O brother, where art thou?
Various / island def Jam
If a film usually shapes its soundtrack, the music to the Coen brothers’ Depression-era fable broke with convention in many ways. Joel Coen wanted to register the deep significance of music to the ’30s South; in response, music producer T Bone Burnett laid down 60 to 70 pieces for the 2000 film before shooting began. As surely as good-quality pomade shapes wayward hair, the music shaped the movie’s capricious moods.
In the film, three dim-bulb escaped cons score an unlikely recording hit as The Soggy Bottom Boys. For an album of antique American bluegrass, folk and gospel, the soundtrack’s success was equally, gloriously unlikely. It shifted nine million copies, reaching beyond banjo connoisseurs to mainstream listeners. At 2002’s Grammy Awards, it beat U2 and OutKast to album of the year. And it birthed its own film in Down From The Mountain, a concert movie starring many of the album’s old-time archivists and revivalists.
Even in a year that boasted top-drawer soundtracks for Almost Famous and High Fidelity, Burnett’s
curation stood tall. Vintage recordings from James Carter & The Prisoners (chain-gang blues lament ‘Po Lazarus’) and Harry McClintock (frisky heelkicker ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’) set the mood beautifully. Elsewhere, veterans Ralph Stanley, Norman Blake, the Fairfield Four and John Hartford sit seamlessly besides younger voices including Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris and Dan Tyminski.
And what voices they are. Krauss’ vocal is as pure as spring water on the gospel goodness of ‘Down To The River To Pray’, while Krauss, Welch and Harris harmonise to hair-raising effect on siren-song ‘Didn’t Leave Nobody But The Baby’. Lip-synched to by George Clooney on-screen, Tyminski leads whooping variations on The Soggy Bottom Boys’ ‘I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow’, the song that holds everything together like the Dude’s rug in The Big Lebowski. And, on a darker note, Stanley’s vocal imbues rural spiritual ‘O Death’ with a bone-stark gravitas.
If the soundtrack’s success helped predict the rise of faux-bumpkins such as Mumford & Sons, don’t hold that against it. Besides ushering Stanley to a late-career revival, Burnett helped introduce Welch and Krauss’ voices to grateful ears. Another happy twist is the case of James Carter, who earned royalties running into – apparently – the six-figure range when tracked down following the album’s release. Carter barely remembered recording ‘Po Lazarus’. “I sang that a long time back,” he remarked. Good thing Burnett remembered for him. Kevin Harley