Saturday, February 2, 2002
By Tom Moon
INQUIRER MUSIC CRITIC
When he wasn't telling tales or professing his love for American vernacular music, Bob Neuwirth - the emcee at the Down From the Mountain cavalcade that visited the Academy of Music Thursday - sat stage-left in an easy chair.
He looked like the guy in the old Maxell audiotape ads who's been blown back by the sheer force of sound. And as the evening progressed, his posture seemed the only appropriate response. What else could one do in the proximity of such gifted storytellers and banjo-pickers as they told of terrible grief and yearned, with plainspoken grace, for salvation?
The sold-out show was designed to celebrate the phenomenon of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coen brothers film whose soundtrack of old-time country allegories and hymns has sold more than four million copies.
But it did more. It demonstrated how a music once thought moribund has been reinvigorated by masters such as Ralph Stanley, whose haunting entreaties closed the revue, and enormously talented disciples such as fiddler-singer Alison Krauss, who have caught not just the notes but the ideals and spirit that drive the old songs.
After the Nashville Bluegrass Band started things with tight four-part harmony on "Po Lazarus" and Georgia guitarist Norman Blake brought a dreamer's wistfulness to "Big Rock Candy Mountain," the event became a game of "Can You Top This?"
There were too many highlights to list. Emmylou Harris sang Gillian Welch's "Orphan Girl" with fragile majesty. Chris Thomas King conjured a trancelike atmosphere for "Canned Heat Blues." The Whites re-created "Keep on the Sunny Side" with exacting precision, and on later choruses transformed the Academy into a giant sing-in. And Patty Loveless, who joined Krauss and Harris for an a cappella "Didn't Leave Nobody But the Baby" in the concert's first half, illuminated the second with coal-country lamentations from her Mountain Soul.
Guitarist Jerry Douglas was the show's MVP. He turned up constantly, playing slicing slide lines, supporting the singers with mournful ad-libs. His solo on the Clarks' "Make Believe" was a masterpiece of invention.
And then there was Stanley, who began his set singing "O Death" solo and ended it by leading the entire cast - and the enthralled crowd - in a goosebumps-raising "Amazing Grace." In a voice raspy but firm, the 74-year-old pioneer did nothing fancy with "Man of Constant Sorrow" or the rousing "Angel Band." He just gave his plainspoken all, moving the air in the room like a man who can't shake sorrow but still yearns for the light.