O Brother, Where Art Thou? 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition
(Lost Highway )
[Rating: 3 stars]
Eleven years ago, pop music ruled the roost. Even country stars were cleaning up their twang and hiking up their hemlines, replacing the ragged charm of country music’s early days with a New Millennium makeover. Old-timey music hadn’t been popular for more than fifty years, and it certainly didn’t appear to be making a comeback.
Then, during the final weeks of 2000, the Coen brothers released O Brother, Where Art Thou? Set during the Great Depression, it painted the South as a musical, mythological place filled with sirens and singing convicts. Actors like George Clooney, who’d just left the cast of ER, made the movie a hit, but the period-perfect soundtrack attracted even more success, selling more than eight million copies and single-handedly pushing Americana back into the mainstream. Most of the album’s songs were new, recorded long after the decade they were meant to represent. Everything sounded old, though, and the bygone genres that O Brother helped resurrect – everything from Appalachian to Baptist gospel to old-timey – live on in groups like the Avett Brothers and Mumford & Sons.
Technically, it’s a little late to celebrate the soundtrack’s 10-year anniversary, but that hasn’t stopped T Bone Burnett from combing through the O Brother archives for this souped-up reissue. Now spanning the length of two discs, the deluxe edition reads like an anthology of American folk music, combining the soundtrack’s original tracklist with a bonus disc of unreleased songs. Included are two additional performances of “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” including a short piano version by Van Dyke Parks, and a reprise of “I’ll Fly Away” that trades Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss’ duet for the high-lonesome harmonies of the Kossoy Sisters. “In the Jailhouse Now,” “In the Highways,” “Keep on the Sunny Side” and “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” all make second appearances, too, making the bonus disc seem more like a collection of outtakes and alternate versions than a collection of unearthed gems.
But then there’s “Tom Devil,” an a cappella work song recorded on the same day as “Po Lazarus,” which kicked off the original O Brother soundtrack. Captured by Alax Lomax, the song is as haunting as it is musical, filled with the rough harmonies and percussive ax strokes of the Mississippi State Penitentiary inmates. For that track alone, the deluxe soundtrack is worth its increased price tag, particularly for those who want to trace modern-day Americana closer to its roots.