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T Bone Burnett holds the 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' vinyl soundtrack

T Bone Burnett

Photo: Rachel Murray/WireImage.com

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For The Record: 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' o-brother-where-art-thou-soundtrack-record

'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' Soundtrack | For The Record

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Learn more about the hit soundtrack to the 2000 Coen Brothers' film and its unique place in GRAMMY history
Tim McPhate
GRAMMYs
Dec 7, 2017 - 12:11 pm

Sometimes, the marriage of music to a film is so brilliantly executed that it's impossible to imagine that film without said music.

For The Record: 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?'

That's certainly the case with the 2000 Coen Brothers' film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? With loose parallels to Homer's "Odyssey," the film is set in Depression-era rural Mississippi in 1937, with the plot centering three convicts, including Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), who escape from a chain gang and journey homeward to get their hands on some stolen bank money.

T Bone Burnett, a musician's musician, was tapped to produce the soundtrack designed to feature bluegrass, country, gospel, blues, and folk music to appropriately represent the time period. The result is a stunningly fun collection of songs that ably supports the film's offbeat comedy.

Enlisting an all-star collective, Burnett churned out an authentic mix of sterling tracks, including Alison Krauss' angelic reading of the traditional "Down To The River To Pray"; Norman Blake's uplifting "You Are My Sunshine"; Chris Thomas King's rootsy "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues"; Ralph Stanley's bone-chilling "O Death"; and Krauss, Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris teaming for another traditional song, "Didn't Leave Nobody But The Baby."

Not only did the soundtrack top the Billboard 200 album chart, it emerged a big winner at the 44th GRAMMY Awards in 2002. The 19-song set took Best Compilation Soundtrack Album For A Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media honors, while Burnett scooped up Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical and Stanley earned took Best Male Country Vocal Performance for "O Death."

O Brother, Where Art Thou? Wins Album Of The Year

The cherry on top of the proverbial sundae? Following Saturday Night Fever and The Bodyguard, the O Brother …. soundtrack became just the third film soundtrack to win the coveted Album Of The Year GRAMMY.

"This version of this epic had a happy ending of sorts, and then one happy ending after another," said Burnett during his acceptance. "But not even minds as elliptical as the Coen Brothers could have written this ending."

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(L-R) John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson and George Clooney in 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?'

(L-R) John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson and George Clooney in 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?'

Photo: Universal/Getty Images

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'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' At 20 o-brother-where-art-thou-20-year-anniversary

20 Years Ago, 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' Crashed The Country Music Party

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In honor of the 20-year anniversary of the GRAMMY-winning album, GRAMMY.com spoke to the creative minds behind the groundbreaking soundtrack, including T Bone Burnett, Dan Tyminski, Luke Lewis and others
Jim Beaugez
GRAMMYs
Dec 5, 2020 - 1:29 pm

The Coen Brothers' 2000 tragicomedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, set in Mississippi during the Great Depression, pulls deeply from the early-20th century American songbook to drive the film's Homeric storyline, which entangles the lives of escaped convicts Delmar O'Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson), Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) and Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney).

But while nearly all 19 tracks on the original soundtrack, released December 5, 2000, are once-popular songs enshrined in the Library of Congress, the music wasn't designed to be a hit outside the world of the Soggy Bottom Boys, the film's fictional band composed of the main characters. "Old-Time Music is Very Much Alive!" trumpets the faux Nashville Banner headline in the liner notes to the film's original soundtrack, "But you won't hear it on 'country' radio." 

The prophecy proved true. The popularity of O Brother, Where Art Thou? didn't help traditional music break into radio programmers' playlists—the single for "I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow" peaked at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart—but it didn't matter. The soundtrack sold more than 8 million copies in the U.S., certified eight times platinum, and won Album Of The Year at the 44th GRAMMY Awards.

On that February evening in 2002, bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley stunned the audience at the Staples Center in Los Angeles with an a cappella performance of "O Death," a traditional folk song featured on the soundtrack, delivered by the then-73-year-old under a single spotlight in the middle of the darkened arena. (Stanley went on to win the Best Male Country Vocal Performance GRAMMY for the track that night.)

"Having Ralph Stanley stand on a stool in the middle of the room and sing 'O Death' was the pinnacle of my entire career," Luke Lewis, whose Lost Highway label released the soundtrack and who also led the Nashville operations of Mercury, MCA and UMG at various points, tells GRAMMY.com. "I was sitting with a bunch of f*cking gangster rappers who were completely blown away."

But the odyssey began long before a host of country, gospel and bluegrass ringers upturned the industry on music's biggest night—before the Coen Brothers even began filming, in fact.

In the spring of 1999, producer T Bone Burnett convened at Sound Emporium in Nashville with a who's who of roots musicians from the city's vibrant bluegrass scene, including Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss & Union Station, to put the song cycle to tape. Lewis, who was just beginning to assemble Lost Highway Records as a creative haven for roots artists like Lucinda Williams, caught wind of the sessions and went to investigate.

"I walked into that creative process when all that was going on, and the Coen Brothers are hanging, T Bone's in there," Lewis recalls. "All these amazing artists come in there and do the record old school, with a mic in the middle of the room."

Classics such as "I'll Fly Away," "You Are My Sunshine" and "In The Jailhouse Now"—the latter sung by actor Tim Blake Nelson—are rendered slower and lower than typical bluegrass interpretations. That was an intentional move, Burnett says, to capitalize on the bass response of the subwoofer-loaded sound systems in movie theaters.

"The first thing we did was stretch the sonic spectrum that bluegrass was ordinarily recorded in, which was very high—the banjo was high, the singing was high, the violins were high, the mandolins were high—and we lowered it a couple of octaves and approached it more as a rock 'n' roll album rather than a traditional bluegrass record."

While Krauss took lead vocals on "Down To The River To Pray," elsewhere collaborating with Welch and Emmylou Harris on "Didn't Leave Nobody But The Baby," her Union Station guitarist Dan Tyminski was asked to audition for the cut of a lifetime: singing lead on "I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow," the hit Soggy Bottom Boys song "sung" by George Clooney in the film. 

"I was happy to do it, but I honestly didn't feel like it made a lot of sense," Tyminski remembers. "I didn't necessarily see myself sounding like Clooney's voice at the time, but it's hard to see from your own perspective what other people see or hear. So, I went back and auditioned the next day, and somehow [I] got it, and just couldn't have been more shocked at what would follow."

Read: 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' Soundtrack | For The Record

The brains behind the soundtrack were just as surprised when the film opened in France, prior to its stateside debut, and sold 70,000 copies of the album within a month. It was a hint of what was to come in the U.S. 

As the film's signature song, "I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow" helped drive the soundtrack to the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200, where it spent 15 weeks during a 683-week run on the chart.

The song became Tyminski's calling card, but he almost didn't get to play it. After his version was done and filming had begun, Clooney himself asked to take a pass at the vocal. Tyminski went back to the studio on a day off from shooting and backed him on guitar.

For The Record: 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?'

"George is actually a really great singer and had learned the song well, and he sang a killer version of it," Burnett says. "But it didn't have the thrill in it that Dan's version had. And so I just said, 'This is great, but we're supposed to be making a movie about a hit record, and now we've got something that sounds like a hit record, so I think we should stick with that. What do you think?' And I think he was relieved, really."

Tyminski says the recording process also played a role in the decision to use his version. "It's not that he couldn't do the job," he says, "but for the sake of the movie, it had to be one take, live, no fixes. It was all really pure, all very organic. 

"After he had taken a couple of swings at it and got the words jumbled a couple of times, he says, 'Dan, I'll make you a deal: I'll act, you sing.' And quite honestly, I was so disappointed because I thought it was so cool to have recorded the song with Clooney. At the time, it felt like that was a bigger deal than singing the song myself. It wasn't until a little bit later that I realized what a loss that would have been. It ended up being the biggest song of my career, easily."

Read: Exclusive: Gillian Welch On Vinyl, Songwriting, 'O Brother...' & More

Tracking down the writers of songs composed nearly a century earlier proved to be an enormous job for Burnett and Denise Stiff, who managed Welch and Union Station. The songs were recorded and re-recorded over the decades, and many versions were unique enough to support their own copyrights. That meant when Burnett used or rewrote an arrangement, they had to determine which previous version of the song was closest and credit the right people. 

"'Man Of Constant Sorrow' has, I think, 50 copyrights in the Library Of Congress," Burnett says. "The one we worked with most closely was The Stanley Brothers' version. Even though we had done our own arrangement, we could've gotten sued by 50 people for infringement."

The version of "I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow" recorded for the film earned Tyminski a GRAMMY for Best Country Collaboration With Vocals at the 2002 GRAMMYs. In addition to the Album Of The Year win, the soundtrack also won for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album For A Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media, while T Bone Burnett won for Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical.

Two decades later, it's hard to say what lasting impact the success of O Brother, Where Art Thou? made on contemporary country music, or popular music in general. The widespread acclaim for the film and soundtrack is undeniable, and they both made gobs of money. But it could be argued—and Burnett does—that a revival of roots music was already underway when it all hit. 

"The reason I think it was so successful [was] because, one, there was already a very strong traditional music trend," Burnett says. "Kids were learning how to do it."

So-called "alt-country" bands like Wilco and Old 97's were impacting the lower rungs of industry charts, along with Jayhawks, Whiskeytown and others. Bluegrass trio Nickel Creek had hooked up with Krauss and released their 2000 self-titled, platinum-selling album, while bluegrass-adjacent bands Old Crow Medicine Show and The Avett Brothers were beginning to make names for themselves on the touring circuit. 

"Certainly, country radio didn't change, and you wish for things like that to happen," Lost Highway founder Lewis says. "But it makes you aware that there's a wider world than what you hear on mainstream radio, and for a lot of people who really love music, you need something to lead you down the path because it's hard to find guideposts to things you might like. I think O Brother had that sort of impact."

There's another reason, too, Burnett suggests. On the night of the 2002 GRAMMYs, Americans were still reeling from the September 11 terrorist attacks that took place just five months earlier. Tony Bennett and Billy Joel sang a duet on "New York State Of Mind," a nod to the resilience of the city amid tragedy. Alan Jackson performed "Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)" in front of children's art created in reaction to the attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. And in the middle of it all, Ralph Stanley stood on the GRAMMY stage, alone and vulnerable, pleading with his maker, "Won't you spare me over for another year?"

"Art responds to events without the artists meaning to at all," Burnett says. "The Beatles weren't responding to Kennedy's assassination, and yet everything about The Beatles felt like the thing that we needed the most after the Kennedy assassination. People were looking for our identity as Americans. Why did we get hit like this? Who were we?"

While the music of O Brother, Where Art Thou? offered millions of Americans the comfort of nostalgia, it impacted others in more material ways.

"It did amazing things for the artists that were involved," Lewis says. "All of a sudden, they were going on the road and making 10 times what they made before the record came out. They got royalty payments that they probably didn't ever dream of."

Mississippi-born singer James Carter had forgotten about the day in September 1959 when Alan Lomax recorded him singing "Po Lazarus" at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman until producers tracked him down in Chicago to present him with a platinum record plaque and a $20,000 royalty check for his performance. The 76-year-old former convict even attended the GRAMMY Awards that night, though he could barely remember recording the song.

In the years that followed, Tyminski recalls that the demographics of Union Station shows began to swing younger than before: more rock T-shirts, more spiked haircuts. He also remembers the rousing applause for the song that George Clooney, as Ulysses Everett McGill, sang into a can in the film's pivotal recording scene.

"From that point forward, that song was in every single show that we did," Tyminski says. "But when you have a song that's been that good to you and that people identify with and they want to hear, shame on you if you're not willing to play that song for the rest of your life."

How 1995 Became A Blockbuster Year For Movie Soundtracks

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'A Charlie Brown Christmas,' 1965

'A Charlie Brown Christmas'

Photo: ABC Photo Archives/Getty Images

Feature
For The Record: 'A Charlie Brown Christmas' vince-guaraldi-trios-charlie-brown-christmas-record

Vince Guaraldi Trio's 'A Charlie Brown Christmas': For The Record

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Here's the Christmas story behind the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame-inducted soundtrack to 'A Charlie Brown Christmas'
Brian Haack
GRAMMYs
Dec 14, 2017 - 3:05 pm

"That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown." — Linus Van Pelt, A Charlie Brown Christmas

For The Record: 'A Charlie Brown Christmas'

In late 1964, producer Lee Mendelson had just completed filming his documentary, Charlie Brown & Charles Schultz. As he was driving across San Francisco's famed Golden Gate Bridge, he happened to hear Vince Guaraldi's GRAMMY-winning jazz composition "Cast Your Fate To The Wind" on his car radio, and subsequently reached out to him about composing some music for the documentary.

Two weeks later, Guaraldi called Mendelson and performed an early version of "Linus And Lucy" over the telephone.

While the documentary wasn't broadcast until May 1969, Coca-Cola reached out to Mendelson just a few months after he and Guaraldi first met and commissioned a new Christmas special based on the Peanuts characters. Mendelson knew immediately that he wanted Guaraldi involved.

For the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas, Guaraldi composed jazz-based interpretations of classic Christmas carols such as "O Tannenbaum," "The Christmas Song" and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," and added in original compositions, including "Linus And Lucy" and "Christmas Time Is Here." (There's also a cover of Beethoven's "Für Elise.") The 11-song set was recorded by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, rounded drummer Jerry Granelli and bassist Fred Marshall.

Following the first broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas in December 1965, the 30-minute special has become a holiday season staple, airing annually. Vince Guaraldi Trio would go on to be commissioned to write music for a total of 17 Peanuts television specials, as well as the 1969 feature film, A Boy Named Charlie Brown.

To date, the A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack has been certified quadruple-platinum by the RIAA, and in 2007, it was formally inducted into the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame.

For The Record
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How 'Baby Driver' soundtrack impacts film music baby-driver-and-beyond-7-soundtracks-spook-spark-and-shine

'Baby Driver' and beyond: 7 soundtracks that spook, spark and shine

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Explore how these soundtracks steered their films and left their mark on pop culture
Renée Fabian
GRAMMYs
Jul 12, 2017 - 5:00 pm

It's no secret that the 2017 crime film Baby Driver, directed by Edgar Wright, has steered its way into the zeitgeist, largely thanks to its killer soundtrack. And like a legacy of film music before it, Baby Driver's music is changing the soundtrack game.

Whether it's the '80s hip-hop of Do The Right Thing or the disco-driving tunes of Saturday Night Fever, music can often provide the boost to push the film into a class of its own. Covering more than 60 years of film music, check out this list of seven soundtracks that influenced generations of pop culture.

Baby Driver, 2017

A heist-gone-wrong film, Wright's Baby Driver taps heavy hitters from the '70s with tracks from Queen, Beck, Barry White, and the Beach Boys, among many others — a total of 35 songs made it into the film. "You could describe Baby Driver as a car-chase movie set to rock and roll," writes Variety. "Or, conversely, you could think of it as a playlist that happens to have a crime film attached." And the film's title? It's Simon & Garfunkel's "Baby Driver" from their Album Of The Year GRAMMY-winning Bridge Over Troubled Water — not to be confused with the KISS song of the same name.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 2000

This Coen Brothers classic follows three convicts who escape from a chain gang and chase buried treasure through 1930s Mississippi. Hilarity ensues, but what makes this film unique was its soundtrack based on music from the deep south, including folk, country and bluegrass. Produced by GRAMMY winner T Bone Burnett, O Brother, Where Art Thou earned an Album Of The Year GRAMMY for its participating musicians, including Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris and the Fairfield Four. 

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Soundtrack)

Pulp Fiction, 1994

Kool & The Gang's "Jungle Boogie," Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" and Chuck Berry's "You Never Can Tell" read like a who's who of rock royalty on Pulp Fiction's soundtrack. "The mixture of surf, soul and s***-talking that Quentin Tarantino assembled for Pulp Fiction's soundtrack played out like one of the world's coolest mixtapes, which made it an instant classic," writes Rolling Stone. While the soundtrack made commercial waves when it peaked at No. 21 on the Billboard 200, its lasting legacy comes from the retro surf-rock vibes of the film's opener, Dick Dale's 1962 breakout single "Mirislou," which still sounds fresh decades later.

Do The Right Thing, 1989

Hip-hop was still primarily an underground genre in the late '80s, but Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing changed all that when Public Enemy's "Fight The Power" blasted first during the film's opening credit roll, and then later straight from Radio Raheem's boombox during the film's climax. "Peppered with 'new jack' era slabs of wax from the likes of Public Enemy (the iconic "Fight The Power"), summer party staples from E.U. ("Party Hearty") and Teddy Riley ("My Fantasy"), and deep slow jams from Perri and Al Jarreau, it's the perfect background for a hot night in the city," writes AllMusic.com.

Do The Right Thing (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Saturday Night Fever, 1977

From subcultures to the main stage, there was no better catalyst for disco than Saturday Night Fever. The primarily Bee Gees-penned album caught fire, earned four No. 1 singles and five GRAMMYs, including Album Of The Year for 1978. But what Robert Stigwood, film producer and head of the Bee Gees' label RSO Records, effectively did was bring the genre to a white-hot peak. "Disco made an unexpected leap in the culture, from popular musical style to genuine phenomenon," writes The Dissolve.

Behind the soundtrack: Saturday Night Fever

Shaft, 1971

Shaft, in a word? Blaxploitation. Composer Isaac Hayes' classic soul double album may contain primarily instrumentals, but that doesn't lessen the soundtrack's impact. The memorable "Theme From Shaft" — one of only three tracks with vocals on the LP — not only won composer Isaac Hayes a GRAMMY, it also earned him an Oscar and became the best-selling record for Stax in its history. Shaft paved the way for other greats in the Blaxploitation genre, such as Curtis Mayfield's Super Fly, and, as A.V. Club says, "fomented a soundtrack revolution."

Psycho, 1960

If you aren't creeped out by Psycho's iconic murderous shower screen, complete with high-pitched scratching violins courtesy of composer Bernard Herrmann, you're stronger than we are. No stranger to Alfred Hitchcock films, including Vertigo and North By Northwest, Herrmann turned up the dial to 100 for Psycho with just spooky stringed instruments. The film's music has become synonymous with terror, and even Hitchcock had to admit, "33 percent of the effect of Psycho was due to the music."

Psycho (Original Soundtrack)

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Joni Mitchell in 1968

Joni Mitchell in 1968

 

Photo: Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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For The Record: Joni Mitchell's 'Blue' Masterpiece record-joni-mitchells-emotive-1971-masterpiece-blue

For The Record: Joni Mitchell's Emotive 1971 Masterpiece, 'Blue'

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The album, written and produced by the GRAMMY winner, includes classics like "A Case of You," "River" and "All I Want"
Ana Monroy Yglesias
GRAMMYs
Dec 2, 2020 - 1:54 pm

In the latest episode of For The Record, GRAMMY.com explores Canadian folk icon Joni Mitchell's widely celebrated fourth album, Blue. Released in 1971, the album features 10 tracks, all written and produced by the GRAMMY winner, including classics like "A Case of You," "River" and "All I Want."

Watch the video below.

Joni Mitchell's 'Blue' | For The Record

In 1999, Blue was inducted into the GRAMMY Hall of Fame. (Her albums Court and Spark and Clouds have earned the honor, too.) Just four years later, Mitchell received the Lifetime Achievement Award, one of the Recording Academy's highest accolades.

Further proving the album's timeless nature, James Blake covered "A Case of You" on his 2011 EP, Enough Thunder, calling the track his "favorite song ever written about a relationship."

Joni Mitchell's Mingus At 40: A Look Back At A Seminal Jazz Collab

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