I first heard about Roscoe Holcomb sometime in the early 1950s when the Sign of the Sun Bookstore in San Diego ran a series of films on traditional music, one of which was John Cohen’s film The High Lonesome Sound all about this Kentucky Mountain farmer who played amazing old time banjo and guitar in a haunting mountain modal tuning that backed up a truly amazing mountain tenor voice. I remember that night I bought the LP record Mountain Music of Kentucky on the Folkways label, which included songs by Roscoe and others looking forward to solo albums by Roscoe.

In 1963 Roscoe came out to California to the UCLA Folk Festival an also played a week at LA’s premier folk club in those years, the Ash Grove. I saw him at the festival and at least two nights at the Grove. Unforgettable shows! In the next years a duet LP with Roscoe and Wade Ward came out and finally a solo LP but no more Roscoe on the West Coast.

Come 1972 and I was making plans for the 6th San Diego State Folk Festival. I remember asking Curt Bouterse who he’d like to see and he said, “Why don’t you try and get Roscoe Holcomb?” So I started looking for a way to make contact. My friend Rita Weill suggested that I call Mike Seeger, which I did. Mike said he’d check with John Cohen and before long Roscoe was booked. It would be his first trip to the West Coast in nine years and as far as I know his last one.

As always, the performances at the San Diego State Folk Festivals were taped and remained in my library of reel-to-reel tapes all these years until they came to be digitized as part of the Lou Curtiss Sound Library project for the Library of Congress, the UCLA Ethnomusicology Library, and also the San Diego State Library in a project starting in 2007 and continuing through today. The folks at Tomkins Square Recordings contacted us about the Roscoe Holcomb recordings and wanted to put them out on both CD and a limited edition LP. I wrote some notes and they also got John Cohen to write some new notes about Roscoe, particularly that 1972 trip, which brought him out to San Diego State.

Roscoe Holcomb has been hailed by artists such as Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton as among the finest traditional mountain singer-musicians in the southern mountains of the United States. I was so proud to get him out here to San Diego in 1972. I’m equally proud to see these rare recordings finally issued on CD and with some fine photographs by my wife, Virginia.

Recordially,