By Scott Alarik, Boston Globe Correspondent, 2/1/2002
The ''O Brother, Where Art Thou?'' juggernaut shows no sign of slowing down. The Mercury/Lost Highway soundtrack to the Coen brothers' film has gone quadruple-platinum (more than four million in sales) and swept the Country Music Association Awards, earning nods for both best album and best single (for '' I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow''). It earned six Grammy nominations, including album of the year, best compilation soundtrack, and best producer (for T Bone Burnett). More than a year after its release, it is No. 2 on Billboard's country chart and No. 10 among Soundscan's top current albums, its highest position ever on that chart.
Emmylou Harris is featured prominently on the soundtrack and has been a champion of traditional music throughout her career. She says nobody expected such a hit from an acoustic album of vintage country, folk, gospel, and bluegrass songs. She's now on the ''Down From the Mountain'' tour, featuring musicians appearing on the ''O Brother'' soundtrack who were later filmed performing a concert. That second film, ''Down From the Mountain,'' was released last summer, and its Mercury/Lost Highway soundtrack earned its own Grammy nomination as best traditional folk album. Saturday, the tour performs to a sold-out Wang Center audience.
'This is really one of those wonderful surprises that comes along and breaks up your cynicism a bit,'' Harris said. ''I mean, this music has always meant a lot to me and the people I hang with, but we all thought it was going to be kind of a regrettably small thing. You always want to believe that if people get a chance to hear the good stuff, they will respond. But I never expected anything like this; none of us did.''
The elaborate strategy designed to extend the success of ''O Brother'' would seem to belie that expectation. With the ''Down From the Mountain'' film and soundtrack and now the first of at least two national tours, someone must have smelled gold, right?
Quite the opposite, according to Denise Stiff, executive producer for the ''O Brother'' film and soundtrack and manager of tour members Alison Krauss and Union Station and the Peasall Sisters. (Also featured are Ralph Stanley, Norman and Nancy Blake, the Fairfield Four, the Whites, Chris Thomas King, Bob Neuwirth, the Nashville Bluegrass Band, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, the Cox Family, Colin Linden, John Hartford, and Patty Loveless.)
Stiff said it was actually fear of failure that drove Burnett, the Coens, and her to develop such a complex cross-promotional strategy. They were certain that commercial country radio stations would never embrace anything so far from the mainstream sound that dominates their format. If the film fizzled, they wanted other outlets for the music.
''We knew we had a phenomenal soundtrack, but at that time, we didn't know how the movie was going to do,'' she said. ''Sometimes movies like that take off; sometimes they don't. But we all felt the music was so good that we needed to be on the offensive, to take every possible step to get it heard.''
Blake, a master of the guitar, dobro, fiddle, and mandolin who is among the most respected instrumentalists in acoustic music, credits much of the soundtrack's success to the spontaneity that Burnett brought out in the players. Blake did his deliciously languid version of ''You Are My Sunshine'' just to get timing and mike levels, but Burnett liked the take's easy feel and used it.
Blake says he's reminded of the similar breakthrough success of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's '70s roots anthology ''Will the Circle be Unbroken,'' which helped make him a star. Both records reached huge new audiences, he says, because they embraced the classic songs savvy traditionalists often eschew for more obscure gems.
''You know, I had never sung `You Are My Sunshine' because I'd heard it from the cradle up,'' he said. ''I'd never had anything against it; I just felt it was a simple piece that's been done to death. But when you get down to it, if a tune is that standard, there's a reason: It's because people like it.''
''O Brother'' is helping the careers of all the participating musicians. Blake has noticed more new fans, especially young people, at his shows. And the attention is boosting sales for his wildly beautiful Red House CD with Minnesota mandolin and fiddle master Peter Ostroushko, ''Meeting on Southern Soil.''
Though she is not on the soundtrack, Loveless says it's helping her career, too. She brilliantly embraced a bluegrass sound on her recent Epic CD, ''Mountain Soul,'' which received almost no commercial radio play but earned critical raves in places her country-pop career had never taken her, including People, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and even the Wall Street Journal.
''I think the movie influenced a lot of kids to get more interested in the music,'' she said.''This form of music is so real, and maybe they're looking for something like that now. It's so different from what's on commercial radio. Even though this music's old to us, you know, it's new to them.''
Despite the obvious awkwardness of refusing to play the CMA single or album of the year, though, most commercial country radio programmers still resist the notion that the ''O Brother'' phenomenon signals any change in national tastes. Stiff worries they may be even more entrenched against it now, because to relent after so long would be to acknowledge they missed the biggest country music story of the year.
So those reaping the benefits of the music's success see its rewards coming in other ways: in more people realizing that commercial radio does not have a corner on all music worth hearing, and in the influence this moment in American music will have on future musicians and fans.
'I believe in people's ability to be moved by music, even if it doesn't happen in a huge way,'' Harris said. ''I started out listening to Peter, Paul, and Mary, thinking that was the most exotic thing I'd ever heard. Then I was wondering who this Bob Dylan was who wrote this great song, and then I was going deeper and deeper to the stuff that's 110 proof. It's a matter of seeds taking root. ''
This story ran on page C14 of the Boston Globe on 2/1/2002.
© Copyright