James Carter the Prisoners Oh Brother Where Art Thou Album

May 06, 2022 Post a Comment

T Bone Burnett in 2009. (Photo: Liz O. Baylen/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

When O Brother, Where Art Yard? was released on Dec. 22, 2000, T Bone Burnett had no idea just how massive the Coen Brothers motion picture's folk music soundtrack, which he produced, would become. Now, ii decades subsequently and in a fraught election year, the Texas-raised musician/songwriter/record producer has simply released the Words + Music Aural Original The Confederacy: Truth and Reconciliation — an ambitious, 90-minute performance that is function VH1 Storytellers, part Ted Talk and part university lecture, examining the history of white supremacy and systematic oppression of Blackness people in America. It's certainly an interesting time for Burnett to look dorsum at O Brother, which was gear up in the 1930s in the rural South and explored diverse racial themes.

"Starting with a chain-gang song then going to the corrupt, racist politico getting ridden out of boondocks on a rails … well, we've fulfilled the bicycle of the movie in the last 20 years. … I think the most apropos-for-2020 function of the flick was when Homer Stokes got put on that rail. And I'm looking forrad to that happening in the showtime of a new twelvemonth," Burnett tells Yahoo Entertainment with a chuckle, referring to the climactic scene when on-the-lam bluegrass singers the Soggy Bottom Boys sneak into a campaign gala for gubernatorial candidate (and secret Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard) Homer Stokes, and speedily turn the oversupply against him by performing their radio hit "Man of Constant Sorrow."

"Information technology all started with a chain-gang song," notes Burnett, recalling the iconic O Brother opening scene'south "Po' Lazarus," a traditional piece of work vocal that he describes every bit an "early hip-hop" track. "Those chain gangs, one time slavery was overturned, the penal system became the new method of forced labor throughout the country, particularly in the Due south. I mean, information technology'due south impossible not to deal with those themes, really, when you're talking about the South in the '30s. … I went immediately to the Lomax archives when I knew nosotros needed a concatenation-gang song, because I knew he had been down there recording in the prisons. It was the kind of heroic song that we were looking for."

"Po' Lazarus" was actually recorded in 1959 by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins at the Parchman Farm prison in Mississippi and originally appeared on the Bad Man Ballads installment of Lomax's Southern Journey LP series, credited to "James Carter and the Prisoners." Forty-ane years later, when it was licensed for the surprise smash O Brother soundtrack, Burnett, Lomax'due south daughter Anna Lomax Chairetakis and the Alan Lomax Archive's licensing manager Don Fleming were adamant to track down the song'south real-life hero — Mississippi sharecropper, inmate and lead vocalist on the field recording, James Carter — to make sure he received both his proper credit and royalties.

"The Lomax foundation, in a really wonderful human activity of responsibility, hired a private detective to locate James Carter — and they found him," Burnett recalls. "He had married a storefront preacher [Rosie Lee Carter of the Holy Temple Church of God] in Chicago, and [Chairetakis and Fleming] showed up at his door with a check; I think the first check was $20,000. … He hadn't even remembered recording the vocal! But he had the No. ane record in the nation, of a sudden. And who even knows what his criminal offence originally was — perchance like stealing two chickens from the mayor."

Carter died in 2003 at age 77, but a year and a half before his death, he had a risk to celebrate his musical legacy with Burnett, when O Brother became one of only four soundtracks to ever win the Grammy Award for Anthology of the Yr (the other three being The Music From Peter Gunn, Sat Nighttime Fever and The Bodyguard). "We brought him out to Los Angeles for the Grammys, which was a great thrill," Burnett reminisces. "He came out, and he was in a wheelchair. We brought his whole family out for the ceremony. Information technology was really wonderful. It was mind-bravado, really, because to me that chain gang that sang 'Po' Lazarus,' I thought information technology had happened in another century or some other land; it seemed so removed from where I grew up and what I grew up with. Just he was still alive and boot, and he was lovely. … I told him what a beautiful job he did, what a beautiful slice of music that was, told him how grateful we were that he gave united states of america an extraordinary beginning to the movie. That song set a standard for where we would have to get. We couldn't let him down later on that."

T Bone Burnett, left, and James Carter, right, backstage after the movie soundtrack "O Brother, Where Art Thou" won Album of the Year at Grammy Awards. . (Photo: Richard Hartog/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images) — T Bone Burnett, left, and James Carter, right, backstage afterward the movie soundtrack "O Brother, Where Art Chiliad" won Album of the Twelvemonth at Grammy Awards. . (Photo: Richard Hartog/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Another favorite O Brother track of Burnett's is Chris Thomas King's rendition of "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues," originally written and recorded by Delta blues vocalizer/multi-instrumentalist Skip James in the 1920s. "To me, Skip James is in many ways one of the greatest bluesmen," says the producer. "He came back from Europe later World War I with this Gypsy tuning — it's a D modest or E small-scale tuning — and he had the most haunting audio and almost haunting melodies of all of the blues. I think Skip James knew he was a genius, and I think he wore information technology very well. That's however a very apropos and poignant and of import song. It'due south about the Depression, and it's also well-nigh not having enough."

But, of course, one of the almost pivotal O Brother scenes is the KKK rally at which the evil politician Stokes is de-hooded. That moment chillingly features another traditional American folk song, bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley's a cappella recording of "O Death," which earned Stanley a Grammy for All-time Male Country Song Functioning at the same 2002 ceremony attended by Carter. "That is a song I'd been carrying around since I was a teenager; information technology's incredible," says Burnett. "And as we looked for what song would go with [the KKK scene], one of the lines I love in O Brother, Where Art Thou? is: 'We found a wizard, just not the wizard we were looking for.' It's a line that goes right by, simply information technology's beautiful — another beautiful through-line. As nosotros were looking for the Grand Dragon of the Klan, it had to be something about death, something taunting to our heroes who were trying to escape."

The O Brother soundtrack features both Black and white artists of the by and present, although it's "Homo of Constant Sorrow," recorded for the film by Dan Tyminski, a member of Alison Krauss'south ring Union Station, that became its biggest striking. (It too won a Grammy, for Best Country Collaboration.) Another notable scene is when the Soggy Lesser Boys (played by George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake) show upward with Black musician Tommy Johnson (played past Chris Thomas King) to perform that vocal at a radio broadcast belfry, and they are told the station doesn't record "n***** songs." Information technology's a seeming commentary on the long history of cultural appropriation of Black music past white artists, which Burnett says is "a large subject to deal with, and an important and worthy subject to deal with," bringing the subject field dorsum to the electric current twenty-four hour period and tying it in with The Confederacy: Truth and Reconciliation. "It's been interesting to see the way, for example, Eminem has been accepted past the African American community. I haven't heard people say that he was appropriating Blackness civilisation — fifty-fifty though he was — just he more assimilated it, I call back. I think that's one of the things that'southward happening in the country today. I think that the generations that were born later the civil rights advances of the mid-1920s to mid-20th century take a very dissimilar attitude towards all of this, and a much more than open, peaceful relationship among all people."

Burnett recalls that when he was in Mississippi working on O Brother, "one of our buses got all the windows shot out one dark by the Ku Klux Klan, or by white supremacists at whatsoever rate, considering, y'all know, information technology was 'New York Jews making fun of u.s.!' But that'southward just something that happened. We moved on, and nosotros didn't dwell on it; that seemed more similar an farthermost fringe-grouping activity at the fourth dimension. At present it's getting more and more than prevalent in the political climate of the concluding several years." Burnett recorded his Words + Music Aural Original "merely probably three, three or four months ago," simply he'd actually been writing "versions of it" for years. While the project took on a more than national focus after the 2016 election, he was originally inspired when he and his married woman, screenwriter/producer/director Callie Khouri, moved from L.A. to Tennessee to work on Khouri'south TV series Nashville — and he experienced a "culture daze" of sorts in his new "heavily siloed" Nashville neighborhood.

"I live on the w side of Nashville, in what'due south chosen Old Nashville, and I can live my whole life hither and never encounter a person of color," says Burnett. "The most interesting to me was that in Los Angeles you can go into the bank or the dry cleaners or the grocery store, and you're running into maybe 15 different ethnicities, and everyone's incredibly respectful of each other, and I would even say open with each other. And when I came [to Nashville], I found that at that place was a lot of distrust among what people phone call 'races,' and I was uncomfortable. … Everyone can be courtly and polite and all those things, merely every in one case in a while, somebody would say something [racist] out of the clear blue that was shocking to me and would finish me in my tracks. So I just started digging into that new reality. I've been living [in Nashville] now for several years, so I'm beginning to understand it, but information technology led to a whole dissimilar betoken of view. It all caught me by surprise. It became clear to me that nosotros never accept overcome the Civil War."

Merely Burnett, who just announced the formation of a new supergroup chosen Dopamine with the Roots' Black Thought, Elvis Costello, DJ Premier, Nathaniel Rateliff and Cassandra Wilson, stresses, "I'g not down on Nashville at all. … I'm optimistic and hopeful that nosotros are finally growing past this white supremacist mindset that nosotros grew up in. … And I think Nashville is incredibly well positioned to lead Tennessee, the South and the United States out of the darkness of the 19th century — which is why I started writing this [The Confederacy: Truth and Reconciliation] slice."

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