In February 2002, as Americans were still recovering from the aftermath of 9/11, the Grammys insisted the show must go on. The contenders for Album of the Year were a varied bunch that included Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft, India.Arie’s Acoustic Soul, and U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. The final two candidates stood as especially intriguing foils, each presenting a unique perspective on life in the American South: OutKast’s celebrated fourth album Stankonia, and the soundtrack to Joel and Ethan Coen’s unexpected hit adventure-comedy, O Brother, Where Art Thou?
By the arrival of the new millennium, the Minnesota-born filmmakers had sealed their reputations as high-minded auteurs on the consecutive successes of Fargo and The Big Lebowski. With O Brother, Where Art Thou?, released in December of 2000, they knitted the lurking everyman terror of the former with the absurd and twisting humor of the latter, approximating the arc of Homer’s epic, the Odyssey. The rural Depression-era Mississippi setting of the film was accompanied by a diegetic slate of gospel, bluegrass, pre-war blues, and string-band music, and its soundtrack became an improbable but massive hit, selling more than eight million copies and snagging the Album of the Year.
It’s no real surprise that the Recording Academy, never the vanguard of taste or talent, favored an album that spoke to white Americans’ nostalgic follies over one by two Black men from Atlanta daring to turn a critical eye toward the future. But the win was a watershed moment for an album that would define a significant part of the music-industry landscape of the next two decades. Beyond the immediate impact of the soundtrack—minting major careers for some and giving a late-in-life boost to others—O Brother, Where Art Thou? primed a generation for a modern folk revival, establishing a new Americana industrial complex along the way.
The Coen brothers took the old saws of folk songs—death, sex, disaster, the highwire act between piety and damnation—and peppered them into their own folkloric adaptation. In press cycles around the film, the Coens spoke about how the music shaped the narrative and the overall tone of the movie. Though the film’s main protagonists are not musicians by trade, music is the backbone of their story and the vehicle for their salvation. And ultimately, the crux of O Brother, Where Art Thou? follows another theme in folk: the homecoming.
On the lam from a chain gang and in search of a vast fortune, three men—played by George Clooney, Tim Blake Nelson, and John Turturro—pull a short grift cutting a record at a radio station, accompanied by a Black guitarist they picked up at a rural crossroads. Their recording of the well-worn folk number “Man of Constant Sorrow” explodes as a local hit, but their hand-to-mouth pursuit of a treasure keeps them out of the loop of their much more concrete commercial popularity.
The Coens cast Clooney as ringleader Ulysses Everett McGill, a speedy talker and phony barrister who thinks just fast enough to keep leaping from one frying pan into increasingly hotter fires. Dragged along for the ride are Turturro’s Pete and Nelson’s Delmar, alternately cynical and dim-wittedly optimistic fellow cons. The film’s centerpiece is Clooney’s nervy, bug-eyed performance of “Man of Constant Sorrow,” with Turturro and Nelson hamming it up as backup vocalists. The Coens had a mind to let Clooney sing it himself, but they found that unlike his aunt Rosemary, Clooney couldn’t carry a tune. Instead, producer T Bone Burnett called in the ringer Dan Tyminski, a guitarist and vocalist who had established himself as a formidable talent with bluegrass singer Alison Krauss and the all-star group Union Station.
Burnett had summoned Krauss, Tyminski, and their Union Station bandmates from the deep pool of bluegrass talent concentrated around Nashville at the time. By the end of the ‘90s, the country charts were dominated by high-gloss stars who packed arenas with heavy pop-crossover appeal: Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw, Shania Twain. But the music of O Brother, Where Art Thou? forewent bombastic pyrotechnics and headset mics. Instead, the Coens wanted to ensure that the film’s music was period appropriate, if not dating back to the Depression itself. They dove headfirst into their own research of folklorists’ field recordings and other long-neglected tunes. Burnett applied his expertise, drawing from his own deep well of historical understanding and recruiting the sharp singer-songwriter Gillian Welch as associate producer. His commitment to authenticity was so great that he arranged ribbon microphones by the Decca tree method of the 1930s and ’40s to more faithfully capture a vintage feeling. The production even hired a forensic musicologist, Sandy Wilbur, to determine whether “traditional” songs like “I’ll Fly Away” and “O Death” were, in fact, traditional (no and yes, respectively).
The results of the production’s many pains are, at times, stunning. Krauss takes the lead alongside the First Baptist Church Choir of White House, Tennessee on “Down to the River to Pray,” a gospel hymn that swells in a plea for communion. She joins Welch and Emmylou Harris, ever the nimble and generous collaborator, on the siren song “Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby.” Welch and Burnett had expanded the lullaby from a recording of Sidney Lee Carter by folklorist Alan Lomax. It drips with suggestion without once approaching a naughty word, proving how well-aligned vocal harmonies can overpower a song with subtext to knee-knocking ends.
The music of O Brother, Where Art Thou? roots the story in reality even as the story romps around in fiction, down to how Black artists fit—and are subsequently diminished—within the narrative. The origin of the story’s crossroads guitarist, Tommy Johnson, mirrors that of the real-life bluesman Robert Johnson, who, apocryphally, sold his soul to the devil in exchange for an inimitable guitar talent. Played by New Orleans blues guitarist Chris Thomas King, Tommy is essential to the crew’s survival: his lead on the radio station rescues them in the short and long term. King’s performance of Skip James’ “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” is a balm in one of the film’s rare moments of quiet, but the movie otherwise rarely allows him to speak about his own view of the world.
Beyond its role as the story’s emotional engine, music is essential to the central fiction in O Brother’s climax. The Soggy Bottom Boys’ schemes collide and come unspooled at a political fundraiser, where a bigoted gubernatorial candidate takes umbrage at the band being “integrated.” Outraged at the disruption to their good time, the townsfolk ride him out on a rail, cheering on the lovable scamps of the interracial ensemble. The film’s biggest improbability isn’t in a brush with a bank robber, a one-eyed Bible-selling Klansman, or a fortuitously timed flood, but in the notion that one good-enough song could move a room full of white people to collectively disavow racism and punish the offending party with passionate haste.
The rapid success of the soundtrack led to some career-changing quirks for almost all of its personnel. It created a surprising windfall for James Carter, whom Lomax had recorded singing “Po’ Lazarus” while Carter was imprisoned at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in 1959. The Coens used the recording in O Brother’s opening credits, and as the soundtrack began to boom, Burnett worked with an investigative reporter and Lomax-affiliated licensing personnel to track Carter down and give him the check he’d earned. Carter got a $20,000 lump sum and a trip to the Grammys with his family, who continued to receive the royalties that arrived after his death in late 2003.
The soundtrack also turned a spotlight back toward Ralph Stanley, who’d been a preeminent figure in bluegrass with his brother Carter. Ralph Stanley’s unaccompanied vocal performance of the ballad “O Death” scores one of O Brother’s most chilling scenes, and though Carter Stanley died in 1966, Ralph continued performing the song as a setlist centerpiece until his own earthly departure in 2016. Welch, Tyminski, and members of Union Station all enjoyed on-screen cameos, as did members of the Fairfield Four, who sing the haunting “Lonesome Valley” as Everett, Pete, Delmar, and Tommy seem to face certain doom. A concert film released in 2001, Down from the Mountain, helped put names and faces to the soundtrack’s not-quite-celebrity players as well as family-band contributors like the Whites and the Cox Family.
All of a sudden, people who thought they didn’t like “folk music” found themselves enjoying it. The old songs pressed on the reminiscences of some of its audience while acting as a new portal to the past for others. Maybe some had heard the tunes in church as children; others perhaps discovered that Deliverance and Hee Haw did not paint a complete picture of the banjo. Aligned with the upper-middle-class appeal of the Coens’ endorsement, the soundtrack wooed listeners who might’ve previously written off the genre as the stuff of uneducated hicks. Regardless, it’s hard to build any argument against the warm encouragement of “Keep on the Sunny Side” or the teetering charm of “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” The songs have stuck around because they’re good.
More long-term, the door had opened for a roster of powerhouse modern players. Already a highly respected presence in the bluegrass and country worlds, Krauss earned her laurels as an outright star, returning to work with Burnett on the soundtrack to Cold Mountain and a 2007 album with Robert Plant. She has 27 Grammys, the most held by any woman or singer—Quincy Jones is the only American with more, having 28. Welch released her lodestar Time (The Revelator) in 2001, which reeled with prescient weariness and an empathetic eye for lonely outcasts. Barely out of their teens, Nickel Creek had already proven themselves a prodigious set with their self-titled record in 2000. Krauss produced their next record, 2002’s This Side, which won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. The affable trio of siblings Sara and Sean Watkins with Chris Thile made Nickel Creek an appealing crossover among boomers keeping up with the kids, Gen Xers who’d heard about their Pavement cover, and millennials connecting with modern folk idioms on their own terms.
The Nashville-based string band Old Crow Medicine Show were also well-primed to ride the wave, having wrapped themselves in an enviable mythology at their outset. Their big break came after the daughter of Doc Watson—the blind grace èminence of Appalachian acoustic guitar whose playing shaped the understanding of the instrument’s melodic capabilities—heard the band busking on a corner in Boone, North Carolina. The group punched up some Bob Dylan scraps into “Wagon Wheel,” which made it to their 2004 self-titled album and became a potent regional favorite for its marriage of barroom bluster and homesick sentimentality. Old Crow had been playing “Wagon Wheel” for a decade by the time Darius Rucker, of South Carolina’s Hootie and the Blowfish, made a No. 1 hit out of it with Lady A (then still operating under their Antebellum auspices) in 2013.
Elsewhere in North Carolina, two hot-blooded young men sharing the Avett surname had begun trading their grunge-inspired electric guitar licks for emotive acoustic yawps. They went from a string of raw, searching records (2004’s Mignonette, 2006’s Four Thieves Gone, 2007’s Emotionalism) to working with Rick Rubin by the end of the decade. The Carolina Chocolate Drops coalesced in 2005, arriving as a necessary corrective and testimony to the presence of Black Americans in the history of country, bluegrass, blues, and more. Mumford & Sons, from the other side of the Atlantic, eventually hitched a ride with purported English charm.
Since O Brother, the Coens have returned to nearby wells, but none have bottled lightning like O Brother. Inside Llewyn Davis felt like a genealogical successor as it followed a young musician struggling to catch a break in the Greenwich Village folk-revival scene of the early 1960s. Burnett’s soundtrack likewise felt like O Brother’s spiritual offspring, with actor Oscar Isaac singing his own parts alongside old-guard favorites (Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk) and members of the younger set who’d been hoisted up by the previous wave (Marcus Mumford and the Punch Brothers—a group led by Chris Thile, by then also a MacArthur “genius” grant winner). Tim Blake Nelson reunited with the Coens as the titular sharpshooter in 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs opposite a cowboy played by former Old Crow Medicine Show fiddler (and co-founder) Willie Watson. They conclude their vignette singing a duet written by Welch and David Rawlings, which was nominated for a Best Original Song Academy Award.
Keeping with Coen tradition, the dynamic emotional heft of O Brother, Where Art Thou? comes from ordinary people going to great lengths and battling unrepentant chaos just to get home. The story’s flawed heroes are good folks messily trying to make a better way for themselves in this life or the next—a spirit underlined with a soundtrack that spoke exclusively to the same sentiments. The film laundered the reputation of “hillbilly music” to more widespread appeal, signaling to the music industry an appetite for twangy tunes packaged with aw-shucks humility. It broadened the platform available to generational talents like Welch, Thile, and plenty of their peers, while inadvertently securing a slot for “Wagon Wheel” on the setlist of countless dive-bar bands across the country.
The impact of O Brother, Where Art Thou? coincided with a cultural moment that left millions of Americans reaching for reassurances about their values. The music spoke to ideas of gentle, earnest goodness, which seemed an increasingly difficult comfort to come by. In subsequent years, boundaries between bluegrass, country, alt-country, blues, Southern rock, old-time, and folk music have been dissolved and re-negotiated under the umbrella of “Americana,” which has itself become a convenient marketing label for just about anything else. But fortunately for folk songs, the good ones have a way of enduring because they speak to moments in ways that Mason jar glassware and Anthropologie prairie dresses never could. They tell the truth about the trying weariness, the sorrowful lows, and the preposterous delight of staying alive.
Buy: Rough Trade
