John Cohen

A historian and folklorist in the tradition of Alan Lomax, New Yorker John Cohen went one step further, forming a revival band in the late '50s called the New Lost City Ramblers. One of the first groups to put together such an act, the Ramblers pre-dated the entire acoustic coffeehouse-return to roots boom of the early '60s. Branching out into film, Cohen made The High Lonesome Sound in 1964, a documentary that dealt with the coal mining towns of Kentucky and introduced the world at large to the expert banjo picking of Roscoe Holcomb. After another film in 1974, The End of an Old Song, Cohen briefly formed another revival band before eventually settling in as a college professor and musicologist.