Emmylou Harris will play a sold-out Academy of Music tomorrow with
many other artists on the Down From the Mountain tour.
January 30, 2002
Rural sounds of the South, boosted by "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," are reaching an expanding audience eager for authenticity. Tomorrow, musicians from the movie soundtrack will perform in a sold-out concert here.
Emmylou Harris will play a sold-out Academy of Music tomorrow with
many other artists on the Down From the Mountain tour.
By Dan DeLuca
INQUIRER MUSIC CRITIC
The way Dr. Ralph Stanley sees it, the secret to the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack phenomenon is simple.
"If you never owned a car, you'd never miss driving," says the 74-year-old titan of American vernacular music, who will play a sold-out Academy of Music tomorrow with many other O Brother artists on the Down From the Mountain tour - Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, Patty Loveless, Chris Thomas King, and the Peasall Sisters, among others.
"You have to hear music to know you like it. And this is new music to a lot of people."
Since its release in December 2000, the O Brother soundtrack has sold nearly four million copies - an astonishing number for an often-unsettling collection of mournful ballads, ancient-sounding gospel and blues plaints, and virtuosic bluegrass workouts that employ close-harmony singing to keep hard times at bay.
The aural companion to the Joel and Ethan Coen film starring George Clooney has made believers out of many who might have scoffed at the notion of old-time hillbilly music as a reservoir of emotional depth, and has answered a yearning for the authentic in a super-slick pop cultural marketplace.
"The more we become immersed in technology, the more we look for authenticity," says soundtrack producer T-Bone Burnett, who, with the Coens' aid, led the audio tour through the white and black rural South. "When I was growing up, my family had books, records and games, and they were all different shapes and sizes. Now everything is the same - it all comes on a shiny silver disc. That's stripping us of our sense of who we are. It makes us more and more Stepford. And people are looking for more than that."
Without the benefit of significant play on mainstream radio stations, O Brother was the ninth-biggest-selling album of 2001, just ahead of the hits set Now That's What I Call Music Volume 6 and just behind Creed's Weathered. It was the best-seller on Amazon.com for 2001, and though the Coens' modestly successful Depression-era recasting of Homer's Odyssey has long left theaters, the disc - nominated for a Grammy as album of the year - continues to move more than 60,000 copies a week.
And the offshoots keep on coming:
Many of the soundtrack artists also starred in Down From the Mountain, a concert film by D. A. Pennebaker. It was shot at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium and spawned a live 2001 album of the same name.
Kentucky-bred country singer Loveless, who was not on O Brother, released the powerful bluegrass collection Mountain Soul. Stanley's Rebel Records put out Man of Constant Sorrow, a best-of set named for the soundtrack song that, credited to the fictional Soggy Bottom Boys but actually sung by Krauss guitarist Dan Tyminski, became a hit video.
Veteran bluegrass artists not affiliated with the film soundtrack, such as Rhonda Vincent, have seen their sales figures double. Opportunistic releases have benefited as well: Rounder Records' O Sister!: The Women's Bluegrass Collection is on track to sell 100,000 copies, five times more than the label would have expected in an O Brother-less world.
Artists such as Stanley, the Fairfield Four gospel quintet, and guitarist Norman Blake (all of whom will perform at the Academy) have toiled in relative obscurity for decades. Now, they have a hit record that has attained the must-have cultural-item status most recently occupied by the Buena Vista Social Club, the Cuban music collective.
The soundtrack is "honest, it's genuine, it's real, and it touches people," says Denise Stiff, who manages Krauss and the Peasalls, the girls who played the daughters of Clooney's Ulysses Everett McGill. "But it also had this amazing vehicle in the movie that exposed these artists to a new audience."
Much of the music, such as Stanley's haunting "O Death," explores themes of despair. "This style seems to hang on those sad, tragic stories," Stanley says, speaking from his home in western Virginia.
But the Coens also delivered gospel laments such as the Fairfield Four's "Lonesome Valley" and blues such as King's "Hard Time Killing Floor" as part of a quirkily entertaining concoction. "Taking the sadness of this music and mixing it with the Coen brothers' humor was a powerful combination," Loveless says.
Paul Foley of Rounder Records, whose label is home to six of the O Brother artists, says, "The movie was key in making it the 'in' thing to own, and then word of mouth took over. The number of people who bought the soundtrack compared to the number who went to the movie has to be the highest in history."
Since Garth Brooks' breakout success in the early 1990s, de-twanged Nashville acts have enjoyed enormous success in crossing over to the pop charts. But many have feared, as Loveless puts it, "that country music is losing its identity."
"Country music has abandoned itself," says Burnett, who is nominated for a best-producer Grammy for O Brother. He also helmed the Down From the Mountain disc and just finished an album with Stanley to be released this year on a label the producer is starting with the Coens.
O Brother is heavy on the banjo-flecked fast-picking style known as bluegrass, invented by Bill Monroe. (It's a term Stanley, who has an honorary doctorate from Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn., abjures in favor of "old-time country music, mountain music, or just American music. I don't really know what bluegrass is.")
But the Coens were careful to weave in many strands of roots music.
"There's a Celtic influence on country music, and African influence on blues and fife and drum, and gospel music coming out of all those things," Joel Coen says. "How those musical forms resolve themselves was real interesting to us. The way we were looking at the music was to make it spiritual and creepy and celebratory."
With country sales down, many have been waiting for the genre to get back to basics, as in the mid-1980s, when Randy Travis shook Nashville out of a sales slump.
"We've all been wondering when is the next traditionalist going to save us," says Chris Parr, an executive with the cable channel Country Music Television. "I think it's bluegrass music. If you look at pop music in general, there are all these teen-pop stars where there's a question if they are lip-syncing. When you see the musicianship of a Del McCoury, you know there's something real there."
Country radio stations have, for the most part, stayed away from the biggest-selling country album of 2001 for fear of bluegrass. But CMT has shown video clips of both the Clooney-starring "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" and the gospel incantation "I'll Fly Away," sung by Krauss and Gillian Welch, who is not on the Mountain tour.
The bluegrass wave did not start with O Brother. Before the soundtrack was released, the Dixie Chicks - who are working on an acoustic album - had already, as Parr points out, "brought the banjo back in vogue in country music." Roots rocker Steve Earle collaborated with bluegrass stalwart McCoury in 1999. Dolly Parton and Ricky Skaggs have returned to their bluegrass roots, and Disney's Lyric Street subsidiary recently struck a deal with Skaggs Family Records.
Will listeners soon tire of fleet-fingered banjo picking and high lonesome balladry? Eyes are on the young California trio Nickel Creek, whose self-titled 2000 album has sold 432,000 copies and whose newest is being produced by Krauss. PBS staged an all-star bluegrass concert in Nashville to be broadcast this year, and the Mountain tour will return to play to amphitheater crowds this summer.
But if the O Brother momentum doesn't carry him any further, it already has made a difference for Ralph Stanley, who, along with his brother, the late Carter Stanley, made up half of one of old-time country's most revered duos.
"More people come to my shows, and more promoters want to book me in places I've never played before," says the patriarch, who still performs more than 100 times a year. "Lots of younger people. Real small kids come up and they want to hear 'O Death.' It's made me a whole new career."