John Cohen, a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, the New York-based string band at the forefront of the old-time music revival of the 1950s and ’60s, died on Monday at his home in Putnam Valley, N.Y. He was 87 .

His son, Rufus, said the cause was cancer.

Although best known as a performer, Mr. Cohen was also an accomplished photographer, filmmaker and musicologist. But virtually all his artistic pursuits were centered on a single goal: revitalizing the traditional music of the rural American South and building a movement around it.

Established in 1958, the Ramblers consisted of Mr. Cohen on banjo, guitar and vocals; the folklorist Mike Seeger, also on vocals, as well as fiddle and other instruments; and Tom Paley, who left the trio in 1962, on banjo, guitar and vocals. Together the three men introduced a generation of young urbanites to the work of Depression-era rural performers like Dock Boggs, Elizabeth Cotten and Blind Alfred Reed. (Tracy Schwarz, Mr. Paley’s replacement, played fiddle and guitar and sang with the group from 1962 until the early 1970s.)