Who Was the Studio Manager on Brother Where Art Thou

The year 2000 was an absolutely dizzying fourth dimension to be a music fan. Intricately constructed boy bands and hyper-objectified teen divas ruled radio, MTV, and tape sales, with the top two all-time-selling albums of the yr being NSYNC'due south No Strings Attached (9.9 million copies) and Britney Spears' Oops! … I Did It Again (8.8 million copies). 3 of the year'southward Pinnacle 5 charting singles (Madonna's "Music," U2'southward "Beautiful Day," and Bon Jovi's "Information technology's My Life") were from seasoned artists who many critics accused of hitting their commercial peaks sometime in the 1980s. Plus, much similar they surprised everyone in the mid-1990s with their expansive Anthology project, The Beatles in one case again offered a new release — their compilation of No. 1 singles, sensibly titled 1 — that immediately became a popular cultural juggernaut, selling more than than 31 meg copies worldwide and earning the distinction of beingness the single best-selling album of the entire 2000s in the The states.

Sneaking into this perplexing musical environment like a driblet of h2o into an oil spill was the soon-to-be-legendary soundtrack to the Coen Brothers motion picture O Blood brother, Where Art Thou?, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. While the album would make a surprisingly long run to the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200, win most a half dozen Grammy awards, and eventually exist certified 8x platinum, it initially appeared every bit an eclectic anomaly amid the new millennium's forrard-leaning pop stars.

From left, Tim Blake Nelson, George Clooney, and John Turturro in "O Blood brother, Where Art One thousand?" (Buena Vista Pictures)

Set against the properties of the Depression-era, Jim Crow South, the satirical comedy is a loose reimagining of Homer's ancient Greek epic The Odyssey, right downwardly to having a main graphic symbol named Ulysses (a post-ER George Clooney), a twisting homeward journey, a trio of sirens, and its very ain Polyphemos-like cyclops (courtesy of John Goodman's middle patch-sporting graphic symbol, Large Dan Teague). Nevertheless, arguably the most notable component of the motion-picture show is its ever-present musical tableau, a rich tapestry of early American roots music — bluegrass, gospel, dejection, country, folk — masterfully curated and recreated by honor-winning producer T Os Burnett.

"Ethan Coen called me and asked, 'How would you like to make a movie about the history of American music?'" Burnett recalls, adding with a hearty express joy, "I hateful, that'southward 1 hell of an elevator pitch."

Having already worked with Joel and Ethan Coen on their 1998 film The Big Lebowski, Burnett was excited to once again be handed the musical reins for ane of the duo'southward unorthodox cinematic works. Ane major difference this time around is that the music would actually come starting time, with Burnett compiling a deep catalog of what was then being referred to as "old-time music" — Appalachian folk songs, gospel numbers, bluegrass traditionals — to be incorporated directly into the script as it was being written. Throughout the procedure, Burnett was as well trying to notice the right balance of older recordings and newly fashioned interpretations past artists like Alison Krauss, Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, and Dan Tyminski.

"In that location weren't whatever specific rules for what older songs nosotros would use versus what nosotros would re-tape," Burnett says. "Information technology was just a natural process of letting the songs themselves decide. For instance, on a chain-gang song like 'Po' Lazarus' by James Carter and the Prisoners, every bit they were called on the old Alan Lomax recording, there was no possible style to reproduce that sound. We knew we were going to be using it for the very beginning of the motion picture, and then it had to be completely 18-carat and authentic. It couldn't have annihilation Hollywood about it. Information technology had to have that specific clay and sweat on it from the 1959 recording."

"For me, the northward star of the whole project was the vocal, 'O Expiry,'" he continues. "Since the 1960s, I've loved this erstwhile version of Dock Boggs doing it because it always struck me as being so chilling. For the film, we were working in epic Greek themes, which were e'er about dealing with fate. To me, 'O Death' was talking straight to fate, the thing that'southward coming for you, and the faster you lot run away from information technology, the closer information technology gets to y'all." While Burnett had initially envisioned the legendary Ralph Stanley cutting a new banjo-fueled version of "O Death" for the soundtrack, the story goes that in one case Stanley got to the studio, he convinced Burnett to let him have an instrument-free get at it, creating a distinctively haunting a cappella version of "O Death" that hearkened dorsum to his Primitive Baptist Universalist church building upbringing in Appalachian Virginia.

For the songs that were getting modern-day re-recordings, Burnett and his team weren't interested in digitally fabricated sonic sepia tones. Instead, they recreated vintage recording techniques and blended them with the technological advancements in audio output to create updated versions of these decades-old songs.

When it came time to option a theme song for the film'southward main grapheme, Clooney's Ulysses Everett McGill, Burnett didn't have much problem deciding on "I Am a Human being of Abiding Sorrow," an early 20th-century American folk song originally published by a partially blind musician from Kentucky named Dick Burnett (though some musicologists trace its origins further dorsum to an old English broadside). "'Human being of Constant Sorrow' was certainly a perfect rewrite of the whole Odyssey in a way," Burnett says. "Odysseus truly was the man of constant sorrow."

However, truth be told, Burnett's connectedness to the rails as a potential theme song for the main grapheme in a Coen brothers moving-picture show stretched back a chip further. "When we were looking for a theme song for The Dude in The Large Lebowski, I really proposed 'Human of Constant Sorrow' for him," laughs Burnett. "I though he was that sort of epic hero, where fate was constantly rolling over him — in that case, fate was in the course of having the same proper noun as another guy who was mixed upwardly in all this crazy stuff. We concluded up going a unlike management with Lebowski, using Captain Beefheart and Creedence Clearwater Revival to institute his musical identity. Just honestly, in that location'southward less difference between Creedence's 'Fortunate Son' and our version of 'Human being of Constant Sorrow,' than there is betwixt it and some of the older versions. When Dan Tyminski played that polyrhythmic guitar office that kicks off 'Man of Constant Sorrow,' nobody had ever done that earlier in bluegrass music. I've e'er thought it'southward a lot closer to a Traffic record than a Monroe Brothers record."

The Sweet Spot of 'Constant Sorrow'

Past the time the O Blood brother, Where Art Thou? project came forth, Dan Tyminski had already been playing guitar equally a member of Alison Krauss & Union Station for well-nigh a decade. A serendipitous concatenation of events led to him providing lead vocals for Clooney's Ulysses in the vocal'south in-film advent of "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" and recording ii different versions of it for the soundtrack.

"Early on on in the project, our manager, Denise Stiff, was helping T Bone out with trying to wrangle upwardly artists to participate in the soundtrack," Tyminski says. "Every bit the total ring, Alison Krauss & Union Station, nosotros all went in to audition considering we were huge fans of the Coen Brothers and of T Bone besides. While nosotros were there, Denise mentioned that they were nonetheless looking for the person who would be George Clooney'south singing vocalisation and she threw my name out there as a potential candidate. They told me to come back by myself the next day and I concluded upwards doing a version of 'Man of Constant Sorrow' that was nada similar what ended up on the soundtrack. Merely the stars aligned, they saw what they were looking for, and called me back the next solar day to offer me the gig."

As is the instance with the hand-me-down nature of most traditional folk songs, there have been multiple recordings and interpretations of "Man of Constant Sorrow" over the decades from which Tyminski could choice a reference point. These include Sarah Ogan Gunning's gender-swapped "I Am a Girl of Abiding Sorrow" from Alan Lomax's 1930s recordings, multiple arrangements by the Stanley Brothers throughout the 1950s, Jerry Garcia'due south a cappella live version from the early 1960s, and Bob Dylan'due south solo audio-visual version from his 1962 self-titled debut LP. "More than any other version, I was most familiar with Ralph Stanley'due south arrangement of the vocal," says Tyminski. "For the audition, I decided to do a more traditional bluegrass have on it: much college, must faster, less swampy. We ended up dirtying it up a bit for the concluding film version, which I thought gave it the right character that it needed."

With the film's master theme locked in, Burnett connected to manner the soundtrack's retro-tinged roster of songs around it. He secured the original 1928 recording of Harry McClintock's "Big Rock Candy Mount." He had blues musician Chris Thomas Male monarch (who plays Tommy Johnson in the pic, a hybridized character based on real-life Delta bluesmen Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson) play Skip James' influential "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues." He called on the otherworldly, DNA-level harmonies of multiple family-based groups, such as The Whites singing "Keep On the Sunny Side," The Cox Family unit'due south bluegrass sway of "I Am Weary (Let Me Rest)," and the young sibling vocal trio The Peasall Sisters' charmingly youthful take on Maybelle Carter'due south "In the Highways." Burnett also recorded Alison Krauss for three separate tracks: her ain pass at the gospel folk hymn "Downwardly to the River to Pray," a crystalline bluegrass duet of "I'll Fly Away" with Gillian Welch, and the enchanting "Didn't Leave Nobody Only the Baby" featuring Krauss, Welch, and Emmylou Harris.

After a brief hiccup with the film'due south original release date — "It was initially supposed to come out in the summer of 2000," Burnett says, "merely it got postponed towards the end of the year because when nosotros took the finished film into the studio, the guy who had originally signed off on information technology had merely been bounced that exact morning and this whole new government of shell-shocked executives didn't what to practice with it" — it was eventually given a staggered limited release in theaters and the soundtrack hit stores a couple weeks before Christmas.

Recalls Burnett: "Luckily enough, the motion-picture show and the soundtrack both started doing really well in tandem with each other. Back then, there were still a lot of picture theaters inside of malls and folks could walk right out of the movie, have a few steps to the record store, and purchase the soundtrack. The more records that sold, the more theaters the studio would put the movie in, and it only kept growing together like that. Afterward its initial run in theaters, every fourth dimension the motion-picture show went to a new format — cable, circulate Tv, DVD — there would be some other wave of interest and spike in sales of the soundtrack each time. It was all very organic."

Although the album that didn't possess the conventional ways of promotion — no spotlight artist stadium tour, no monster radio hits, no slickly-produced music videos for Carson Daly to play on MTV's TRL — it did astoundingly well in mainstream pop civilisation over a surprisingly lengthy menstruation of fourth dimension. A month before the record celebrated its one-year anniversary, it was certified triple platinum. At the 2002 Grammy Awards, it won five separate awards, including Anthology of the Yr, All-time Compilation Soundtrack Anthology for a Motion Pic, Best Male State Vocal Functioning (Ralph Stanley'due south "O Death"), Best Country Collaboration with Vocals (The Soggy Bottom Boys' "I Am a Homo of Constant Sorrow"), and All-time Traditional Folk Album for the soundtrack to the accompanying documentary/concert film Downward from the Mountain. A month subsequently the Grammys, the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack beat out superstar artists similar Brandy, Alanis Morissette, and Linkin Park to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200, having been on the chart for 62 weeks at that point. All in, it remained on the chart for 101 weeks, just shy of two direct years. The anthology would eventually go on to exist certified 8x platinum in 2007.

Opening Doors

Equally Americana Music Association Executive Director Jed Hilly sees information technology, the incredible successes the O Blood brother, Where Art G? soundtrack accomplished and the celebratory disquisitional and commercial responses it received felt similar the fitting culmination of a genre groundswell that started a few years prior.

"At that place were some pretty of import things going on in the music business in the 1990s that affected what we now telephone call Americana," says Hilly, who was an executive at Sony Music at the time. "The FCC rulings changed the style radio existed where it went from 10,000 different radio stations being run past 10,000 different owners to those same 10,000 radio stations being bought upward and corporatized past similar 10 companies. You also had the appearance of SoundScan, which acquired an artist like Garth Brooks, who had never appeared on a popular chart earlier, to hit No. 2 on the very outset SoundScan nautical chart. Of a sudden, artists associated with what Steve Earle called the 'swell credibility scare' — Rodney Crowell, 1000.d. lang, Dwight Yoakam, Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Greenbacks — all of a sudden, the Nashville music business had no interest in any of them. They were simply subsequently artists like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain. Throw in the rising alt-land motion with Uncle Tupelo and The Jayhawks, as well as Johnny Cash going to work with Rick Rubin; all that fix the stage for the surroundings into which O Brother was dropped in 2000. The audience was in that location, they merely needed the commitment and delivery past the right group of record company, producer, and artists. O Blood brother striking all those chords perfectly."

Audience response is also where Dan Tyminski saw the biggest fingerprints of the soundtrack's significant pop cultural impact. "What I noticed after the release of O Blood brother was that our audition demographic significantly changed and expanded," he says. "Among the people that we usually saw at our shows, there was now this new crop of younger fans with rock ring T-shirts and facial piercings. Attendance was tripling at bluegrass festivals with no other change simply that pic and soundtrack being released. It really made me enlightened of how many people exterior of our genre were affected by O Brother. I haven't personally seen a record bear on so many people outside of its built-in genre at that magnitude before or since."

Tyminski also credits his advent on the soundtrack with expanding his creative prospects and collaboration opportunities every bit well. "Information technology gave me a level of notoriety I don't think I could've ever had without it, and it's opened the door for people to want to write and record with me who probably wouldn't take come up across my music otherwise" says Tyminski. "In a weird way, it was kind of the genesis that sparked me doing 'Hey Brother' with Avicii, considering they wrote that song with me in mind after hearing 'Man of Constant Sorrow.'"

The tardily EDM artist Avicii asked Tyminski to provide the vocals for his dance-popular single "Hey Brother" in 2013, and the multi-genre hitting landed on the The states popular, land, dance, rock, and Top forty charts. Information technology also became a global No. 1 blast, topping the charts in over 20 countries, including France, Brazil, and Spain. "Technically, that song is my biggest hit, and information technology's in EDM music," laugh Tyminski. "It shows you that the success of O Brother wasn't but a fluke. It afflicted other music fans, other artists, and other genres. Acoustic bluegrass music has never been meant to be played to huge audiences, simply it'south afflicted music that has filled stadiums. But this by year I played 'Hey Brother' at a tribute concert for Avicii in an arena filled with 60,000 people who were screaming for a song that never would've happened without the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack."

Burnett likewise saw the audition honey and industry accolades for the album pay off for the artists involved, and has been gratified to see it spread far beyond.

"With 'Man of Constant Sorrow,' at that place were all these actually great versions to choose from, but our arrangement was mainly patterned on the Stanley Brothers version, where there was a bit of a phone call-and-response matter going on," he says. "So, we ended up licensing it from Ralph Stanley, which I was really happy most because he got paid on all of those multiple versions of 'Man of Abiding Sorrow' that appear on the soundtrack. He was able to go a new tour charabanc and he even bought a new Jaguar!"

The bluegrass icon wasn't the only one to meet significant royalty payouts on his decades-old catalog songs. "One other piece of restorative songwriting justice that I'm pretty proud of is, after the soundtrack was a hit, the Lomax family started looking for James Carter, because they thought he might even so exist alive," Burnett says, excitedly getting into storytelling mode. "They hired a detective and eventually found him in Chicago. Out of the blue, they knocked on the door and presented him with a big $20,000 royalty bank check for 'Po Lazarus'. With the success of the film and soundtrack, artists similar James Carter, Ralph Stanley — oh yeah, I heard the Fairfield Four were able to pay off their houses — those are such wonderful stories and happy endings tied to the success of the whole thing. A lot of skillful came out of the picture show and it was actually cool to see it go spread around like that."

An Americana Milestone

Over the last 20 years, the O Blood brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack has continually been credited with ushering in the mainstream resurgence of American roots music and accelerating the rise of the tradition-steeped, purlieus-refusing Americana genre. Within that community, the anthology is often celebrated for casting a long shadow that has shaped other mainstream milestones such as the nautical chart-topping, Grammy-sweeping, platinum-selling 2007 album Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, the Grammys calculation a new All-time Americana Album award category in 2010, and fifty-fifty Merriam-Webster calculation the musical definition of "Americana" to the dictionary in 2011.

"O Blood brother was definitely one of the offset big multiplatinum records in that incarnation of the Americana earth," acknowledges Hilly. "The timing of it was massively significant for the Americana motion and T Os is such an omnipresent effigy in the customs. Along with artists like Levon Helm, Bob Dylan, and Emmylou Harris, T Bone is one of the vital godfathers of the motion. He's on the ground floor of the whole affair."

But from Burnett's perspective, the larger cultural touch on, genre-shaping praise, and commercially quantifiable successes aren't where his proudest moments and personal satisfactions come from — "I haven't looked at whatsoever anthology charts since the 1960s," he laughs. Instead, he takes pride in the way the album has found its mode into the private stories of so many listeners.

"The matter that has stuck with me the most over the years," Burnett says, "is how many people have told me that they've played these songs at their weddings and at family members' funerals and all these other major life events. Or that they think their granddaddy playing one of these songs on the front porch when they used to become visit him when they were children. These songs have entered so many personal lives at important moments and people seem really happy to accept both those old reminders and the new memories. Something I always tell the artists I piece of work with is that the song's arrow shouldn't bespeak to themselves, information technology should point to the listener. Every time someone tells me a personal story about a touching moment involving a song from O Brother, then I'thou reminded that we were successful at the about of import thing."

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Source: https://www.nodepression.com/o-brother-where-arent-thou-the-two-decade-cultural-impact-of-o-brother-where-art-thou/

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