One autumn day in 1959, a field recordist named Alan Lomax sat at the roadside and watched a Mississippi chain-gang chop logs. One of the prisoners, James Carter, led a chorus of his fellow inmates in a bluesy work-song as they swung their axes. Lomax taped the men before proceeding on his way. The song slipped its chains, lived on and roamed free. The singers at the roadside, God help them, stayed put.
Carter’s primitive prison work-song, “Po Lazarus”, would eventually resurface on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Joel and Ethan Coen’s freewheeling comedy about a trio of dopey fugitives in Depression-era Dixieland. You can hear it playing over the opening scene, just before George Clooney’s preening, wiley Ulysses Everett McGill cuts through the cornfield to the railroad to escape. Everett has convinced his sidekicks (played by John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson) to join him in a search for buried treasure, but the man is a huckster who lies as naturally as he breathes, and so it’s likely his treasure will amount to a pile of fool’s gold.
Times and dates tend to blur in rural, off-grid Mississippi and so it is too with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which has its feet, hands and fingers in several different decades. The film is re-issued this week to commemorate its 25th anniversary. But the story is set in 1937 and features a repertoire of songs that range from Harry McClintock’s 1928 rendition of “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” to pin-sharp folk covers from the late 1990s. As Everett chivvies his buddies across the Delta, tangling with sheriffs and Klansmen and corrupt politicians, this music dips and swells in glorious sympathy. “Po Lazarus” is the overture, the early signpost, pointing the way to a spread of bluegrass ditties and gospel staples that extends all the way through to the final credits. The soundtrack provides the film’s soul and its connective tissue. It would later prove to be its stash of buried treasure as well.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? is adapted – very loosely – from The Odyssey, playfully lifts its title from a pompous unmade movie in Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and bounces, Br’er Rabbit-style, through a cartoonish Deep South and a road “fraught with peril”. The film takes its lead from Clooney’s energetic performance in that it is bumptious, charming and possibly a shade too pleased with itself. It’s not my favourite Coen brothers’ picture (that’s a three-way tie between No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski and Inside Llewyn Davis) but it’s irrepressibly entertaining and more savagely satirical than it first appears, like a Looney Tunes tour of America’s Jim Crow era. The characters may be exaggerated, verging on the grotesque, but there is usually a real-world inspiration lurking just out of shot. The imperilled bluesman who claims to have sold his soul to the devil is an obvious stand-in for Robert Johnson, while Charles Durning’s crooked, pork-barrel governor is based on the true-life “Pappy” O’Daniel, who sang old-time country-western and once stole an election from the young Lyndon Johnson.
If O Brother contains anything so blunt as a message, it is that good music endures and redeems those who play it – even when those people are a band of bumbling convicts called the Soggy Bottom Boys. In the case of O Brother, it lasts even longer than a good movie does, because while the Coens’ comedy remains beloved by its fans (not least, bizarrely, the former US senator Mitt Romney, who cites it as his all-time favourite film), in cultural terms it has been gazumped by its merch, upstaged by its music. It joins Saturday Night Fever and The Harder They Come on an elite list of hit movies that wound up playing second fiddle to their soundtrack albums.
On some level, perhaps, this was all preordained. The Coens had only a title and a vague story in mind when they hired producer T-Bone Burnett to help fill in the blanks. Burnett in turn made a playlist of American folk songs that would serve as a guide when the Coens wrote their script. So the O Brother soundtrack existed before the film even did. It wore an assistant’s hat during the writing and production process and then returned at the end to claim its share of the spoils. Following the initial fanfare of the movie’s release, Burnett’s 18-track compilation was credited with almost single-handedly sparking the early-Noughties folk revival. It sold nearly 9 million copies in the US alone and helped boost the careers of Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch. At the 2002 Grammys – where the soundtrack won the Album of the Year award – 74-year-old Ralph Stanley reprised his a capella version of “O Death” from the film.
Many of the older musicians featured in O Brother, Where Art Thou? had passed on by the time the soundtrack album came out. But the producers were eventually able to find lowly James Carter, who was then in his mid-seventies and living a quiet life in Chicago. They presented him with a plane ticket to the Grammys plus a royalty cheque for $20,000, both of which came as such a surprise to Carter that he reportedly had to step outside to roll a nerve-soothing cigarette. Carter believed that he had put his Mississippi chain-gang days behind him. He said he had only a faint, fading memory of singing “Po Lazarus” on the road. Had the man seen the movie, it might have made perfect sense. The Soggy Bottom Boys’ recording of “Man of Constant Sorrow” becomes a runaway hit; even “Pappy” O’Daniel claims to be a big fan. Good music survives and finds fresh generations of fans, and freed songs circle back to rescue the men who once sang them.
