Was Reference of Old Timey Music in O Brother Where Art Thou Backlash to Jazz
The twelvemonth 2000 was an absolutely dizzying time to be a music fan. Intricately constructed boy bands and hyper-objectified teen divas ruled radio, MTV, and record sales, with the pinnacle 2 best-selling albums of the year existence NSYNC's No Strings Attached (9.9 million copies) and Britney Spears' Oops! … I Did It Once more (8.8 million copies). Three of the twelvemonth's Top v charting singles (Madonna's "Music," U2's "Beautiful Day," and Bon Jovi'due south "It'southward My Life") were from seasoned artists who many critics accused of hitting their commercial peaks sometime in the 1980s. Plus, much like they surprised anybody in the mid-1990s with their expansive Anthology project, The Beatles in one case once more offered a new release — their compilation of No. 1 singles, sensibly titled one — that immediately became a pop cultural juggernaut, selling more than than 31 million copies worldwide and earning the distinction of being the single acknowledged album of the unabridged 2000s in the Us.
Sneaking into this perplexing musical environment similar a drib of water into an oil spill was the shortly-to-be-legendary soundtrack to the Coen Brothers film O Brother, Where Fine art Thou?, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this calendar month. While the anthology would brand a surprisingly long run to the No. i spot on the Billboard 200, win almost a half dozen Grammy awards, and eventually exist certified 8x platinum, it initially appeared every bit an eclectic anomaly among the new millennium's forrard-leaning pop stars.
From left, Tim Blake Nelson, George Clooney, and John Turturro in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (Buena Vista Pictures)
Fix confronting the properties of the Depression-era, Jim Crow Due south, the satirical one-act is a loose reimagining of Homer's ancient Greek epic The Odyssey, right downward to having a main character named Ulysses (a post-ER George Clooney), a twisting homeward journey, a trio of sirens, and its very own Polyphemos-like cyclops (courtesy of John Goodman'south eye patch-sporting grapheme, Big Dan Teague). However, arguably the well-nigh notable component of the motion picture is its ever-nowadays musical tableau, a rich tapestry of early American roots music — bluegrass, gospel, dejection, country, folk — masterfully curated and recreated by honour-winning producer T Os Burnett.
"Ethan Coen called me and asked, 'How would you similar to make a movie nearly the history of American music?'" Burnett recalls, adding with a hearty laugh, "I hateful, that's one hell of an elevator pitch."
Having already worked with Joel and Ethan Coen on their 1998 film The Big Lebowski, Burnett was excited to once once more be handed the musical reins for one of the duo'south unorthodox cinematic works. One major difference this time around is that the music would actually come kickoff, with Burnett compiling a deep catalog of what was then beingness referred to as "onetime-time music" — Appalachian folk songs, gospel numbers, bluegrass traditionals — to be incorporated directly into the script every bit it was being written. Throughout the process, Burnett was also trying to find the correct balance of older recordings and newly fashioned interpretations by artists like Alison Krauss, Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, and Dan Tyminski.
"There weren't any specific rules for what older songs nosotros would utilize versus what we would re-record," Burnett says. "It was only a natural procedure of letting the songs themselves decide. For example, on a chain-gang song similar 'Po' Lazarus' by James Carter and the Prisoners, as they were chosen on the old Alan Lomax recording, there was no possible way to reproduce that audio. Nosotros knew we were going to be using it for the very starting time of the moving-picture show, so it had to exist completely genuine and authentic. It couldn't have anything Hollywood about information technology. It had to have that specific dirt and sweat on it from the 1959 recording."
"For me, the north star of the whole project was the song, 'O Death,'" he continues. "Since the 1960s, I've loved this onetime version of Dock Boggs doing information technology because information technology always struck me as being so chilling. For the film, we were working in epic Greek themes, which were always almost dealing with fate. To me, 'O Death' was talking direct to fate, the thing that'south coming for yous, and the faster you run away from information technology, the closer it gets to yous." While Burnett had initially envisioned the legendary Ralph Stanley cut a new banjo-fueled version of "O Expiry" for the soundtrack, the story goes that one time Stanley got to the studio, he convinced Burnett to allow him have an instrument-free go at it, creating a distinctively haunting a cappella version of "O Death" that hearkened back to his Primitive Baptist Universalist church upbringing in Appalachian Virginia.
For the songs that were getting modern-day re-recordings, Burnett and his team weren't interested in digitally fabricated sonic sepia tones. Instead, they recreated vintage recording techniques and blended them with the technological advancements in audio output to create updated versions of these decades-erstwhile songs.
When information technology came time to pick a theme song for the picture's main character, Clooney's Ulysses Everett McGill, Burnett didn't take much problem deciding on "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow," an early 20th-century American folk song originally published by a partially blind musician from Kentucky named Dick Burnett (though some musicologists trace its origins further back to an old English language broadside). "'Man of Constant Sorrow' was certainly a perfect rewrite of the whole Odyssey in a style," Burnett says. "Odysseus truly was the man of constant sorrow."
Yet, truth be told, Burnett'due south connection to the runway as a potential theme vocal for the main character in a Coen brothers flick stretched back a bit further. "When nosotros were looking for a theme song for The Dude in The Large Lebowski, I really proposed 'Man of Constant Sorrow' for him," laughs Burnett. "I though he was that sort of epic hero, where fate was constantly rolling over him — in that case, fate was in the class of having the same name as some other guy who was mixed up in all this crazy stuff. We concluded up going a dissimilar management with Lebowski, using Captain Beefheart and Creedence Clearwater Revival to establish his musical identity. But honestly, there's less departure between Creedence'due south 'Fortunate Son' and our version of 'Man of Constant Sorrow,' than there is between it and some of the older versions. When Dan Tyminski played that polyrhythmic guitar function that kicks off 'Man of Constant Sorrow,' nobody had ever done that before in bluegrass music. I've always thought information technology'south a lot closer to a Traffic record than a Monroe Brothers tape."
The Sweet Spot of 'Constant Sorrow'
By the time the O Brother, Where Art Thou? project came forth, Dan Tyminski had already been playing guitar equally a member of Alison Krauss & Matrimony Station for nigh a decade. A serendipitous chain of events led to him providing pb vocals for Clooney's Ulysses in the song's in-film appearance of "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" and recording two different versions of it for the soundtrack.
"Early in the project, our managing director, Denise Stiff, was helping T Bone out with trying to wrangle up artists to participate in the soundtrack," Tyminski says. "As the full band, Alison Krauss & Union Station, we all went in to audience because we were huge fans of the Coen Brothers and of T Os every bit well. While nosotros were there, Denise mentioned that they were still looking for the person who would be George Clooney'due south singing vox and she threw my name out there as a potential candidate. They told me to come up dorsum by myself the next twenty-four hour period and I ended up doing a version of 'Man of Constant Sorrow' that was nothing like what concluded upwardly on the soundtrack. But the stars aligned, they saw what they were looking for, and called me back the next mean solar day to offer me the gig."
Equally is the case with the paw-me-downwardly nature of virtually traditional folk songs, there accept been multiple recordings and interpretations of "Human being of Constant Sorrow" over the decades from which Tyminski could selection a reference signal. These include Sarah Ogan Gunning's gender-swapped "I Am a Girl of Constant Sorrow" from Alan Lomax's 1930s recordings, multiple arrangements past the Stanley Brothers throughout the 1950s, Jerry Garcia'due south a cappella live version from the early 1960s, and Bob Dylan's solo acoustic version from his 1962 self-titled debut LP. "More than whatever other version, I was virtually familiar with Ralph Stanley'south arrangement of the song," says Tyminski. "For the audition, I decided to exercise a more traditional bluegrass accept on information technology: much higher, must faster, less swampy. We ended up dirtying information technology up a bit for the concluding motion-picture show version, which I thought gave it the right graphic symbol that it needed."
With the moving-picture show'south chief theme locked in, Burnett connected to fashion the soundtrack's retro-tinged roster of songs effectually it. He secured the original 1928 recording of Harry McClintock's "Big Rock Candy Mountain." He had blues musician Chris Thomas Male monarch (who plays Tommy Johnson in the motion picture, a hybridized character based on existent-life Delta bluesmen Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson) play Skip James' influential "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues." He called on the otherworldly, Dna-level harmonies of multiple family-based groups, such as The Whites singing "Keep On the Sunny Side," The Cox Family'southward bluegrass sway of "I Am Weary (Allow Me Residuum)," and the young sibling vocal trio The Peasall Sisters' charmingly youthful take on Maybelle Carter'due south "In the Highways." Burnett also recorded Alison Krauss for three separate tracks: her ain laissez passer at the gospel folk hymn "Down to the River to Pray," a crystalline bluegrass duet of "I'll Fly Away" with Gillian Welch, and the enchanting "Didn't Exit Nobody Only the Baby" featuring Krauss, Welch, and Emmylou Harris.
Afterward a cursory hiccup with the motion-picture show's original release date — "It was initially supposed to come out in the summer of 2000," Burnett says, "but it got postponed towards the end of the year considering when we took the finished film into the studio, the guy who had originally signed off on it had just been bounced that exact morning time and this whole new authorities of vanquish-shocked executives didn't what to exercise with information technology" — it was somewhen given a staggered express release in theaters and the soundtrack hit stores a couple weeks earlier Christmas.
Recalls Burnett: "Luckily plenty, the motion picture and the soundtrack both started doing really well in tandem with each other. Back then, there were still a lot of movie theaters inside of malls and folks could walk right out of the motion-picture show, have a few steps to the tape store, and buy the soundtrack. The more than records that sold, the more theaters the studio would put the movie in, and it just kept growing together like that. After its initial run in theaters, every time the film went to a new format — cablevision, broadcast TV, DVD — in that location would be another moving ridge of interest and spike in sales of the soundtrack each time. It was all very organic."
Although the album that didn't possess the conventional means of promotion — no spotlight artist stadium tour, no monster radio hits, no slickly-produced music videos for Carson Daly to play on MTV'due south TRL — it did astoundingly well in mainstream pop culture over a surprisingly lengthy menstruum of time. A month earlier the record celebrated its one-year anniversary, it was certified triple platinum. At the 2002 Grammy Awards, it won five separate awards, including Album of the Year, Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion picture, Best Male State Vocal Performance (Ralph Stanley's "O Death"), Best Land Collaboration with Vocals (The Soggy Lesser Boys' "I Am a Human of Constant Sorrow"), and Best Traditional Folk Album for the soundtrack to the accompanying documentary/concert film Down from the Mountain. A calendar month after the Grammys, the O Brother, Where Art Grand? soundtrack vanquish out superstar artists like Brandy, Alanis Morissette, and Linkin Park to hit No. one on the Billboard 200, having been on the chart for 62 weeks at that bespeak. All in, information technology remained on the chart for 101 weeks, simply shy of two straight years. The anthology would eventually get on to be certified 8x platinum in 2007.
Opening Doors
As Americana Music Association Executive Manager Jed Hilly sees information technology, the incredible successes the O Blood brother, Where Fine art Thou? soundtrack achieved and the celebratory disquisitional and commercial responses it received felt like the fitting culmination of a genre groundswell that started a few years prior.
"There were some pretty important things going on in the music business in the 1990s that affected what nosotros at present call Americana," says Hilly, who was an executive at Sony Music at the time. "The FCC rulings changed the way radio existed where it went from x,000 different radio stations being run past 10,000 different owners to those same 10,000 radio stations being bought up and corporatized past like ten companies. Yous also had the advent of SoundScan, which acquired an artist like Garth Brooks, who had never appeared on a popular chart earlier, to hit No. two on the very kickoff SoundScan chart. Suddenly, artists associated with what Steve Earle called the 'dandy credibility scare' — Rodney Crowell, thousand.d. lang, Dwight Yoakam, Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash — all of a sudden, the Nashville music business concern had no interest in any of them. They were only after artists like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain. Throw in the rising alt-country movement with Uncle Tupelo and The Jayhawks, as well as Johnny Cash going to work with Rick Rubin; all that fix the stage for the environs into which O Blood brother was dropped in 2000. The audience was there, they just needed the commitment and delivery by the correct group of record company, producer, and artists. O Brother hit all those chords perfectly."
Audience response is also where Dan Tyminski saw the biggest fingerprints of the soundtrack'due south significant popular cultural impact. "What I noticed after the release of O Blood brother was that our audience demographic significantly changed and expanded," he says. "Amongst the people that we commonly saw at our shows, there was now this new crop of younger fans with rock ring T-shirts and facial piercings. Attendance was tripling at bluegrass festivals with no other change but that movie and soundtrack being released. It actually fabricated me aware of how many people outside of our genre were affected past O Brother. I oasis't personally seen a record impact so many people outside of its built-in genre at that magnitude before or since."
Tyminski also credits his appearance on the soundtrack with expanding his creative prospects and collaboration opportunities as well. "It gave me a level of notoriety I don't recall I could've ever had without it, and it's opened the door for people to want to write and record with me who probably wouldn't have come across my music otherwise" says Tyminski. "In a weird way, it was kind of the genesis that sparked me doing 'Hey Brother' with Avicii, considering they wrote that song with me in mind after hearing 'Man of Constant Sorrow.'"
The late EDM artist Avicii asked Tyminski to provide the vocals for his dance-popular single "Hey Brother" in 2013, and the multi-genre hit landed on the Usa pop, country, dance, rock, and Top 40 charts. Information technology also became a global No. i nail, topping the charts in over 20 countries, including French republic, Brazil, and Spain. "Technically, that song is my biggest striking, and it'south in EDM music," laugh Tyminski. "It shows you that the success of O Blood brother wasn't but a fluke. It affected other music fans, other artists, and other genres. Acoustic bluegrass music has never been meant to be played to huge audiences, but it's afflicted music that has filled stadiums. Just this by year I played 'Hey Brother' at a tribute concert for Avicii in an loonshit filled with 60,000 people who were screaming for a song that never would've happened without the O Brother, Where Art K? soundtrack."
Burnett also saw the audience love and manufacture accolades for the anthology pay off for the artists involved, and has been gratified to see it spread far beyond.
"With 'Man of Constant Sorrow,' there were all these really cracking versions to cull from, but our arrangement was mainly patterned on the Stanley Brothers version, where there was a flake of a call-and-response thing going on," he says. "So, we ended up licensing it from Ralph Stanley, which I was actually happy well-nigh because he got paid on all of those multiple versions of 'Man of Constant Sorrow' that appear on the soundtrack. He was able to become a new tour bus and he fifty-fifty bought a new Jaguar!"
The bluegrass icon wasn't the just ane to run into significant royalty payouts on his decades-quondam catalog songs. "One other piece of restorative songwriting justice that I'm pretty proud of is, afterward the soundtrack was a hitting, the Lomax family unit started looking for James Carter, because they thought he might however exist alive," Burnett says, excitedly getting into storytelling mode. "They hired a detective and eventually found him in Chicago. Out of the bluish, they knocked on the door and presented him with a large $twenty,000 royalty cheque for 'Po Lazarus'. With the success of the film and soundtrack, artists like James Carter, Ralph Stanley — oh yeah, I heard the Fairfield Four were able to pay off their houses — those are such wonderful stories and happy endings tied to the success of the whole thing. A lot of good came out of the movie and it was actually cool to see it get spread effectually similar that."
An Americana Milestone
Over the last 20 years, the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack has continually been credited with ushering in the mainstream resurgence of American roots music and accelerating the ascension of the tradition-steeped, purlieus-refusing Americana genre. Inside that customs, the album is often celebrated for casting a long shadow that has shaped other mainstream milestones such as the chart-topping, Grammy-sweeping, platinum-selling 2007 album Raising Sand past Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, the Grammys adding a new Best Americana Anthology award category in 2010, and even Merriam-Webster adding the musical definition of "Americana" to the dictionary in 2011.
"O Brother was definitely i of the offset large multiplatinum records in that incarnation of the Americana earth," acknowledges Hilly. "The timing of it was massively significant for the Americana movement and T Os is such an omnipresent figure in the community. Forth with artists like Levon Helm, Bob Dylan, and Emmylou Harris, T Bone is ane of the vital godfathers of the movement. He's on the ground floor of the whole thing."
Only from Burnett's perspective, the larger cultural affect, genre-shaping praise, and commercially quantifiable successes aren't where his proudest moments and personal satisfactions come from — "I haven't looked at any album charts since the 1960s," he laughs. Instead, he takes pride in the manner the anthology has found its way into the private stories of and so many listeners.
"The affair that has stuck with me the near over the years," Burnett says, "is how many people have told me that they've played these songs at their weddings and at family members' funerals and all these other major life events. Or that they remember their grandfather playing ane of these songs on the front porch when they used to go visit him when they were children. These songs accept entered and then many personal lives at important moments and people seem really happy to have both those old reminders and the new memories. Something I ever tell the artists I piece of work with is that the song's arrow shouldn't point to themselves, it should indicate to the listener. Every time someone tells me a personal story about a touching moment involving a song from O Brother, then I'grand reminded that nosotros were successful at the most important thing."
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Source: https://www.nodepression.com/o-brother-where-arent-thou-the-two-decade-cultural-impact-of-o-brother-where-art-thou/
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