Chicago Tribune
Not since 'Dueling Banjos' has mountain music enjoyed such acclaim, but this time it's no fluke.
By Greg Kot
Tribune rock critic
Published February 3, 2002
Thanks to the success of the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" movie soundtrack, mountain-soul and bluegrass music are more fashionable than at any time since the days of "Dueling Banjos," the 1973 instrumental hit from the movie "Deliverance."
Only this time, the success smacks of more than mere novelty. In "O Brother," the music is more than just a sidelight; it attains a mythic aura that makes it this year's answer to the 1997 Cuban-pop crossover album "Buena Vista Social Club." It still may sound alien, especially to ears raised on rock, pop or the last two decades of Nashville country. But it also packs an emotional wallop lacking in most pop music.
"This is music that most people haven't really heard before, but it is music of the people," says alternative-country matriarch Emmylou Harris, who performs on the soundtrack, in an interview. "It's the shock of the real thing. The soundtrack doesn't water it down or make it more palatable. It's not being made into a fast-food hamburger. It has a universality that strikes a very basic, primal chord in people. But this is the first event that brought it all together."
The key question facing the patrons of "O Brother" is, what's next? Even Harris isn't sure: "The jury is still out. This is an unprecedented opportunity for people to discover bluegrass, to check it out in record stores, chat about it on the Internet, to seek it out. It is definitely a pivotal time for this music."
What's certain is that bluegrass has become a mainstream buzz word, however briefly, thanks to "O Brother," which was released by Mercury in December 2000. The movie, written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen (whose credits include "Raising Arizona" and "Fargo"), used a collection of raw-as-moonshine songs from the 1930s to drive the plot, a prison-break caper based on Homer's "The Odyssey." The film earned $45 million at the box office, a modest hit for the Coen Brothers. But the soundtrack has surpassed 4 million sales -- it's in the same league as contemporary hitmakers Creed, 'N Sync and Destiny's Child -- and has been the No. 1 country album in the nation for more than half a year. It has spawned a veritable cottage industry of spinoff projects, including a concert CD and DVD, "Down from the Mountain" (Lost Highway), and a 19-city concert tour featuring some of the performers on the soundtrack (Harris, Patty Loveless, Ralph Stanley, Chris Thomas King, among others) that will play a sold-out date Friday at the Chicago Theatre.
Bluegrass has been part of the American musical landscape for a half-century, as invented by Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. They melded traditional mountain-folk, blues and gospel songcraft and vocal harmonizing with jazzlike instrumental dexterity on banjo, fiddle, mandolin, acoustic guitar and upright bass. Monroe had been playing country music since 1929, but the addition of pioneering instrumentalists such as Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs enabled him to experiment with faster tempos and increasingly complex arrangements, so that by the late '40s he had invented a new sound, distinct from (yet still deeply indebted to) traditional country music.
Mountain music
Bluegrass is a sound so identified with Monroe that even a legendary stylist working similar territory, Ralph Stanley of the late Stanley Brothers, is reluctant to embrace it as his own. "When I think of bluegrass, I think of Bill Monroe," Stanley says in an interview. "My style is different. It's more simple and down to earth."
Stanley prefers the terms "old-time mountain music" or "mountain soul" to describe his music, but its core is much the same as Monroe's, and together they're the source of the "O Brother" phenomenon. They both popularized acoustic string-band music of soaring plaintiveness; most of this music suggests that outside of two certainties -- God and death -- life is chaos. A prime example of that worldview is "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow," which Ralph and Carter Stanley recorded in 1948. The song, as sung by Dan Tyminski of Alison Krauss' Union Station and lip-synched by actor George Clooney of the Soggy Bottom Boys in the movie, was the "O Brother" breakthrough hit.
But what gives "O Brother" its timeless, fad-busting resonance is Stanley's a cappella reading of the traditional mountain ballad "O Death," in which the singer begs the Grim Reaper to spare him for one more year.
"These songs of tragedy and heartbreak were around long before we came around," says Stanley, who turns 75 in a few weeks. "We [the Stanley Brothers] wrote some songs about the same things. Even if some of these things didn't happen in our lives, we always knew they could happen. It's music based on experience and knowing that our time on this Earth is short."
Yet this most quintessentially American music is rarely heard in mainstream America, outside the occasional blip such as "Dueling Banjos" or the Flatt-Scruggs theme for "The Beverly Hillbillies." Almost all of these previous forays into the mainstream have presented a condescending image of the bluegrass culture. Even the "O Brother" movie too readily embraces hillbilly stereotypes, as it presents Clooney and his fellow jailbirds as illiterate buffoons on their odyssey across the South.
Looking to the past
Fortunately, the fierce personality of the music blazes through those sophomoric images, from the Fairfield Four's a cappella "Lonesome Valley" to the traditional ballad "Didn't Leave Nobody But the Baby," performed by Harris, Krauss and Gillian Welch. These stark, haunting songs were chosen and recorded by T Bone Burnett, the project's musical director, who says he isn't surprised by the soundtrack's massive commercial success in the face of complete indifference by mainstream country radio stations.
"We didn't need radio because we had a movie -- that's a great broadcast medium," Burnett says. "We live in an electronic age, but the more we are affected by technology, the more people will look for a connection to the past to find who we are. At this point, rock 'n' roll has worn so thin, it has been done over and over, and it's hard to hear it anymore and get anything fresh out of it. This music is authentic, and I think the audience has a genius for sensing things like that."
Brett Sparks, vocalist in the neo-traditionalist country duo the Handsome Valley, says he resisted buying the "O Brother" soundtrack for months, seeing it as some sort of "Yuppie marketing scheme." But he eventually was won over.
"It's an album that isn't about chops or technique or gimmicks," Sparks says as he sips a beer before taking the stage at the Hideout a few days ago. "It's about those songs. They hold up. Four million people buying this album? That doesn't just happen. People must have wanted this music -- it's in the zeitgeist. And once you dig in there and discover Ralph Stanley and Emmylou Harris, there's no going back."
Sparks is part of an emerging movement of fresh-faced aficionados of mountain-soul and bluegrass who are making their own mark on the culture. "Banjo is the trendy instrument now," says Colleen Miller, talent buyer at the Old Town School of Folk Music, where 60 banjo students are currently registered, compared to 45 a year ago and barely a dozen five years ago.
To a legion of under-40 artists, the "O Brother" phenomenon isn't a fad, just a mainstream affirmation of an art form that continues to thrive. Consider the success of Alison Krauss and Union Station, who have sold millions of albums melding pop with bluegrass virtuosity; mandolin player Rhonda Vincent, a rising star who will appear on the "O Brother" tour; Welch, who last August sold out the Park West on the strength of three albums of sparse hard-country ballads recorded with her husband, David Rawlings; and the twentyish San Diego trio Nickel Creek, whose self-titled debut album of bluegrass instrumentals and country-folk laments has sold more than 500,000 copies.
Tradition makes comeback
Older artists also have returned with a vengeance to more traditional country styles on recent albums, including Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton and Loveless, whose all-acoustic "Mountain Soul" (Epic) follows a series of increasingly elaborate recordings that tried to cater to the polished standards of country radio. "Mountain Soul," in contrast, is a stripped-down series of songs from a true coal-miner's daughter who grew up in the hills of Kentucky.
"I started doing an acoustic set in my show years ago and the response was so great that I just kept adding songs," Loveless says in an interview. "Last year in Los Angeles, with my manager and producer-husband and label vice presidents watching, I performed acoustic songs like `Daniel Prayed' and `Two Coats' and the crowd was standing and stomping and trying to sing along. . . . I'd always wanted to do a record that further expressed my upbringing and got back to the style of music that I grew up hearing in my house as a little girl, when my dad was listening to the Stanley Brothers, and finally the time seemed right."
Timeless tunes
Loveless says as a girl she was at first stunned by the music's awesome sadness, its depth of feeling. Like many first-time listeners, Loveless wasn't prepared for the pathos she would encounter, and she couldn't understand why her father insisted on listening to it after another arduous day in the mines.
"I finally was able to hear it as a different form of soul music, and it can bring tears to your eyes," Loveless says. "To younger people, it's new music. It's like the first time I heard '50s rock 'n' roll as a girl in 1969. It didn't seem `old.' To our ears, it was fresh. Good music can be recycled. It comes back. The people who made it may be gone, but the music lives on. It's timeless."
But Ralph Stanley had been making timeless music for 50 years before he lived to see a No. 1 album with his name on it. Will the "O Brother" phenomenon fade, or can bluegrass and hard-core country artists continue to raise their profiles amid the prettier faces that drive a celebrity culture urnett says they can; he and the Coen brothers are closing a deal for their own boutique label on Columbia Records, and their first release will be a Ralph Stanley album recorded in the manner of "O Brother." Negotiations are under way for a larger bluegrass tour this summer, as well as a tour by Scruggs in the wake of his all-star comeback album, "Earl Scruggs and Friends" (MCA).
"I would like to see the thing they call country music now recede into the oblivion it has created, and this music come up and take its place," Burnett says.
On the other hand . . .
Not so fast, says Justin Case, the program director of mainstream country powerhouse US-99 in Chicago. "Like `Titanic,' the success of `O Brother' was bigger than anyone expected," he says.
But like most country stations across the nation, US-99 played "O Brother" only sparingly, if at all. Why? "Because when you're playing music to a mainstream audience, `O Brother' brings up the `hillbilly' stereotype of country music," Case says. "I don't agree, but there are elements of the population who see this music as a throwback, regardless of how cool, contemporary and hip it is. And we have to balance that. It's a record that has no middle ground -- our audience either loves it or hates it. It's a polarized record, and that's why country radio struggled with it."
A concert industry executive who requested anonymity says "O Brother" is a phenomenon that will quickly shake off many bandwagon-hoppers, and bluegrass will return to its natural state outside the glare of massive mainstream popularity. "There are some people who are buying this album because everyone else is buying it, but once they put it on they're appalled -- `Who needs this hillbilly [expletive]!' -- and they never play it again," the executive says. "So much of our society is about consume, consume and then moving on. But the good news is that some of the people who picked up `O Brother' have become bluegrass fans for life. It's not necessarily for a huge general audience, but it can be for an active and growing audience."
As Old Town's Miller says, "Of every 10 people who bought `O Brother,' maybe one wants to take it further. For those people, this movie is a can of worms. They're going to have to buy a lot more bluegrass records before they get enough."
Here's how to get a fix
Some recent albums for those who need another fix of "O Brother"-style mountain soul and bluegrass:
Robbie Fulks, "13 Hillbilly Giants" (Bloodshot): Virtuoso instrumentalist Fulks runs down his encyclopedic knowledge of bluegrass and honky tonk in this expertly executed set of tunes, which were originally performed by unjustly obscure artists such as Jean Shepherd and Jimmy Arnold.
Merle Haggard, "Roots Volume 1" (Anti): The Hag pays tribute to his influences, notably Lefty Frizzell, with devastatingly direct acoustic-swing arrangements.
Alison Krauss and Union Station, "New Favorite" (Rounder): The reigning superstar of bluegrass has gone pop but retains her hard-country backbone.
Patty Loveless, "Mountain Soul" (Epic): One of the most country-sounding of the mainstream Nashville singers, Loveless strips it way back on this inspiring homage to her old Kentucky home.
Nickel Creek, "Nickel Creek" (Sugar Hill): The new darlings of bluegrass blend gauzy folk-pop with precision instrumentals.
Dolly Parton, "Little Sparrow" (Sugar Hill): She verged on self-parody during her countrypolitan heyday in the '70s, but lately she's returned to her mountain roots with stunning results.
Rhonda Vincent, "The Storm Still Rages" (Rounder): This vibrant mandolinist emerges in the footsteps of Alison Krauss, without the overt pop leanings.
Various artists, "O Sister! The Women's Bluegrass Collection" (Rounder): A solid overview of female musicians in a largely male bastion, from trailblazers Delia Bell and Hazel Dickens to contemporary stars Alison Krauss and the Cox Family.
Gillian Welch, "Time (the Revelator)" (Acony): Hollywood-born, Berklee College of Music-educated Welch shouldn't sound this down-home and lonesome, but she pulls it off.
-- Greg Kot
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