Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers & the Folk Music Revival (review)

Ray Allen chose a particularly difficult story to tell in Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival. While following a winding but clearly chronological telling of the New Lost City Ramblers' creation, flourishing and breakup, every turn in the story faces the thorny issues of authenticity in traditional music. The New Lost City Ramblers—Mike Seeger, John Cohen, Tom Paley and Tracy Schwartz, all from the suburbs of the Northeast—became for several decades the foremost interpreters of rural folk music from the southern Appalachians. They drew their material mostly from commercial recordings made by labels such as Okeh and Brunswick from the 1920s through the 1940s, but also from their own field recordings and relationships with traditional musicians in the rural South. During their prime, from 1958 to 1979, they were the best-known of a small number of groups performing Appalachian string band music ("hillbilly" or old-time music if you will) in the traditional style. Their career continued with occasional reunion concerts until the death of Mike Seeger in 2009. Their insistence upon being both true to the style of their sources and largely apolitical left them operating in the shadows of the folk music revival—a revival in which they would never enjoy (or perhaps even wish to enjoy) the commercial success and fame of the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and many other of their contemporaries. The problem wasn't the accuracy or even sincerity of their work, but rather that through an "accident of birth" none of the members of the Ramblers was born and raised in the rural South.

What Allen emphasizes about the New Lost City Ramblers is not their lack of commercial success, although this does cast a certain melancholy air over their personal stories, but rather their influence in preserving the tradition of the Appalachian string band. They carefully documented its sources and, through their fieldwork, discovered and promoted (and performed with) many of the surviving original artists from whom they took their songs and their sound. These artists included Elizabeth Cotton, Eck Robertson, Doc Watson (who at one point was asked to join the Ramblers), Roscoe Holcomb, Maybelle Carter, Dock Boggs, Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Mississippi John Hurt, Fred MacDowell, Bessie Jones, and others. Their style of playing in many ways copied the recordings and the style of playing and singing of their source materials. Yet Allen, as well as most of the critics who reviewed them, observed that they had developed a style that was, while true to the tradition, still distinctly their own. The Ramblers had absorbed the style to the point where they felt free to take liberties with it.

For many northern and western audiences the sound of this southern rural music was both unfamiliar and raw. Ironically, the Ramblers rarely performed in the South, but performed and sold most of their recordings in the Northeast and on the West Coast. They stood apart from most of the other urban folk musicians of the "folk music revival" in both their refusal to bow to commercial concerns and their general unwillingness to perform either topical songs or songs with a overtly political or partisan message. They played and sang to the best of their abilities in the style of the musicians from whom they received the songs.

Their recorded legacy includes over 20 albums, and numerous reissues. A recent reissue anthology, the splendid set 50 Years: Where Do You Come From? Where Do You Go? (Smith sonian Folkways SFW CD 40180 [2009], CD), makes an excellent aural companion to Gone to the County. It includes detailed liner notes along with some of the source recordings the Ramblers used and discographic details for all by Ray Allen. The original LPs, often described by Mike Seeger...