T Bone Burnett Producer O Brother Where Art Thou

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

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

When O Brother, Where Art Chiliad? was released on Dec. 22, 2000, T Os Burnett had no idea but how massive the Coen Brothers film'due south folk music soundtrack, which he produced, would become. Now, ii decades subsequently and in a fraught election twelvemonth, the Texas-raised musician/songwriter/tape producer has just released the Words + Music Audible Original The Confederacy: Truth and Reconciliation — an aggressive, 90-infinitesimal functioning that is part VH1 Storytellers, part Ted Talk and part university lecture, examining the history of white supremacy and systematic oppression of Black people in America. It'southward certainly an interesting fourth dimension for Burnett to await back at O Brother, which was set in the 1930s in the rural South and explored various racial themes.

"Starting with a chain-gang song and so going to the corrupt, racist politician getting ridden out of town on a rail … well, we've fulfilled the cycle of the film in the last 20 years. … I think the most concerning-for-2020 role of the moving picture was when Homer Stokes got put on that rail. And I'm looking forward to that happening in the get-go of a new year," Burnett tells Yahoo Amusement 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 Magician) Homer Stokes, and apace turn the crowd confronting him by performing their radio hit "Man of Constant Sorrow."

"Information technology all started with a concatenation-gang vocal," notes Burnett, recalling the iconic O Brother opening scene'southward "Po' Lazarus," a traditional work song that he describes every bit an "early hip-hop" track. "Those concatenation gangs, once slavery was overturned, the penal organisation became the new method of forced labor throughout the state, specially in the S. I mean, it's impossible non 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 we needed a chain-gang song, because I knew he had been downwards there recording in the prisons. Information technology was the kind of heroic song that we were looking for."

"Po' Lazarus" was really recorded in 1959 by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins at the Parchman Subcontract prison in Mississippi and originally appeared on the Bad Man Ballads installment of Lomax'south Southern Journeying LP series, credited to "James Carter and the Prisoners." Twoscore-one years later, when information technology was licensed for the surprise smash O Brother soundtrack, Burnett, Lomax'due south daughter Anna Lomax Chairetakis and the Alan Lomax Archive'southward licensing director Don Fleming were determined to track downwards the vocal'due south existent-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 upward at his door with a check; I think the first check was $20,000. … He hadn't even remembered recording the vocal! Merely he had the No. 1 record in the nation, suddenly. And who even knows what his crime originally was — maybe like stealing two chickens from the mayor."

Carter died in 2003 at age 77, only a year and a half before his decease, he had a chance to celebrate his musical legacy with Burnett, when O Brother became one of simply 4 soundtracks to ever win the Grammy Laurels for Album of the Year (the other iii 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 anniversary. It was really wonderful. It was mind-blowing, really, considering to me that concatenation gang that sang 'Po' Lazarus,' I idea information technology had happened in another century or some other land; information technology seemed so removed from where I grew up and what I grew up with. Merely he was still alive and kicking, 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 us an extraordinary starting time to the motion picture. That song prepare a standard for where we would take to get. We couldn't permit him down afterwards 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 picture show soundtrack "O Brother, Where Art Grand" won Album of the Yr at Grammy Awards. . (Photo: Richard Hartog/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Another favorite O Blood brother track of Burnett's is Chris Thomas King's rendition of "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues," originally written and recorded by Delta blues singer/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 after Globe War I with this Gypsy tuning — information technology'due south a D pocket-size or Due east pocket-sized tuning — and he had the most haunting sound and about haunting melodies of all of the dejection. I retrieve Skip James knew he was a genius, and I think he wore it very well. That's still a very apropos and poignant and important song. It's most the Depression, and it's also about not having plenty."

Merely, of course, ane of the well-nigh pivotal O Blood brother scenes is the KKK rally at which the evil political leader 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 Performance at the aforementioned 2002 ceremony attended by Carter. "That is a song I'd been conveying effectually since I was a teenager; it's incredible," says Burnett. "And as we looked for what song would get with [the KKK scene], 1 of the lines I love in O Blood brother, Where Art M? is: 'We establish a wizard, only not the sorcerer we were looking for.' Information technology's a line that goes right by, but it's beautiful — another beautiful through-line. As we were looking for the M Dragon of the Klan, it had to be something about expiry, something taunting to our heroes who were trying to escape."

The O Brother soundtrack features both Black and white artists of the past and nowadays, although it's "Homo of Constant Sorrow," recorded for the film by Dan Tyminski, a fellow member of Alison Krauss'south band Union Station, that became its biggest striking. (It also won a Grammy, for Best State Collaboration.) Another notable scene is when the Soggy Bottom Boys (played by George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake) show up with Black musician Tommy Johnson (played by Chris Thomas King) to perform that song at a radio circulate belfry, and they are told the station doesn't record "north***** songs." It'south a seeming commentary on the long history of cultural appropriation of Black music past white artists, which Burnett says is "a big subject to deal with, and an of import and worthy subject to deal with," bringing the subject back to the current day and tying it in with The Confederacy: Truth and Reconciliation. "It's been interesting to come across the style, for example, Eminem has been accustomed by the African American community. I haven't heard people say that he was appropriating Blackness culture — fifty-fifty though he was — merely he more assimilated it, I think. I think that'south one of the things that's happening in the land today. I call up that the generations that were born after the civil rights advances of the mid-1920s to mid-20th century have a very different attitude towards all of this, and a much more than open up, peaceful relationship among all people."

Burnett recalls that when he was in Mississippi working on O Blood brother, "1 of our buses got all the windows shot out one night past the Ku Klux Klan, or by white supremacists at any rate, because, you know, it was 'New York Jews making fun of us!' But that'southward merely something that happened. We moved on, and nosotros didn't dwell on information technology; that seemed more than similar an farthermost fringe-group action at the time. Now it's getting more and more prevalent in the political climate of the concluding several years." Burnett recorded his Words + Music Audible Original "merely probably three, three or four months ago," merely he'd really been writing "versions of information technology" for years. While the project took on a more than national focus afterward the 2016 election, he was originally inspired when he and his wife, screenwriter/producer/director Callie Khouri, moved from L.A. to Tennessee to work on Khouri'southward TV series Nashville — and he experienced a "culture shock" of sorts in his new "heavily siloed" Nashville neighborhood.

"I live on the west side of Nashville, in what's chosen Old Nashville, and I tin live my whole life here and never meet a person of color," says Burnett. "The well-nigh interesting to me was that in Los Angeles you lot can go into the bank or the dry out cleaners or the grocery store, and you lot're running into mayhap xv different ethnicities, and everyone'due south 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, but every once in a while, somebody would say something [racist] out of the clear blue that was shocking to me and would cease me in my tracks. And then I simply started digging into that new reality. I've been living [in Nashville] now for several years, and then I'one thousand beginning to understand it, but it led to a whole different point of view. It all caught me by surprise. It became clear to me that we never have overcome the Civil War."

Just Burnett, who just appear the germination of a new supergroup called Dopamine with the Roots' Black Thought, Elvis Costello, DJ Premier, Nathaniel Rateliff and Cassandra Wilson, stresses, "I'k non down on Nashville at all. … I'm optimistic and hopeful that we are finally growing past this white supremacist mindset that we grew upward in. … And I call up 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] piece."

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Source: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/t-bone-burnett-talks-o-brother-anniversary-and-why-we-never-have-overcome-the-civil-war-231857980.html

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