On the last night of February, the Grand Ole Opry beat with that old country heart. There were no drums or electric guitars - just acoustic stringed instruments, harmonious voices, and a repertoire of heritage American songs, polished with time like river stones. A sold out house of 4,400 people sang along at every opportunity, many of them recalling lines they’d known since childhood.
This special edition Opry was a celebration of the 25th anniversary of a recording that sparked a genuine American folk revival, the soundtrack of the motion picture O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Original musical cast members performed - including Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, Dan Tyminski, The Fairfield Four, and the Whites - as did leading lights from the generation that grew up in the aura of the album’s influence - Sarah Jarosz, Molly Tuttle, and Billy Strings. A house band of original soundtrack pickers with Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan and Mike Compton backed them up, leading to a mesmerizing “I Am Weary Let Me Rest” by Tuttle and a swinging take on the album’s big hit, “Man Of Constant Sorrow.”
For me, the show was a time machine that sent me back to the year 2000 when, as a music reporter at the Tennessean, I started covering this amorphous new project, because it seemed newsworthy that legendary producer T Bone Burnett was recruiting the city’s best acoustic roots musicians - like Krauss and the members of the Nashville Bluegrass Band - for a Coen Brothers film score. The concept had something loosely to do with Homer’s Odyssey. Its title was weird. And the filmmakers wanted the movie to be heavy on music authentic to the story’s setting, Mississippi in the 1930s. That’s all anybody would tell us. It seemed a curiosity at best.
Yet what unfolded was an odyssey in itself - a confluence of good music, savvy marketing, auspicious timing, and grassroots enthusiasm. It began with a concert at the Ryman Auditorium with the musical cast in May of 2000 (more than half a year before the film or its score was even released) called Down From The Mountain, a fund-raiser for the Country Music Hall of Fame. That show, and its concert film by D.A. Pennebaker, spawned a Down From The Mountain package tour that spread the music before and during the first run of the motion picture.
The movie did pretty well, commercially and critically, but the soundtrack became the dog and the movie the tail. Supported by video play on country music video networks CMT and GAC, plus a wave of adoring press coverage, the multi-artist collection became a phenomenon. It swept the CMA, ACM and IBMA awards before winning the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2002. And it became the number one selling country album, racking up eventually between 8 and 9 million records sold. It got the nation talking about its musical heritage and raised the fortunes and booking opportunities for the cast members, as well as other roots artists.
“I think it impacted everyone that had anything to do with acoustic folk music,” says Nashville’s Denise Stiff, the album’s executive producer. “What an amazing project to be involved with.”
Stiff was managing Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch at the time. “One day, I get a call from T Bone, who I'd worked with on Gillian's first two records. And he said, ‘You know, I've got this thing, and I'm gonna need some help.’ Next thing I know, I'm sitting in a room with the Coen Brothers, talking about venues for the auditions and making lists. And it kept going for years.”
Stiff worked on the Down From The Mountain Ryman show, another one at Carnegie Hall, the tour, and layers of marketing and promotion. She saw the impact up close across live music and retail. “I'd walk into a record store and they'd say, ‘boy, our sales have really boomed in this genre, and we've been able to bring in more artists (for events).’ Musical Instrument stores really reported an uptick. It helped so many people. It was crazy how viral it went. It maybe hit its peak within five years or so after (release), but it always maintained. It didn't die down. I mean, it kept selling.”
O Brother didn’t blow up in a vacuum. An acoustic roots wave was already building. Ricky Skaggs pivoted his star country career to his first musical love with the albums Bluegrass Rules in 1997 and Ancient Tones in 1999. Late that year, on the eve of a new millenium, Dolly Parton stole the show with The Grass Is Blue, an album mixing original songs with classics by the Louvin Brothers, Johnny Cash, and Hazel Dickens. Nickel Creek was making mandolins and fiddles cool to a new youth brigade with passionate live shows and a debut album, which arrived in the spring of 2000.
So when the soundtrack hit the marketplace, it became the go-to variety sampler feeding a new fascination with old-time roots and country. It was the new millennium’s contribution to a cycle that seems to happen every couple of decades. In the 1950s, it was Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. In the early 70s, it was the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s multi-generational Will The Circle Be Unbroken?. Once again, with O Brother, roots music had a focal point, a platform, and a narrative.
It also became a frame to view the contested state of country radio at a time when large parts of its historic audience were bailing on it for sounding too pop. Old timers were sporting ball caps that made fun of the Country Music Association’s abbreviation with: “Country My Ass.” No less than George Strait and Alan Jackson had recently teamed up to publicly accuse their own industry of having committed “Murder On Music Row,” through a song they premiered on a country awards show in 2000.
In the face of this tumult, the soundtrack served up a mass-appeal single in Dan Tyminski’s take on “I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow,” boosted by video channels CMT and GAC. But as I reported at the time, country DJs who wanted to play it on the radio ran into a wall of resistance from program directors at the rapidly consolidating radio chains. “Being a CMA member, it got my (awards) vote, even though I am not allowed to play it on our station,” said DJ Lisa Layne on an industry chat board at the time. “I made the only statement I could without getting fired.”
Another from a country station in Ohio wrote: “I stood up and applauded when ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ won two (CMA) awards. I tried to explain why we should play the song and although we did give it a few spins, it wasn't enough in my opinion. Funny, after the show I was told to spin the single a few times today. WHY NOW? WHY NOT BEFORE?”
“Man Of Constant Sorrow” is the film’s sentinel song and motif, because its narrative of a long-suffering wanderer on his way eternally home tracks the theme of the film’s Homeric source material. Thus it appears on the soundtrack in four different versions. Two are instrumental, one picked on a dry woody guitar by the great Normal Blake and one on a lonesome fiddle by John Hartford, who emerged as an iconic star of the Down From The Mountain tour. The movie’s fictional Soggy Bottom Boys, with Tyminski's voice, get to play the song twice - once with just a guitar backing in a country radio station, and another with a more bluegrass leaning full band arrangement, the one that most people know.
The rest of the album holds up beautifully. To listen through it today conjures two layers of nostalgia - one for the early 2000s when these songs were lighting up scenes in the O Brother movie and rippling out to new audiences, and another for the pre-World War II era of country music when the blues, gospel, and old-time string band music began to cohere into the genre we’d later call bluegrass. There were no original songs written for the soundtrack; all date from the early 20th century or before, including a few period recordings, such as album openers “Po Lazarus” (1959 with James Carter and the Prisoners) and “Big Rock Candy Mountain” (1928 by Harry McClintock).
The “stars” tapped for the musical cast were Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch, then a bright new voice in old-world country-folk. They were tapped for the pivotal “siren” scene and the African-American, slavery-era folk song “Didn’t Leave Nobody But The Baby.” (A lyric from that one inspired the name of venerable folk/punk trio The Devil Makes Three, which would form the following year.) The actor Tim Blake Nelson, who played one of the three fugitives followed in the story, asked to sing his own, non-lip-synch part on Jimmie Rodgers’s “In The Jailhouse Now,” and it’s one of the best if overlooked tracks. Nelson turned up at the Opry show to sing it again with the house band, and his affection for its humor and bluesy nuance was palpable.
I’m partial to the sun songs. The effervescent Carter Family staple “Keep On The Sunny Side” was rendered with stained glass harmonies by classic Nashville family act The Whites. The White sisters sounded as great on the Opry stage as they did on the recording. The other one’s a song that gets me at a bone and brainstem level, because my mother sang it to me as a child - “You Are My Sunshine,” popularized by the raconteur, songster, and Louisiana governor Jimmy Davis in the 1940s. The Opry version came from Sarah Jarosz, who - with apologies to my Mom - sang pretty much the definitive version right there in front of all of us.
There’s more (and even more on a 10th anniversary deluxe edition with 14 unreleased tracks). The duet of Krauss and Welch on the old gospel song “I’ll Fly Away” was an instant classic. Hartford got rustic and raw on the obscure fiddle tune “Indian War Whoop.” And of course there’s “O Death,” the song that Ralph Stanley himself, then a titanic patriarch of bluegrass in his 70s, sang on the Grammy Awards. T Bone realized that Stanley’s desire to sing the song a cappella after several other approaches were tried was spot on, and the result is kind of an American monument.
The cultural impact was “huge,” Barry Poss, the late founder/president of Sugar Hill Records, told me back in the early 2000s. “It’s almost a zeitgeist thing. What O Brother did was make bluegrass cool again, and for many years, bluegrass was not cool.” Booking agents working in acoustic Americana at the time saw a surge across their rosters, not just for the soundtrack artists. A banjo-picking friend of mine told me just last week that “I played way more shows for way more money because of that album.”
Bands formed in college dorms as the album’s influence hung in the air, including North Carolina’s Steep Canyon Rangers and Chatham County Line. “The scene just exploded,” said CCL’s singer Dave Wilson in a 2021 review in the Bluegrass Situation. “Suddenly we had this huge advertisement out there in the world for the style of music we were playing. We definitely noticed a change. There were more strangers coming to see us play gigs, and they were really excited about it.”
The album comes up routinely in my interviews with artists to this day. Singer/songwriter Jobi Riccio told me about hearing the music growing up in Colorado.”When that movie came out, I was maybe like, eight or something. But I remember it having a profound impact on me.” And Americana newcomer Olivia Wolf said she listened to the soundtrack “1,000 times” and obsessed over the song “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” It reached overseas as well. English mega-band Mumford And Sons told numerous interviewers their passion for banjo-driven roots music was sparked by the soundtrack, while Bristol-raised country soul songwriter and singer Yola told me that the O Brother wave “changed my actual life.”
It’s harder to imagine a single project like O Brother or the Circle album having this kind of impact today. Our attention is more splintered, and albums don’t have as much focused cultural heft. But there are other vehicles and vectors. A little more than 20 years after the O Brother surge, Billy Strings jolted 100 kilowatts of power into the bluegrass story, and now he’s bringing legions of new fans into the bluegrass fold through the power of his live shows.
In case there’s any doubt that O Brother played a role in Strings’s musical development, on Halloween in 2004, he staged a multi-media, multi-act theatrical extravaganza in Baltimore featuring songs and artists from the soundtrack mingling with some of his own material and set pieces evoking 1930s Mississippi. Its title: “O Billy, Where Art Thou?”
This odyssey is far from over.
Lost Highway Records is marking the soundtrack’s anniversary with a remastered, colored vinyl gatefold edition. Find it HERE.
