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VARIOUS
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
(Mercury Nashville)
(Feb./March 2001)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? achieves what all soundtracks should, but rarely do: It evokes the spirit of a time and place. Which is a little ironic, given that this batch of well-chosen country, blues, bluegrass, and folk songs range from 1920s-era tunes to 1950s field recordings to old songs sung by contemporary roots performers like Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss, and John Hartford. Yet all these songs lend themselves most beautifully and painfully to the Depression-era, Appalachian setting in which the film takes place.
As much a history lesson as a movie soundtrack, the Coen Brothers (the guys who brought us Fargo) and soundtrack producer T Bone Burnett have eschewed the current pathetic Hollywood practice of pasting gratuitously commercial pop songs into films in favor of carefully chosen tracks that hammer home what it is to be downtrodden, hard up, down on your luck. What's so hard-hitting, and ultimately sad, about this music is the almost desperate attempt to put a sunny face on the hard realities of life. The White's rendition of the old Carter Family tune, "Sunny Side," is the most obvious example. But Harry "Mac" McClintock's 1928 hobo classic "Big Rock Candy Mountain," introduced here to a new generation of listeners, takes the cake. It is a brilliant little piece of Depression-era denial in which homelessness, unemployment, brutal railroad cops, malnutrition, and alcoholism are transformed into a free-for-all life of easy pickins. Set to a simple acoustic guitar, McClintock's cheerful campfire vocals project his fantasies on an otherwise miserable existence as he happily clucks, "In the big rock candy mountain, all the cops have wooden legs/And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth, and the hens lay softboiled eggs…/In the big rock candy mountain you never change your socks/And the little streams of alcohol come trickling down the rocks."
Of course, there's a dark side too, which acknowledges inevitable pain and death with no pie-in-the-sky skirting. Ralph Stanley's haunting a cappella rendition of "O Death" marks perhaps the finest three minutes of the disc. And it doesn't get much more real than Alan Lomax's 1959 recording of a singing Mississippi chain gang at work (the percussion you hear is actually prisoners chopping wood in unison), which kicks off the disc. Blake's traditional rendering of the old bluegrass tune, "A Man Of Constant Sorrow," also cuts to the chase with little romanticism.
Versions of songs that to the contemporary ear might seem hopelessly sappy come across joyous and hopeful and dead serious in this Depression-era context. Thus Norman Blake's rendition of the Jimmie Davis classic, "You Are My Sunshine," becomes more a testament to the endurance of the human spirit than a sugarcoated folk song that mothers sing to their children at night.
Given all this strong, simple, gruff material, it feels a bit odd to run into gorgeous, expansive numbers such as Alison Krauss' gospel rendition of "Down In The River To Pray," in which she is backed by the First Baptist Church Choir of White House, Tennessee. It's a little too nice and clean around the edges for my tastes, certainly, but you can't fault Krauss' near-perfect voice. And Gillian Welch, who shows up several times both as lead vocalist and as a background singer, fails as always to transcend her slow, aching vocal style, which is beautiful in its own way but can get old fast.
But one must remember that O Brother is first and foremost a soundtrack, and what works for film may not always translate so smoothly to your turntable. Though here, with few exceptions, it usually does.
-Michael Koster
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