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John Cohen, founding member of New Lost City Ramblers, the New York string group at the forefront of the musical revival of the 1950s and 1960s, died Monday at his home in Putnam Valley, New York. 87.
His son, Rufus, said the cause was cancer.
Although best known as an interpreter, Mr. Cohen was also an accomplished photographer, filmmaker and musicologist. But almost all of his artistic activities were focused on one goal: to revitalize the traditional South American rural music and create a movement around it.
Founded in 1958, the Ramblers were composed of Mr. Cohen on banjo, guitar and vocals; the folklorist Mike Seeger, also on vocals, as well as violin and other instruments; and Tom Paley, who left the trio in 1962, playing banjo, guitar and singing. Together, the three men introduced a generation of urban youth to the work of rural performers of the Depression era such as Dock Boggs, Elizabeth Cotten and Blind Alfred Reed. (Tracy Schwarz, Mr. Paley's replacement played violin and guitar and sang with the band from 1962 to the early 1970s.)
Unlike some of their contemporaries, the trio did not simply imitate – or sanitized, as was the case with groups like the Kingston Trio – the unadorned sounds of their Appalachian ancestors. By mastering the antediluvian musical syntax, the Ramblers accorded great respect to the old group of strings while equipping them to reimagine it with their own exuberant timbre.
The Jon folklorist Pankake, in the liner notes to "Where do you come from? Where Do You Go ?," an anthology of 2009 Ramblers recordings and their influences, called Mr. Cohen "William Blake's group, a visionary role worthy of the training and talents of his artist ".
"In retrospect," continued Mr. Pankake, "he seemed particularly aware of the evolution of the Ramblers' mission, aware that the band had something more entertaining than itself, carving out a still unknown place in the world. the story and inspiring many listeners become a new type of music community. "
Mr. Cohen went periodically to the south to locate and record those of his predecessors from the Depression era who were still alive and, whenever possible, bring them into the north for that they occur in folk festivals and on university campuses. Her commitment to Southern traditional culture also extends to her photographs, published in publications such as Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and The New York Times, and is part of the collections of the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art.
Published in 2001, his book "There Is No Eye" served as a repertoire for his 50 years working as a photographer. It included images of subjects ranging from personalities like Bill Monroe and Woody Guthrie to lesser-known characters like banjo players Clarence Ashley and Charlie Poole.
Mr. Cohen was also a documentary filmmaker. His 1963 short "The High Lonesome Sound" examined the life and music of Kentucky singer and banjo artist Roscoe Holcomb. Among his more than a dozen documentaries were films describing the music and traditional mores of the Incas of Peru.
Unlike some who present Aboriginal cultures to a wider audience, Mr. Cohen did not impose preconceived notions on his subjects. He avoided the term "folk" as a way of referring to Aboriginal music and traditions, describing it in a 2001 interview with roots music magazine No Depression, as "a way of the upper class to describe this. what do the poorer classes do?
John Cohen was born on August 2, 1932 in Sunnyside, Queens, Israel Cohen, owner of a shoe store, and Sonya (Shack) Cohen, a housewife. He grew up in the suburbs of Great Neck on Long Island. His parents introduced him to folk music when he was a child. in high school, he listened to Woody Guthrie's records and started playing the guitar.
He received a BA in Fine Arts from Yale in 1955 and a MA in Fine Arts from that city in 1957. He also helped organize hootenannies on campus and began taking pictures of influential but unknown musicians like folk singer Reverend Gary Davis.
Mr. Cohen then photographed the production of "Pull My Daisy", the 1959 Robert Frank movie about the Beat Generation, starring Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.
[Readit[Readthe[Lisle[ReadtheObituary of Mr. Frank, deceased this month.]
In the late 1950s, Mr. Cohen photographed the comings and goings of abstract expressionist painters who frequented Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village. His book "Young Bob", published in 2003, brings together his photos of Bob Dylan's arrival on the Village folk scene in the early 1960s.
A number of Mr. Cohen's photographs have been used under license in the Ken Country "Country Music" documentary series, currently broadcast on PBS. Some of them are also in Mr. Cohen's book, "Slowdowns on a dirt road: when old music meets bluegrass," published this month.
Friends of the Old Music of the time, an organization created by Mr. Cohen with folklorists Ralph Rinzler and Izzy Young presented a series of concerts in New York featuring musicians from that time, from 1961 to 1965.
In 1965, Mr. Cohen married Penelope Seeger, the youngest of the Seeger family of musical musicians, who also included his brother Mike, the band's companion in the New Lost City Ramblers, and his half-brother Pete. She died in 1993. The daughter of Cohens, Sonya Cohen Cramer, a singer, died in 2015. In addition to their son, Rufus, Mr. Cohen is survived by two grandchildren and a brother, Michael.
Mr. Cohen left Ramblers in the early 1970s, after a second career as a filmmaker and professor of visual arts at SUNY Purchase College, where he taught photography and drawing from 1972 to 1997. In 1973, he takes out the album. "Home Grown", recorded with the Putnam String County Band. (Around the same time, his former classmates, Mike Seeger and Mr. Schwarz, started playing more contemporary country material with Strange Creek Singers, a group that also included fellow former musicians Hazel Dickens, Alice Gerrard and Lamar Grier.)
In 1978, Mr. Cohen brought together Mr. Seeger and Mr. Schwarz for the Ramblers' 20th Anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall. They met again for a 35th anniversary tour in 1993. (Mr. Seeger died in 2009 and Tom Paley in 2017). He also released a solo album titled "Stories the Crow Told Me" in 1999 and, most recently, played with a strings group of the last days, the Down Hill Strugglers.
Mr. Cohen was a music producer associated with T Bone Burnett, on the movie 2003 "Cold Mountain", which takes place in the last days of the American Civil War. In 2005, he appeared in "No Direction Home", Martin Scorsese's documentary on PBS about Mr. Dylan.
A documentary about Mr. Cohen, "Play, John: A life in music" was screened on the Smithsonian network in 2009. Its records were acquired by the Library of Congress in 2011.
"When I started studying music, it was a multiple implication," Cohen wrote in the cover notes of the CD accompanying his 2001 photographic retrospective. "I photographed it , interpreted, presented, recorded and filmed on this subject.
"While some music collectors were looking for stars and innovators," he continued, "I was looking for music that was always in direct contact with its roots, and I was only photographing elements. related to my research. "
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