John Cohen, a founding member of the influential folk group the New Lost City Ramblers, died on Sept. 16, 2019. Cohen, 87, also was a musicologist, photographer and filmmaker.
Cohen joined Mike Seeger and Tom Paley in 1958 to form the New Lost City Ramblers, a vocal and instrumental urban folk group that helped to popularize and spark renewed interest in traditional string band music and played a major role in the 1960s folk revival as it evolved to include bluegrass and unaccompanied ballads in its repertoire. In its first year as a band, the New Lost City Ramblers played sold-out concerts at New York’s Carnegie Recital Hall and recorded its eponymous debut album for Moe Asch’s Folkways Records. Tracy Schwarz replaced Paley in the group in 1962.
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During its heyday, the New Lost City Ramblers recorded some 15 albums and played colleges, coffeehouses and notable clubs across the country, as well as the very first Newport Folk Festival in 1959. The seminal old time string band not only based much of its music on the old-time cultural stylings of the 1920s and 1930s, but they also helped introduce traditional performers from the rural south to urban audiences and influenced a number of other musicians – including the Byrds, Ry Cooder and Bob Dylan.
“I listened to The New Lost City Ramblers. Everything about them appealed to me –their style, their singing, their sound,” writes Dylan in Chronicles. “Their songs ran the gamut in styles, everything from mountain ballads to fiddle tunes and railroad blues. All their songs vibrated with some dizzy, portentous truth… I couldn’t listen to them enough.”
A multi-instrumentalist, Cohen played banjo, guitar and mandolin. Besides his work with the New Lost City Ramblers, which recorded its final album, There Ain’t No Way Out, during a 1997 reunion, Cohen recorded and toured with the Putnam County String Band (featuring Jay and Lyn Ungar, and Abby Newton) and frequently performed with the Down Hill Strugglers in later years. Acoustic Disc released a solo recording, Stories The Crow Told Me, in 1998. As a co-founder of Friends of Old Time Music in 1961, he also helped to introduce such notable artists as Gus Cannon, Bill Monroe, Mississippi John Hurt, The Stanley Brothers, and Doc Watson to New York audiences. He penned many articles for Sing Out! Magazine and liner notes for albums including Jerry Garcia & David Grisman: Shady Grove.
As a photographer, Cohen also helped to visually document a young Bob Dylan’s arrival in New York, Beat Generation writers, and old time musicians of Appalachia. His documentary films have aired on PBS stations and the BBC and screened at film festivals. He also joined T-Bone Burnett as music consultant on the film Cold Mountain and appeared in No Direction Home, Martin Scorcese’s film about Bob Dylan.
Cohen, who lived in New York’s lower Hudson Valley, was predeceased by his wife, Penny Seeger (1943-1993), half-sister of Pete Seeger, with whom he had two children (Rufus and Sonya).
In 2011, Cohen donated his archive –- including films, photographs, music recordings and other historical ephemera to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, while many of his photographs also can be found in the collections of notable museums throughout the U.S.
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