It is fashionable these
days in Nashville (and perhaps it always was) to complain that things
aren't what they used to be—that country music stinks, that the
Lower Broadway honky-tonk district isn't as cool as it was in the 1990s,
or that the bluegrass jams pale in comparison to those at the Old Time
Pickin' Parlor in the '70s. And, of course, since they moved the Grand
Ole Opry out of the Ryman Auditorium in 1974, well, it's a wonder anybody
still bothers to call it Music City.
But hold on. One of Nashville's
virtues is that it keeps finding ways to revitalize its mythology and
refresh its magic. On a night in May 2000, that happened. A show called
Down from the Mountain was staged at the Ryman, featuring Ralph Stanley,
Emmylou Harris, John Hartford, and most of the rest of the musical cast
of the film soundtrack O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Virtually no one in the
audience had seen the film or heard the soundtrack; those wouldn't be
released for another seven months. But as the show achieved one musical
climax after another, 2,000 audience members and about two dozen performers
became aware that they were part of something profound and utterly true
to the spirit of old Nashville and the beautiful soul of country music—something
that hadn't happened with such force or focus in many years.
"It was just a deeply important
musical night. And that's all that it was," says participant
Gillian Welch. "The words O Brother appeared on the poster, but
nobody knew what that meant that night."
How could they have known?
Less than a year later, she and the cast would perform on Late Night
with David Letterman and soon thereafter at Carnegie Hall. In 2001,
they would play the Country Music Association Awards and then the 2002
Grammy Awards before a worldwide audience, capturing Album of the Year
honors at both events.
Meanwhile, the record sold
and sold and sold, racking up four million copies by the end of 2001
and nearly another two million since. More than two years after the
Ryman show, where the buzz started, O Brother has swelled into
a phenomenon. It has spun off a major concert tour and helped all roots
and bluegrass music achieve a level of visibility, respect, and commercial
success that rivals anything in its history.
Gasoline on a Fire
O Brother arrived
at a time when roots and bluegrass were already on the upswing. In 1999,
Steve Earle cut a bluegrass album with the Del McCoury Band, which in
turn began venturing boldly into rock clubs and listening rooms that
hadn't ever known the strains of bluegrass. Ricky Skaggs returned to
bluegrass after a productive country music career and began preaching
anew the gospel of Bill Monroe. Dolly Parton made the first true bluegrass
album of her life. The Dixie Chicks reclaimed a place for the banjo
and Dobro in commercial country and transmuted their bluegrass and western
swing backgrounds into 20 million sales on two albums.
Festivals had grown steadily
through the '90s, as families and college grads looked for music that
was better than what they heard on commercial radio. The Americana radio
format, encompassing alternative country, roots, and bluegrass, was
conceived in the mid-'90s and spawned a new trade organization about
the same time O Brother was being recorded. PBS, with uncanny
timing, aired an elaborate four-part documentary called American
Roots Music in late 2001.
But O Brother did
what nobody had thought possible: sell world-class numbers with unadulterated
traditional country music. The record was full of pristine performances
far removed from the drum-heavy, sexualized, or artificially sweetened
pop country of Music Row. Its label, Mercury Nashville, hoped to sell
100,000 copies and had to scramble to meet unexpected demand. A grassroots
groundswell sustained the momentum, and O Brother became a rallying
cry for roots music fans everywhere.
The soundtrack benefited
from numerous spin-offs. The Ryman show was captured on film and offered
in 2001 as the documentary Down from the Mountain. The remarkable CD
of that live performance also did well on the country charts. Most significantly,
Down from the Mountain became a tour that visited 17 cities over
the winter and reached even more this summer, with plans to grow.
Country radio programmers
called the O Brother soundtrack a "coffee-table album for NPR-listening
baby boomers," not a signpost for country music at large. But many people
believe something more important and real is happening.
"It's one of the most wonderful
things that's ever happened in country music," says music historian
Robert K. Oermann, author of the soundtrack's liner notes. "And it's
a great affirmation of the American public's taste. This town is always
insulting the intelligence of the listener. Here is a record that did
not do that, and it is a huge success."
Conceiving the Project
Filmmakers Joel and Ethan
Coen, Hollywood mavericks known for rich and offbeat pictures like Blood
Simple and Fargo, admired T Bone Burnett's ear for music.
His background as a songwriter and producer of such acclaimed albums
as Elvis Costello's King of America and Los Lobos' How Will
the Wolf Survive marked him as a talented eclectic. And the filmmaking
brothers had used him as a music consultant on The Big Lebowski,
matching songs to the personality of Jeff Bridges' unforgettable character
the Dude.
The Coens' new film was
to be a retelling of Homer's Odyssey, set in Depression-era Mississippi,
and the music was to be not mere background, but a plot driver and a
part of the action. So, once again, they turned to Burnett to flesh
out the film's soundscape. The Coens love vintage country and hoped
from the outset that the movie would bring real roots music to new audiences.
"Nothing was casual" about
the Coens' music canvassing, says Denise Stiff, manager of Gillian Welch
and Alison Krauss and executive music producer of the soundtrack. "A
huge amount of thought and research went into it before I got the first
phone call."
Burnett had produced Welch's
influential debut album Revival and knew how attuned she was
to the spirit of early country music. Welch knew O Brother would
be her kind of project when she saw the outcome of Burnett and the Coens'
deep dive into the American music library.
"When I came on board, T
Bone and the Coens had kind of a song map. What they didn't have was
a musician map to go with it," recalls Welch. "At our first meeting,
T Bone was sitting there with, like, two thousand archival records.
There were towers covering this table, and they were all people
who were dead. T Bone just asked me, 'Who does this today?'"
One original who wasn't
dead was Ralph Stanley, half of the seminal Stanley Brothers and perhaps
America's purest mountain ballad singer. Though he was 72 when called
on for the film, he was by no means retired. He had recently made an
acclaimed double CD of bluegrass duets with two dozen or more country
singers, including Welch.
Welch's personal feelings
for Stanley verged on the sacred, because the Stanley Brothers were
the epiphany that set her career in motion. Scrubbing a bathroom in
college, she heard those keening, soulful voices coming from her roommate's
stereo, and the experience changed her life. Coming from a Los Angeles
childhood and a Berklee College of Music background, she seemed ill-suited
to lead a new generation deep into vintage country. But she and guitar/vocal
partner David Rawlings, sounding like a postmodern Carter Family, quickly
earned the deep respect of the Nashville bluegrass and old-time music
community.
An even more precious recruit
for the soundtrack was John Hartford, a fiddler, songwriter, and historian/raconteur
who had assumed Merlin-like status among roots musicians. He helped
bridge the gap between hillbilly music culture and young pop culture
in the '70s and throughout his life, and he shone in the cast like a
sapphire among diamonds. Hartford emceed the Ryman show, playing a confection-sweet
version of "Big Rock Candy Mountain" that Emmylou Harris called "one
of the best things I've ever heard." He died of cancer in June 2001,
and his funeral was attended by dozens of roots music legends.
The other musicians involved
are no less impressive. Norman Blake, who was a member of Hartford's
revolutionary Aereo-Plane Band in the '70s, is a multiple Grammy nominee
and a flatpicking genius. The Fairfield Four is one of the nation's
longest-performing a cappella gospel groups. The Whites, a family band
with Texas swing and bluegrass origins, had a couple of Top Ten country
hits in the early '80s and are long-time members of the Grand Ole Opry.
The Cox Family is a remarkable bluegrass and country/gospel group from
Louisiana, whose lead singer Suzanne Cox influenced the vocal style
of close friend Alison Krauss.
Also vital were the core
band members, Nashville pilgrims who had come in search of the spirit
of Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs. Chris Sharp is a Hartford sideman
whose precise and energetic thumbpick-driven rhythm guitar enhanced
numerous tracks. Mike Compton, mandolinist for the Nashville Bluegrass
Band, has perhaps the most Monroe-like touch in the business. Pat Enright,
the remarkable vocalist and guitarist, also with the NBB, provided thrilling
yodels on "In the Jailhouse Now." These were some of the men who made
up the fictional Soggy Bottom Boys, fronted by the caramelized voice
of Krauss sideman Dan Tyminski. He'd proven recently with a debut solo
album what a master bluegrass singer he was, and his performance of
"I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" became a surprise hit in real life,
just as it did in the narrative of the film.
Burnett ran the recording
sessions so that the rapport that already existed among the musicians
could continue to deepen. That was easy because everybody was in one
room, recording into vintage microphones arrayed in the famous "Decca
tree," an arrangement that lets right, left, and center mics pick up
a full band at once. That leaves plenty of room ambience while allowing
the producer to mix the lead vocal up or down.
"The interesting thing about
the sound of O Brother is not, as many have accurately remarked,
that it is true to the sound of the period," said Burnett in a speech
delivered to the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) convention.
"The interesting thing is that it sounds so completely modern. It has
high fidelity, fidelity to what was happening in the room when the singers
and players were singing and playing all at once."
Major Label Muscle Burnett
and the Coen brothers shopped for a label among Nashville's country
recording companies and opted for Mercury, which looked like a good
vehicle for classic material. Although it was the home of Shania Twain
and other pop-country artists, it had recently released a Grammy-winning
ten-CD box set of Hank Williams music.
Stiff recalls a meeting
with Burnett and the top brass at Mercury: "When we were partway through
recording, T Bone predicted that it was going to be a platinum album
and that ÔMan of Constant Sorrow' was going to be a hit single. We all
looked at each other like he was out of his mind."
In April 2000, Mercury's
Luke Lewis and head of marketing Kira Florita saw the film. "We could
not have been more excited," Florita remembers. "We loved the movie,
and it was a two-hour soundtrack commercial. Nobody told us the music
would be as prominent as it was. You walk out of there loving the music."
There were early signs that
the public would feel the same. The movie opened in France in August
2000, and by October, 70,000 copies of the soundtrack had sold, far
more than expected. The film opened in New York and Los Angeles on December
22 and in several more cities each week. The slow roll-out suggested
that Disney, the film's distributor, was treating it like an art-house
movie, rather than a mass entertainment vehicle starring George Clooney.
But as many as one in four people who saw the film were buying the soundtrack,
an unheard-of ratio. Moreover, Mercury had hyped the album heavily to
the bluegrass and roots music communities, and by March, fans in small
towns across the South were complaining that they couldn't see the movie,
even as "Man of Constant Sorrow" became the No. 1 song on the nation's
bluegrass radio shows.
The movie finally reached
about 1,000 theaters nationwide, and the soundtrack exploded. In March
2001, it reached No. 1 on the Billboard country album chart,
something no bluegrass-related album had done since Dueling Banjos
in the early '70s. It was widely noted that the recording had achieved
that pinnacle without the support of country radio, which continued
to marginalize "Man of Constant Sorrow" for the rest of the year. Programmers
experimented with the song as a novelty during morning drive time, and
some deejays added it to the rotation. Others reported high demand for
the song but said they were under orders not to play it. Some radio
consultants had deemed it "too country" for a format that was now aimed
at suburban middle-aged women instead of hard-core country music fans.
In the absence of radio,
cable television played a vital role in the success of the soundtrack.
The Coens edited a video of clips from the film to the full-band version
of "Man of Constant Sorrow," and whether it was due to the presence
of George Clooney or the vital and driving music, Country Music Television
(CMT) and its smaller competitor Great American Country played it frequently.
"It broke up the logjam in commercial country music that had been marginalizing
bluegrass forever," says CMT general manager Brian Philips.
And indeed, CMT's rotation
in the past year was spiced up with videos from Nickel Creek, Dolly
Parton, and Alison Krauss. CMT also put on a Bluegrass Rules week, with
nightly prime-time programming that featured documentaries about the
music as well as key performances. "We wanted our week to serve as a
sort of primer," Philips says. "You know how it is when you first discover
something and you want to know more about it? I imagined there were
a lot of people of that mindset." The shows collectively drew 7.1 million
viewers, making them some of the most popular CMT broadcasts ever.
To Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall has hosted
watershed moments in traditional music before. Flatt and Scruggs made
a famous bluegrass record there. The Weavers' live Carnegie Hall album
was the catalyst for Vanguard Records, the seminal indie label of the
folk boom. And the Grand Ole Opry cast had ventured there for two hit
shows in 1947.
But on June 13, 2001, something
special happened in the hallowed hall. Ralph Stanley's ancient, velvet
rasp filled the acoustic space with "O Death"; the Fairfield Four performed
"Po Lazarus"; a trio of country sirens, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch,
and Alison Krauss, thrilled the house with the archaic-sounding "Didn't
Leave Nobody but the Baby"; and Tyminski sang "Man of Constant Sorrow"
while a sell-out crowd went berserk. "The performers were really kind
of awe-struck," recalls Welch. "At the Ryman, the anticipation escalated
throughout the night. From the moment the Fairfield Four started the
show, they brought the house down. So everyone had to step up to the
plate and continuously better the evening. At Carnegie Hall, it started
that way."
The Carnegie Hall concert
told Stiff and several large tour booking agencies that a Down from
the Mountain tour could work. The name was coined by the Coen brothers,
in part to disassociate from Disney, which owned the rights to the film's
name. Changing the name also had the effect of opening up the musical
cast to artists who hadn't been on O Brother, folks like country
star Patty Loveless, who was looking for avenues to promote her first
bluegrass album, Mountain Soul. The concert organizers are planning
to bring the show to Europe, it has already toured the U.S., and it
may roll around the nation for years to come.
As inspiring as these concerts
have been, however, no event felt so akin to planting the roots music
flag on the Moon as the climactic performance at the 2002 Grammy Awards,
where O Brother racked up four Grammies, including Album of the
Year. Event producer Walter Miller reordered the traditional Grammy
night agenda, placing the Album of the Year category last, instead of
Record of the Year. The show presented Stanley in a truncated version
of "O Death," the Krauss/ Welch/Harris trio, and a lacerating Soggy
Bottom Boys performance of "Man of Constant Sorrow." The week after
the Grammies, sales of O Brother soared from 50,000 per week
to 250,000, and it subsequently enjoyed two weeks as the nation's best-selling
album.
Cool Again
The O Brother soundtrack
and its ripples are re-creating the epiphany Welch experienced when
she first heard the Stanley Brothers. Most aficionados of roots and
bluegrass-based music can point to a recording, show, or festival where
a light turned on, where they crossed a threshold. For many, it was
the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's Will the Circle Be Unbroken in 1972
or Old and in the Way with Jerry Garcia and others. For others,
it was North Carolina's MerleFest, which recently drew its largest crowd
ever. For an untold number of music lovers it will be O Brother.
And many of those listeners will pick up instruments and play. Sales
of banjos and mandolins are way up. Picking circles around the country
have formed or felt a surge of interest. Whether the current phenomenon
has the same big-bang effect as Harry Smith's seminal Anthology of
American Folk Music, the 1952 collection that launched the folk
revival, remains to be seen. But this isn't over by a long shot.
"It's huge," says Barry
Poss, president of Durham, North Carolina's Sugar Hill Records. "It's
almost a zeitgeist thing. What O Brother did was make bluegrass
cool again."
"I don't think there's anybody
in the rootsy/bluegrass end of my roster who hasn't been affected in
a positive way," says Nashville booking agent Keith Case. "If nothing
else, pulling acts like the Nashville Bluegrass Band and Ralph Stanley
out of the festival market in July and August (for the Down from the
Mountain tour) has to create some slots for other artists. There's no
question it's happening." Later this year, in fact, Stanley will release
his first major label-backed project (produced by Burnett) in decades.
"Everybody's still shaking
their heads, wondering when the bottom's going to fall out," says Pat
Enright. "But it's got legs of its own, and I think [bluegrass] is going
to have a more prominent place in the music spectrum than it did."
Mandolinist Sam Bush, who
was not part of O Brother but has been taking acoustic and roots
music to new places and audiences for three decades, says, "It reaffirms
what we've been thinking all along, that this is valid music. For me
and people like me who make our living playing acoustic instruments,
it's gratifying when any new audience discovers you. Some people might
say, 'What took you so long?' I would say, 'Glad you're here.'"
Excerpted from
Acoustic
Guitar magazine, September
2002, No. 117.
