Scope and Content
Collection of manuscripts, sound recordings, graphic images, and moving images created and collected by John Cohen. The materials document Cohen's parallel careers as a musician (member of the New Lost City Ramblers) and writer during the 1960s American folk music revival, and his celebrated work as a documentary photographer and filmmaker, producer, and artist from the 1950s to the present. Includes interviews made by Cohen with John Hartford, Harry Smith, Roger McGuinn, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Gary Davis, John Summers, Cousin Emmy, Roscoe Holcomb, Charlie Higgins, Wade Ward, Friends of Old Time Music, High Atmosphere, and photographs of these and others including E. C. Ball, Clancy Brothers, Elizabeth Cotten, Willie Dixon, Jack Elliott, Woody Guthrie, Mary Frank, Lilly Brothers, Alan Lomax, Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, Mike Seeger, Stanley Brothers, Belle Stewart, Stony Mountain Boys, Merle Travis, Muddy Waters, Doc Watson and many others. The collection includes documentation of Greenwich Village and Harlem, New York City; Cohen's travels to Paris and Spain in the 1950s; and later to England, Wales, Scotland, Germany, Italy and Japan, and other countries. Notable is his research for his master's thesis on Peruvian textile weaving, and subsequent fieldwork in Peru. Cohen visited Peru eight times between 1956 and 2005. Subsequent projects in Peru incorporated sound recordings of Andean music, and films as well as books about weaving, music, festivals, and dance. The majority of Cohen's Peru photographs were taken during his first three trips there and focus primarily on indigenous Andean people in the Q'ero region.