by Lloyd Sachs
Located on the edge of a residential community facing busy Belmont Avenue, away from Music Row, Sound Emporium is the house built by one of the town’s beloved figures, Cowboy Jack Clement. A great producer in his own right who broke into the field as a young hand at famed hitmaker Sam Phillips’s Sun Studios in Memphis, he was, in Burnett’s estimation, “a sonic genius,” as well as a much-admired singer, songwriter, and raconteur. When designing the studio in the 1960s, Clement, who died in 2013, aggressively departed from the Nashville norm by eliminating anything that interfered with a true live sound. He didn’t even like having a control room. Stepping into Sound Emporium’s Studio A, with its thick fringes of dark wood baffling, high ceiling, and open space, you might think you walked into a converted barn.
An acolyte of Cowboy Jack’s who executive-produced his final album, For Once and for All, Burnett follows suit in not allowing synthetic surfaces into his sound field—no vinyl road cases, no laminated guitars, no plastic drum heads. “You can take a plastic head and process it for nine million years and it will never sound as good as if you had just gotten a calfskin head and hit it once,” Burnett told Tape Op, no doubt thinking fondly of the sideman David Kemper’s thirty-inch double calfskin–headed bass drum—an instrument he credits with propelling him toward his low-end concept.
As Burnett always does when he records at Sound Emporium, he had Studio A turned into a warmly lit living room space with couches, love seat, lamps, and tables—and burning Palo Santo wood sticks, used for centuries by the Incas for their healing properties. “Musicians all want it because it ties all of the senses together, it’s part of the community, you know, everybody smelling the same thing,” Burnett told the British site Bring the Noise.
Things got off to a roaring start with Dan Tyminski’s recording of “Man of Constant Sorrow,” based on the call-and-response version recorded by the Stanley Brothers (featuring Ralph’s sibling Carter) in the late 1950s. Tyminski established himself as a force to contend with thanks to his full-tilt take on this centuries-old folk tune (here credited to Dick Burnett, a blind Kentucky fiddler T Bone said he likes to imagine he’s related to). It’s no slap at George Clooney’s vocal talent to say a piece of musical history would have been lost had the star sung “Man of Constant Sorrow” himself—as was briefly considered—instead of lip-syncing it to wide-eyed comic effect as Ulysses Everett McGill, impromptu leader of the Soggy Bottom Boys. With its cranked guitar and bass, Tyminski’s rendition of the song has gale-force emotional power—klezmer-like in its simultaneous expression of intense joy and bottomless regret. “It ranks with ‘My Sharona,’ ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,’ and ‘She Loves You’ in its immediacy,” Rodney Crowell told me.
In a second stroke of genius, Burnett had Ralph Stanley record “O Death.” The bluegrass legend had previously played the song, on which a lowly doomed man pleads for more time on earth—“Won’t you spare me over till another year?” But he had never heard the seminal 1929 version by Dock Boggs, a perennially rediscovered figure who has had a significant impact on contemporary artists ranging from Bob Dylan to the jazz/Americana guitarist Bill Frisell. Initially, Stanley wrote in his 2009 memoir, Man of Constant Sorrow, Burnett “wanted me to play it solo and real backwoods. Just me and my banjo, the way Dock Boggs done it back in the twenties. . . . He don’t care for bluegrass-style banjo, except the way I play it.” Burnett ended up using an a cappella recording of the song because, he told NPR’s Terry Gross, “it was much more terrifying that way.” Boggs’s hardscrabble version has the brusque resignation of someone with one foot already in hell. Stanley’s intense, showstopping performance—an aria, really—is directed at eternity.
Burnett, Stanley wrote, “hears things regular people don’t hear, the way dogs hear sounds we can’t hear.” One day at Sound Emporium, the producer was unable to elicit a particular sound he heard in his head but had trouble describing to the musicians. What he was after, he said, was the sound of an old pair of scissors. The studio manager Juanita Copeland and her staff turned the place upside down until someone found the kind of scissors he had in mind. Recording accomplished. Burnett, wrote Stanley, “wanted to re-create the feel of the old-time music, same as when you make a piece of antique-style furniture using all the materials and tools and techniques from bygone days. It’s new but done the old way.”
The O Brother soundtrack was completed in three weeks. The musicians recorded alongside one another, unseparated by booths or panels, facing a single microphone from about twelve feet away. Using one mike goes a long way toward controlling bleed and eliminating anomalies in the stereo mix because everything is perfectly in phase. (Mike Piersante told me that Burnett’s approach to control and separation was beyond anything the engineer had been taught.) Burnett also miked the cozy area where the musicians relaxed between takes because, he told Tape Op, “the casual thing that you’re doing when you’re running a song down is actually the thing.” To capture the natural ambience of the room, Piersante set up old-fashioned ribbon mikes on the three points of a Decca Tree, an apparatus designed in the 1950s to record orchestral music.
Burnett, who prefers the term “balancing” to “mixing,” is no sound purist. He likes tape hiss and in fact has added sounds to a recording situation to enhance the sense of being in a particular place at a particular moment. “When we were in Sun Studios, one of the great parts of that sound there was an air conditioner up on that wall that just ran all the time,” he told Huffington Post. “It was just one of those old wall units, and all those Elvis Presley records were recorded with that going. So, that’s part of the world of sound.”
As great as the individual performances on the O Brother soundtrack are—the other artists include Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, the Fairfield Four gospel group, the Peasall Sisters country trio, the folk legend John Hartford, and the young bluesman Chris Thomas King—the collective power of the music and its transmission of deeply held American values is what made the album such a cultural event. In the aftermath of 9/11, the collection provided comfort food even for many people who never listened to this kind of music. Elvis Costello was widely quoted as saying that when Stanley sang “O Death” at the 2002 Grammy Awards presentation from a pedestal in the middle of the audience, “that was the truest American response to the 9/11 attacks.”
If only the film absorbed more of the humanity embodied in the songs. Farce is farce and satire is satire, but Preston Sturges, one of the Coens’ acknowledged influences, never condescended to his characters the way the filmmakers condescend to theirs—in this case Clooney’s leering McGill, John Turturro’s gawping ninny Pete Hogwallop, and Tim Blake Nelson’s tagalong Delmar. For New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, “the real brutalities of poverty and racism are magically dissolved by the power of song” in O Brother. The film’s angelic Sirens—Welch, Krauss and Harris—certainly do a heavenly job of distracting us from said brutalities with the lullaby magic of “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby.” Though it may have seemed like a great stroke of postmodern irony to have Stanley’s “O Death” emanate from a Ku Klux Klansman presiding over a hellish grand finale, there is an unsettling disconnection between the grandeur of the singer and the cheap spectacle of the scene.
It is easy to understand Burnett’s affinity for the Coens. Like him, they are card-carrying absurdists who take great delight in exposing our idiocies and self-delusions (though the Coens take aim at hapless individuals, whereas Burnett prefers to have demagogues in his sights). And Burnett admires what he sees as their Dylan-like ability to pull together strains of twentieth-century American culture into provocative modern statements. (He also relates to their refusal to tell actors how to read a line or act a scene.) But it is hard to figure how Burnett the born-again moralist (and reformed pronouncer of easy judgments) would forge such close ties with filmmakers who are most comfortable gazing down at we poor earthlings like superior beings from a distant planet.
Ultimately, t
he story behind “Po Lazarus,” the prison work song that opens O Brother, dwarfs the Coens’ Homerian concoction. James Carter recorded the song for the musicologist Alan Lomax in 1959, when he was serving time at the Mississippi State Penitentiary. A group of inmates backed him on the tune, about a poor soul who is hunted and gunned down by a sheriff. Burnett had discovered the song several years before the making of O Brother in the Lomax archives in New York. For all anyone knew, Carter was dead. But just to be sure, when the soundtrack started climbing the charts Burnett and the Lomax Foundation launched a labyrinthine search for the singer. They enlisted a Florida newspaper reporter who was working on a project about Lomax. After more than a year of poring over databases, public documents, prison and death records, and such, they found Carter, alive and well, married to a minister in Chicago.
Carter, who barely remembered recording the song, was given a check for $20,000, his first royalty payment. A week later, the seventy-six-year-old boarded a plane for the first time in his life and flew to Los Angeles to attend the Grammy Awards. He died the following year but left his family with many more royalty checks to come.
Spirits were high following the completion of O Brother. Plans came together to stage a benefit concert for the Country Music Hall of Fame featuring musical contributors to the film at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, the “Mother Church of Country Music.” The documentarian D. A. Pennebaker (best known for Dylan’s Don’t Look Back) was lined up to shoot the event, which would be emceed by John Hartford. Holly Hunter, who played Clooney’s wife in O Brother, would introduce Hartford. The problem was, the concert took place nine months before the release of O Brother—“a crazy idea,” said Burnett. Tickets didn’t go on sale until two weeks before the show. Sales were slow. But thanks to a record number of walk-ups following an eleventh-hour promotional blitz by Burnett and others, the Ryman was packed. The concert, held on May 24, 2000, went off without a hitch. In his last public appearance, the ailing Hartford, who died within a month, drew heartfelt cheers from the audience with songs such as “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”
After the show, rather ominously, a tornado blew through Nashville, causing extensive damage. O Brother opened to a meager turnout in a handful of theaters on Christmas Day, 2000, and though it turned out to be the Coens’ best-grossing picture, it fell way short of a smash. Still, without a lick of radio exposure—its only “airplay” came in movie theaters and then on home systems—its unfashionable mountain music stormed the charts, bucking trends, popular tastes, music biz conventions, and Hollywood wisdom. The soundtrack album cleaned up at the Grammys, winning five awards, including Album of the Year, Best Producer for Burnett, and Best Male Country Vocal for Stanley—his first. As Burnett had predicted from the start—“He never had any doubt about it,” Juanita Copeland told me—“O Death” made a star out of the seventy-five-year-old Stanley. It bought him a house and led to his stark, self-titled solo album on DMZ Records, the short-lived label Burnett, the Coens, and Columbia Records formed in the wake of O Brother. Stanley also was featured on an O Brother concert tour, “Down from the Mountain,” and in the Pennebaker documentary.
“There was something T Bone told me I’ve never forgot,” wrote Stanley in Man of Constant Sorrow. “He said he understood what I’d been doing all these years, sticking with my old-time mountain music when everybody else was going uptown. I told him it wasn’t a strategy. More like an instinct.” He continued, “It was just the way I felt I had to go after Carter died. I didn’t want to follow the herd. I said I felt like an old moonshiner who heads way back up the creek to the head of the hollow. Where there ain’t nobody to bother him. ‘I think you were right to do that,’ said T Bone. ‘You had to go backward to go forward.’ When I heard him say that, I knew we were going to get along fine.”
In analyzing the soundtrack’s success, Burnett credited the greater availability of historical sounds in the computer age. “Now two clicks and you have Charlie Patton’s complete recorded history,” he told the Chicago Daily Herald. “So the audience, because they have so much more to draw from, they are much more savvy than they are given credit for.”
The O Brother soundtrack (which was reissued in a two-disc tenth-anniversary edition containing extra tracks) certainly had a galvanizing effect on a generation of pickers. “A New Wave of Musicians Updates That Old-Time Sound” was the headline for a 2006 Sunday New York Times feature on the rise of “newgrass” groups. “A lot of venues that would never book a string band five years ago are open to us now,” said Ruth Ungar, then the fiddler and singer for the Mammals. And while her group, along with Nickel Creek, Crooked Still, the Duhks, the Yonder Mountain String Band, Uncle Earl, and Old Crow Medicine Show, carried the newgrass torch in the States, the Grammy-winning British band Mumford & Sons broadened the meaning and reach of Americana.
Burnett wasn’t crazy about the term “old-time sound,” which seems to belong to 1930s and 1940s vocal groups like the Mills Brothers (not that there is anything wrong with that). But he surely was pleased by all the young musicians engaging the mountain music tradition, finding fresh ways to push it forward—and being rewarded for their efforts. “The thing about this music, this ancient, old music is you can reinvent it at any time,” he told Uncut, lauding the new crop of players for being “so much better than any of us when we were reinventing it.”
“I thought he might weary of that kind of music, coming from a blues background and a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle,” Bob Neuwirth told me. “Turns out, he became more interested.”
CHAPTER 18
Soundtrack Auteur
As a film fan who came of age in what is now widely regarded as the golden era for American cinema, Burnett was exposed to pop soundtrack masters like Martin Scorsese, whose jukebox fantasies permeate the working-class struggles of his characters in Mean Streets; Robert Altman, who brilliantly matches song to narrative in Nashville; Altman’s protégé Alan Rudolph, whose use of Marianne Faithfull on the title song of Trouble in Mind epitomizes his skill at thickening atmosphere; and Jonathan Demme, who mixed ethnic and rock tunes in Something Wild. Here were filmmakers who were not looking to pump up the commercial potential of a project by stuffing the soundtrack with marketable songs—as so many were asked to do in the wake of the Bee Gees’ mega-selling Saturday Night Fever score. They saw the music as an integral part of the film, a cog in the storytelling process.
With his soundtracks for The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Burnett served the Coen Brothers’ surrealistic vision. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002), the Steel Magnolias–style southern dramedy based on Rebecca Wells’s beloved novel and stories, presented him with different challenges and opportunities. The film was the directorial debut of Callie Khouri, Burnett’s future wife, who won an Academy Award in 1992 for writing Ridley Scott’s iconic female buddy movie Thelma and Louise. Divine Secrets cuts between 1990s New York, where the successful playwright played by Sandra Bullock reveals that her miserable upbringing in the South was her greatest source of inspiration, and 1930s Louisiana, where we witness what the playwright’s mother (played by Ellen Burstyn) insists was an ideal childhood.
Divine Secrets did well at the box office but was not well received by critics. There is an awful lot of talk in it but, wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, “not a character in the movie with a shred of plausibility, not an event that is believable, not a confrontation that is not staged, not a moment that is not false.” But as phony-sounding as the southern-fried chatter of the sisterhood is, listen to the words of womanly wisdom, beauty, and resolve that anoint the film courtesy of Mahalia Jackson (“Walk in Jerusalem”), Macy Gray (a spiffy new version of Billie Holiday’s “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law,” Linda Thompson (rebuking her estranged spouse Richard with his own heartbreaking composition “Dimming of the Day”), and Ann Savoy (lending Cajun flavor to “Lulu’s Back in Town”).
In the hands of a programmer with Burnett’s superior taste and instincts, a mediocre film c
an be a good excuse for an enriching soundtrack, as further demonstrated here by Tony Bennett’s eloquent, first-time-ever recording of Nat King Cole’s 1940s favorite “If Yesterday Could Only Be Tomorrow”; Taj Mahal’s rollicking, genre-crossing version of Fats Waller’s “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now”; and Bob Dylan’s newly written Cajun waltz “Waitin’ for You.” This lackluster film also occasioned the restoration of landmark roots recordings—something that doesn’t happen every day in Hollywood, particularly if the subject isn’t a roots artist.
While working on Divine Secrets, Burnett discovered that the Jimmy Reed songs he had chosen for the soundtrack were going to be heard via shoddy second- or third-generation CD versions. Moviegoers and soundtrack consumers who had never heard Reed were going to be treated to a pale digital reflection of his larger-than-life self. Going back to the original 1950s source recordings, which had been engineered by the legendary Bill Putnam, a hero of his, Burnett treated “Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby,” “Little Rain,” and “Found Love” to state-of-the-art upgrades. As lousy as Divine Secrets is, it deserves credit for making available to the world three, count ’em three, Jimmy Reed tunes in new and improved condition.