holcomb has a certain untamed sense of control, which makes him one of the best.” – Bob Dylan
Mountain musician and coal miner Roscoe Holcomb approached his songs as if they were strangers, mysterious shapes in the twilight, visitors from afar, confusing but alluring mirrors to another realm.
It always feels like early morning on An Untamed Sense of Control. Dew drips down a blade of grass. A glint of sun beams around a rocky outcropping. Holcomb’s voice cuts through the uncertain air of floating banjo arpeggios. The music hovers like curls of fog, without precise harmonic location. All is uneven and vertiginous.
We are not down in roots music here, but up in mountain music.
Sure, Holcomb uses songs to dig in, to push along the mule team. But he’s up to something else as well. Music becomes a means of departing, of traveling and soaring into new realms.
He follows the dips and cracks in melodies that emerge like ridge lines on the horizon. Verses and choruses are always a little different each time he traces their forms. His voice discovers unknown edges, ploughs into the clouds, blasts upward, leaves his home behind, reaches back to the forgotten familiar and forward into the future.
Holcomb lifts himself up on what he knows (his voice, his throat, his fingers, his being) to get to what he doesn’t know (which, through the transformative passage of each new song, turns out to be his voice, his throat, his fingers, his being).
Image: John Cohen/Smithsonian Folkways