OThe Ne-Feed Day in 1959 sat a field plate named Alan Lomax on the road and looked at a Mississippi chain bang-hood-wood sticks. One of the prisoners, James Carter, led a chorus of his fellow prisoners in a blue-like work song while swinging their axes. Lomax took up the men before he was on his way. The song slipped his chains, continued and ran. The singers on the road, God help them, keep sitting.
Carter’s primitive prison work song, “Po Lazarus”, would eventually come up again Oh brother where are you?Joel and Ethan Coen’s free comedy about a trio of dull refugees in Dixieland of the depression era. You can hear that it plays over the opening scene, just before George Clooney’s lead, Wiley Ulysses, Everett McGill cut through the wheat field to the railroad to escape. Everett convinced his Sidekicks (played by John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson) to work together on a search for a buried treasure, but the man is a Huckster who lies as naturally as he breathes, and it is likely that his treasure will be a stack of fool’s gold.
Times and dates tend to fade in rural, off-grid Mississippi, and it is also with Oh brother where are you?which has his feet, hands and fingers in different decades. The film is being released again this week to commemorate its 25th anniversary. But the story was drawn up in 1937 and contains a repertoire of songs ranging from Harry McClintock’s 1928 version of “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” to Pin-sharp folk lids from the late 1990s. While Everett Chivvies his friends across from the Delta Chivvies, tangled with sheriffs and klansmen and corrupt politicians, descends and swells this music in glorious sympathy. “Po Lazarus” is the Overture, the early signpost, which shows the way to a spread of blue -grass orientation and gospel cramps that extend to the final credits. The soundtrack offers the soul of the film and its connective tissue. It would later also be the line of buried treasure.
Oh brother where are you? has been adapted – very loosely – of The Odysseylifted his title playfully from a pompous unmade film in Preston Sturges Sullivan’s journey (1941) and Bons, Br’er Rabbit style, through a cartoon-like deep south and a road “loaded with danger”. The film takes its starring role from Clooney’s energetic performance in that it is struggling, charming and possibly a shadow that is too satisfied with himself. This is not my favorite Coen brothers’ picture (it’s a three-way tie between No land for old men, The big Lebowski and Inside Llewyn Davis) But it is irreparably entertaining and more satirical than it appears for the first time, such as a Looney Tunes tour by the Jim Crow -era of America. The characters can be exaggerated, and it is on the grotesque, but there is usually a real inspiration that peers just outside the shot. The implied Bluesman who claims to have sold his soul to the devil is an obvious stand-in for Robert Johnson, while Charles Durning’s crooked, pork governor is based on the true ‘pappy’ O’Daniel, who sang the countrywest and once put an election from the young Lyndon Johnson.
As O brother Contains anything as blunt as a message, it’s that good music endures and saves those who play it – even if these people are a group of tricky prisoners called the Soggy Bottom Boys. In the case of O brotherIt takes even longer than a good film, because although the COens comedy remains loved by his fans (not least, strange, former US Senator Mitt Romney, who mentions it as his favorite film of all time), was looked at in cultural terms by his brand, which was staged by the music. It joins Saturday night fever and The harder they come On an elite list of hit films that played the second fiddle to their soundtrack albums.
On a certain level, it was perhaps everything in advance. The COens only had a title and a vague story in mind when they hired the producer T-Bone Burnett to fill in the spaces. Burnett, in turn, made a playlist of American folk songs that would serve as a guide when the COens wrote their screenplay. So the O brother Soundtrack existed before the film even did. It wore a hat from an assistant during the writing and production process and then returned to the end to claim the part of the loot. After the initial fanfare of the version of the film, Burnett’s 18 track compositions were credited to causing the early bars to revival almost once. It sold almost 9 million copies in the US alone and helped the careers of Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch. At the 2002 Grammys-where the soundtrack won the album of the Year Award, 74-year-old Ralph Stanley has re-tested his A Capella version of ‘O Death’.
Many of the older musicians who are in Oh brother where are you? went by when the soundtrack album came out. But the producers could eventually find the humble James Carter, who was in the middle of the seven-seven and lived a peaceful life in Chicago. They submitted a plane ticket to the Grammys plus a check for $ 20,000, both of which were such a surprise for Carter that he allegedly had to walk outside to roll a nervous cigarette. Carter believed he had put his Mississippi chain gang days behind him. He said he had only a dull, fading reminder of the singing of “Po Lazarus” on the road. If the man saw the film, it might have made the perfect sense. The recording of the lower son of ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ becomes a runaway hit; Even “Pappy” O’Daniel claims to be a big fan. Good music survives and finds fresh generations of fans, and frees songs Circle to save the men they once sang.
