Sounds of a Lost America

Every Ulysses needs a little traveling music, and in the case of George Clooney’s Everett Ulysses McGill, the 1930s incarnation of Western civilization’s archetypal wanderer, it’s the old folk lament “Man of Constant Sorrow.”

That tune is the recurring centerpiece in a feast of traditional music that enriches “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” Joel and Ethan Coen’s loose, comedic adaptation of “The Odyssey” set in Depression-era Mississippi. The movie opens Dec. 22, and Mercury Nashville Records will release the soundtrack album on Dec. 5.

The black gospel, blues and work songs, the white spirituals and Carter Family classics, the hill tunes and string-band dance music that form the film’s score not only define the story’s time and place, but also reinforce themes shared by Homer’s hero and Americans uprooted by the Depression--exile and haven, the dream of a better place ahead.

Even if the Coen Brothers, post-”Fargo,” aren’t a box-office given, this might amount to the most significant airing of core American folk music in a popular film since “Deliverance” inspired an epidemic of dueling banjos in the early ‘70s.

In “O Brother,” though, the music isn’t isolated to one scene or relegated to background flavoring--it’s so integral to the film that it seems to become a character, a Greek chorus with a twang propelling the picaresque plot.

“As we developed the story more, the music became an increasingly important element in it and really began to sort of inform the story itself,” says Joel Coen, who directed the movie and co-wrote it with his brother, Ethan. “It also started to inform the tone and the feeling of the whole thing.”

True to the Coen Brothers’ fondness for counterpoint, the music’s earthiness and directness often play against the film’s exaggerated, almost cartoon-like visual and acting style.

That--and the brothers’ track record of irreverence--might have given pause to some musical traditionalists, but the end product has the endorsement of one fierce guardian of the music’s integrity.

“I have to give huge credit to the Coens, because across the board they did it right,” says singer-songwriter Gillian Welch, who served as the project’s associate music producer.

“It would have been a big drag to marshal this kind of musical cast and to have [the movie] be lame,” she adds. “In the past, a lot of people haven’t done it right, it’s been the coarsest of stereotypes. And this one kind of hit the nail on the head. Death and slapstick really abut each other in mountain music. This balance is necessary, I think. . . . You find yourself tending to alleviate the darkness with some jokes.”

This treasure trove of Southern culture is the brainchild of two New York-based Minneapolis natives (the Coens), an Angeleno who now lives in Nashville (Welch) and the Texas-to-L.A. transplant who served as the music producer for both the film and the soundtrack album--T Bone Burnett.

Actually, Burnett’s reemergence is one of the notable byproducts of the “O Brother” saga.

The St. Louis-born, Fort Worth-raised musician left the game at a time when he was one of rock’s most in-demand record producers, and a singer and songwriter whose four albums gave him a strong critical reputation and a loyal following.

“I sort of dropped out several years ago and started studying with the notion of getting good,” says Burnett, who played guitar in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in the mid-’70s and whose album productions include Los Lobos’ “How Will the Wolf Survive?,” Elvis Costello’s “King of America” and “Spike,” and Welch’s two albums.

“He has an uncanny ability to judge a performance,” Welch says of her mentor. “It’s not the easy thing. It’s not, ‘Are you in tune, did you play the notes right?’ It’s nothing that coarse. It’s, ‘Did you tell the story, were you believable?’ ”

Burnett befriended the Coens by calling them to say how much he liked their 1987 comedy “Raising Arizona.” They hired him on as “music archivist” on “The Big Lebowski,” their 1998 “Fargo” follow-up, but that was hardly preparation for the consuming work that “O Brother” would require.

“The goal from the beginning was to find these stories and find themes for the different characters,” says Burnett, 52. “Then the challenge was to find where they fit and who should do them and what the tone of them was and how they fit the scene.”

When the Coens finished their script, they sent Burnett a CD with 20 to 30 songs for consideration, including Harry McClintock’s 1928 hobo’s fantasy, “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” and “You Are My Sunshine.”

Burnett scoured his archives-- and bought about 1,000 more albums--to come up with some additional songs. Among them was “Oh Death,” which would be sung for the film in a chilling, a cappella version by bluegrass patriarch Ralph Stanley. Burnett and Welch also wrote “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby,” an adaptation of a black lullaby, as the “beguiling and frightening” song of the sirens.

The Coens, Burnett and Welch brainstormed for three months before starting to record in Nashville with a roster that included veterans (Stanley, Emmylou Harris, John Hartford) and the new guard (Alison Krauss and her band Union Station, the Cox Family, the Whites).

A few of the tracks in the film--including “Big Rock Candy Mountain” and the chain gang holler “Po Lazarus”--are period recordings, and Burnett made sure the new ones sounded period, acquiring vintage ribbon microphones and arranging them in a triangular configuration known as “Decca tree,” after the technique employed by that record company in the ‘30s and ‘40s.

“You get this really interesting stereo image, but still very present,” says Burnett. “There’s no echo, there’s nothing. We didn’t use any equipment that was made after 1948. . . . It sounds better. This whole digital thing is the emperor’s new clothes.

“People are being trained to hear music in a stiff, regimented way now. . . . I just think there is a tremendous amount of freedom missing in music today. It’s a hard battle. It’s hard to raise the standard for freedom, because [the record business] doesn’t need it. It’s not useful, freedom.”

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Haven’t we heard this story before?

A respected musician-producer travels to the stronghold of a culture’s musical tradition and gathers some performers to record in time-honored style.

The parallel between Ry Cooder’s Cuban-music project Buena Vista Social Club and Burnett’s “O Brother” work isn’t exact--most significantly, much of the film’s music is played by young disciples of traditional music rather than its neglected elders.

But there are more similarities in store: Like Buena Vista, “O Brother” is sprouting something of a cottage industry, including an all-star concert, a feature-film documentary and a possible series of live shows.

The idea of a concert started forming during the recording sessions, inspired in part by the pragmatic desire to create some kind of promotional vehicle for the soundtrack. So on May 24, the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” musicians took over Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, home of the Grand Ole Opry, and played a show that was filmed by famed documentarian D.A. Pennebaker (“Don’t Look Back”); his wife, Chris Hegedus; and Nick Doob.

That documentary, “Down From the Mountain,” had a one-week Oscar-qualifying run in October, but its future release plans are still pending. Burnett is also formulating plans to reconvene the cast and repeat the show in some other cities, including Los Angeles, New York and Washington.

“We just thought it was interesting and important that some of these guys who most people don’t know a lot about, like Ralph Stanley and Hartford and the Fairfield Four, that someone document who they are and what they do a little bit,” says Joel Coen, who, with his brother, is an executive producer of “Mountain.”

No one is predicting that this bluegrass blitz will set baby boomers two-stepping to “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” or turn Ralph Stanley into the Ibrahim Ferrer of American roots music. But the partisans know that their music isn’t likely to get a better shot any time soon at reaching a lot of ears.

“I’ll be real curious to see what happens,” says Welch. “I’m not that much of an optimist when it comes to the masses, but it will be a new platform and a unique setting for all of us. So we’ll see. I’m hopeful. I don’t really know what’s not to like.”

Says Burnett: “We live in an age of music for people who don’t like music. The record industry discovered some time ago that there aren’t that many people who actually like music. For a lot of people, music’s annoying, or at the very least they don’t need it.

“They discovered if they could sell music to a lot of those people, they could sell a lot more records, so now we have jazz for people who don’t like jazz and country music for people who don’t like country music.

“This stuff is music for people who like music.”