Bob Dylan has described Holcomb’s work as exhibiting “a certain untamed sense of control.” Photograph by John Cohen / Getty

The great dragnet of the American folk revival—which began in New York City in the mid-nineteen-thirties, and, lore dictates, started to falter when Bob Dylan powered up an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival—resulted in the retrieval and trotting out of various long-retired rural performers, many of whom had been puttering peaceably about their gardens, or convalescing in hospital rooms, when the searchers came knocking. Most had been thinking infrequently about music. Most hadn’t been thinking about New York City at all.

In 1959, John Cohen, a twenty-seven-year-old musician and photographer from Queens, bought a bus ticket to eastern Kentucky. He was looking for “Depression songs” to play with his folk band, the New Lost City Ramblers. “I said to myself, I’m going to go to Kentucky, because they have a depression going on there. I’ve never experienced a depression—all I’ve heard are the records,” he said recently. Cohen was a voracious consumer of traditional music and a dutiful student of its nuances, but he fretted that something was missing—some empathic vantage that he couldn’t quite access, at least not from Manhattan.

Like many amateur folklorists who went trawling the South for undiscovered performers during the first half of the twentieth century, Cohen was craving a more multidimensional sense of how the music he prized functioned in context. With folk music, that idea is particularly paramount. “For years, I’d heard singers—Pete Seeger, Burl Ives—talking about some old guy out on his back porch singing this wonderful music. And I kept thinking, I want to hear that old guy. Who is that old guy? This was a way of getting at that, and at what in that music got to me. What was that feeling? What was that thing? How could I get to that thing?”

What Cohen is referring to—the crippling power that acolytes of old-time music find inherent in these songs, many rooted in a particular region and indicative of a particular time—is a spiritual journey more than a literal one. Mapping the metaphysical pathways that allow human beings to be devastated or buoyed by a series of sounds? That’s a never-ending mission. That’s a mystery as deep as any we’ve got.

But even if a person can’t unlock those doors, she can, at least, participate in their safeguarding. Many musicologists (including, most famously, John Lomax and his son, Alan) had already embarked upon comparable passages south, devoting themselves to the preservation, via field recordings, of endangered strains of vernacular music and other manifestations of fading folk cultures. Sometimes, in hindsight, these transactions feel clumsy, complicated. That vague, collective unease—when does folklore, enacted on impoverished rural communities, begin to mimic a kind of inverted cultural imperialism?—has been exhaustively (if inconclusively) interrogated by scholars and artists for decades. Meanwhile, we are left with a body of recordings that, in their richness, seem to transcend any questioning at all.

Throughout the nineteen-sixties, a number of surviving American visionaries—players like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley, Reverend Gary Davis, Bessie Jones, and Elizabeth Cotten, musicians who had previously issued only a smattering of commercial releases, if any at all—were granted full second acts.* Some had been briefly introduced to the public in 1952, when Harry Smith compiled his multidisk “Anthology of American Folk Music” for Folkways Records, but most were ciphers, ghosts, disembodied voices embedded in shellac and conjured only by a phonograph needle. That a person in 1964 could shake out a camp blanket, sit down on the lawn at Newport, and listen to Skip James perform “Sick Bed Blues” (“I used to have some friends, but they wish that I were dead”) in that lurching, alien falsetto—that’s just plainly miraculous.

In 1959, the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank put together a short film, “Pull My Daisy,” about the Beat Generation; Frank’s first book, “The Americans,” a fiercely unromantic (yet somehow deeply romantic) collection of black-and-white photographs, had redefined Americana when it was published, in 1958. Cohen documented the film’s production as a set photographer, and eventually Life magazine asked to publish one of the portraits he’d taken. In it, Jack Kerouac is leaning toward a radio speaker, listening to a broadcast of himself reading, his hand curled around a stubby volume knob, a mix of self-interest and disdain squeezing his face. He looks a little pinched. Cohen has an incredible aptitude for capturing these sorts of deeply revelatory non-moments. It is a poet’s instinct—find the accidental truth, the inadvertent tell—that’s also evident in the work of Walker Evans, and in all the great American documentarians.

The Life deal mostly meant that Cohen now had enough cash—about six hundred dollars—to pack up his notebook, his Nikon Rangefinder, and a boxy Magnamite tape recorder powered by a hand crank, and split town. He could plan to acquire a used car once he’d arrived in Kentucky. He doesn’t recall the precise make and model he bought, merely that it was a dud. Its failings turned out to be serendipitous. “The car kept breaking down. I kept going to gas stations for help. They’d say, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I’d say, ‘Looking for banjo players, you know any banjo players?’ ”

Last month, Tompkins Square, a San Francisco-based reissue label, released a live recording by a musician named Roscoe Holcomb, made at the San Diego Folk Festival in 1972. Bob Dylan has described Holcomb’s work as exhibiting “a certain untamed sense of control, which makes him one of the best.” I think Dylan was equivocating. For me, Holcomb is easily the greatest American banjo player to have commercially recorded, possessing, as he did, that ineffable combination of virtuosity and openness.

When John Cohen met Holcomb in Daisy, Kentucky, in 1959, Holcomb was forty-seven years old and had never made a recording, nor had he ever considered a career as a musician. Cohen is deliberate on this point; Holcomb wasn’t rediscovered, like some of those other players, he was divined, realized. Found. In an essay printed on the back of the new LP, Cohen writes, “If I hadn’t ‘found’ him in Daisy, Kentucky in 1959, there would be no record of his music. He never had the desire to record, go on radio, or perform in public…. He was little appreciated or recognized back home in Kentucky.”

By the time Cohen came around, Holcomb had been forced into premature retirement. His body was ravaged, licked. He had worked in a coal mine for fifteen cents an hour, worked at a sawmill (where his back got broken), and worked various construction jobs. Now he mostly stayed at home, fixing things, taking intermittent construction gigs, and picking a banjo from time to time. He seemed ambivalent about music. “I don’t like to play anymore. I don’t like the things I used to like. I don’t care enough about it no more. I’m getting old.”

I wonder sometimes if Holcomb considered the idea of a music career ignoble—if he found it hubristic or he found it dumb. He had some pretty stoic notions about work: “I always liked to work. Worked all my life. I enjoyed it,” he told Cohen later. “That’s why it hurts so bad. When you work hard all your life and then just have to give it up.” You get the sense that Holcomb thought playing folk songs was something of a goof.