Böcker av John Cohen

Speed Bumps on a Dirt Road is a living document of country music's founding fathers and mothers. John Cohen photographed musicians, at home, backstage at public events, from the wings at fiddlers' conventions, out in country music parks, and in the studio for live radio show performances and recording sessions.Back in 1961 it was still possible to know a few of America's original country musicians from the '20s and '30s. Renowned and celebrated musician and artist John Cohen came of age at the confluence of old time and early bluegrass music, the historic intersection of traditional and folk music. Cohen traveled the country playing music, recording, and documenting what was to be a generation of musicians who would influence American music and culture for decades to come.Traveling between the Union Grove fiddlers' convention to the Grand Ole Opry to a coal celebration in Hazard, Kentucky, Cohen made historic photographs of performers like Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, the country's very first all-bluegrass show, and a bluegrass bar in Baltimore, among much more. Speed Bumps on a Dirt Road presents old time music as the root of country music.Includes photographs of: Flatt & Scruggs, fiddler "Eck" Robertson in Amarillo, Texas, Doc Watson, bluegrass fiddler "Tex" Logan, the Stanley Brothers at Sunset Park, Sara and Maybelle of the Carter Family, and Cousin Emmy, Alice & Hazel, and a dulcimer in a parking lot.

In the summer of 1955 a relatively naive and uninformed John Cohen crossed the straits of Gibraltar. He arrived in Tangier with a handwritten note in cursive Arabic; the man who had composed it in New York had told him to "keep this paper far from your passport." Cohen had no idea why or indeed what the note said; it was not addressed to a specific person. He was simply instructed to look for a certain man when he arrived, who would then send him to "the others." Cohen's otherwise straightforward trip to make photographs in Morocco thus began with a sense of intrigue and perhaps risk.This was Cohen's first journey outside America to see the world. In his words: "The camera led my way to a distant culture, along with the desire to represent what I could see and sense there, and not be distracted by chronology or thought. My photographs were intended to be a sensual response to light and to the people who inhabited these spaces. These Morocco photos were ... an indication of what was to come."