Why it struck me the way it did I could not at first put into words. It was all about feeling, like being cradled in a down comforter. I hadn’t felt this for such a long time, I thought I’d forgotten it. Waves of long-ignored compassion washed over me. On the stereo was the soundtrack to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?
I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., with parents who listened mainly to show tunes, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, and Dionne Warwick. The sounds of bluegrass, folk and gospel, the main components in the film’s soundtrack, were foreign to us. Foreign because we were inspired to think that the future was waiting to be created by us. I mean this quite literally, because my mother is an art director in New York City, and creating the future was her raison d’être. Traditional forms of music were foreign because they were not "modern," and any notions of backward-looking, whether they involved music or furniture design or religion or gender roles or politics, were left for other people.
There is a passage in an essay by Harold Brodkey called Dying: An Update, which expresses this idea beautifully:
Optimism. Hopefulness. Our American fondness for advertising and our dependence on it culturally to represent not what works or is worth preserving but what is worth our working for—this, in lieu of tradition, is nervously life-giving, a form of freedom. It is also a madness of sorts, a dream-taunted avidity for the future to replace a sense of history. But it is the basis of America—the forward-looking thing, and we will have gardens and swimming pools and corrective surgery.
Advertising has always been, and by its very nature always will be, creating a promise of a better future. (Whether the future will be better is something entirely different.) My partner, Sean Holt, and I started our company on this promise, and believe in it.
For us, as for most people, music is a direct link to feeling. Reflecting on the O Brother soundtrack reminds us that to ignore traditional American music means we are willing to limit what our hearts feel. Put another way, this music reminds us that there is value in tradition. It reminds us that the human heart, as expressed in folk music and gospel music and bluegrass music, is worth preserving.
The music in the film is performed by artists who deserve to be household names but never will be—artists such as Harry McClintock, Norman Blake, Alison Krauss, Chris Thomas King, Gillian Welch, The Stanley Brothers, Fairfield Four, The Cox Family, Emmylou Harris, John Hartford, The Whites, Ralph Stanley. Their impact on the film is profound—immediate, genuine and soulful.
Thankfully, the Coen brothers not only brought this music to the screen and to people’s consciousness, but also helped to organize a concert with these artists. They even had the foresight to hire documentary filmmakers to chronicle the event [Down from the Mountain, directed by Nick Doob, Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker]. A deep bow to the Brothers.
Sadly, for most Americans living in large metropolitan cities, it takes a tragedy to give us pause to re-embrace the traditional. Given the course of recent events, we need what this soundtrack gives us now more than ever.
