The New Lost City Ramblers

50 Years of Folk

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By Ray Allen
Brooklyn College, CUNY

The New Lost City Ramblers pioneered the renaissance of southern mountain music that grew out of the post-World War II folk music revival the late 1950s and 1960s. Formed in 1958 by Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and Tom Paley (replaced in 1962 by Tracy Schwarz), The New Lost City Ramblers introduced northern urban audiences to what they judged to be "authentic" southern folk traditions at a time when the urban revival was dominated by popular and artsy interpreters of folk music.

All four Ramblers were born in New York City and as youngsters had no personal contact with the rural southern culture and music that would so captivate them as young adults. Yet each experienced the sounds of southern country music at an early age. Mike Seeger, the son of the erudite musicologist Charles Seeger and ultra-modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, was literally reared on folk music field recordings that his parents spent years transcribing in their home in suburban Washington, D.C. John Cohen, a native of Queens and suburban Long Island, grew up hearing folk music at leftist Catskill summer camps and helped organize hoots at Yale, where he received his BA and MA degrees in art and photography. Bronx-born Tom Paley collected old 78 rpm hillbilly records and followed Woody Guthrie around before entering graduate school at Yale to study mathematics. Tracy Schwarz, the son of an investment banker and classically trained pianist, was fascinated by the snatches of country radio that infiltrated the airways of his suburban New Jersey home. Though city born and suburban bred, the Ramblers immersed themselves in the sounds of traditional southern mountain music, initially through scratchy records and Library of Congress recordings, and later through visits to the South to meet, record, and commune with rural artists.

Following the their first public appearance at the Carnegie Recital Hall in September 1958, the Ramblers were thrust to the forefront of what came to be known as the "traditionalist" or "purist" wing of the folk music revival. In their first four years Mike, John, and Tom turned out nine Folkways LPs and two EPs, and played over a hundred and fifty engagements at folk festivals, urban clubs, and college campuses. On disc and on stage their ability to emulate with remarkable accuracy the instrumentation, styles, and repertories of southern mountain string band and early bluegrass groups made them unique among city players.

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