By Donna Bowman
Traditional Southern and Appalachian folk music is making a comeback. Yes, it’s been around and thriving in a festival and live-performance subculture for years. But the word “comeback” is reserved for media events, and the latest revival is media-driven and media-reported. Check the Billboard 200, which tracks the best-selling albums across all genres. The soundtrack to the Coen brothers’ modest hit O Brother, Where Art Thou? stood at No. 27 in the May 26 issue—two below the Beatles collection 1, one above Nelly Furtado’s pop breakthrough Whoa, Nelly!, and seven above P. Diddy protégés Dream. It offers 19 tracks of acoustic, sometimes a cappella tunes, chants, and choruses—not a new-country synth or pop guitar hook to be found. It has been on the charts since its release in December—and certified platinum, without fitting into a single mass-programmed radio format.
Now poised to take advantage of the sudden market for the ballads and jigs of the mountains is Songcatcher, a film that won a standing ovation from the Sundance Film Festival crowd last year and mixed reviews from critics thereafter. (The movie is the opening-night selection next Wednesday at the Nashville Independent Film Festival; see the festival coverage on p. 18.) The soundtrack, released May 8, features 14 traditional tunes (and a couple sections of the score); in contrast to O Brother, most of the performers are women.
Why this 21st-century mining of roots music’s back catalog? Plenty of writers have pondered O Brother’s conquest of the charts and asked that very question. Perhaps there were a million music buyers just waiting for someone to release an album of traditional folk that would be featured at their local chain retailer, instead of languishing in a specialty store’s dusty bin. Perhaps the ad campaign for the soundtrack, featured on television and in magazines late last year, created new buyers where before there were none.
Surely it’s significant, though, that this revival is being catalyzed by the movies. The South has been the setting and subject of movies before, and in one instance has even spawned a hit tune: “Dueling Banjos,” from John Boorman’s Deliverance. That was before the days of radio consolidation, when a station would play whatever was on the charts—metal, psychedelic, crossover country, even Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. Other movies about the region have used its indigenous music, but not until now has a traditional-music soundtrack taken off like Deliverance did when it went gold in 1973.
What O Brother and Songcatcher have in common with “Dueling Banjos” is that the soundtracks are not just background music to the films. The movies are about the music. In Deliverance, the gap-toothed boy who trades banjo licks with Ronny Cox before the fateful trip downriver foreshadows the countryside and culture into which the weekend adventurers will travel. In O Brother, the escaped prisoners win fame and fortune by recording a rollicking lament that inspires the entire South to dance. The Coens provide each group of characters with their own traditional tune, which serves as introduction, instant characterization, and, often as not, a means of attracting new followers. The revivalists in the river mesmerize two of the prisoners with the repeated chorus “Down to the River to Pray”; later, three sirens lure them back to the water with “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby.”
Songcatcher is even more explicitly about the music its soundtrack features—specifically, about the process of discovering and recording the folk songs of Appalachia. Janet McTeer, the British stage actress who energized Tumbleweeds in 1999, plays a musicologist who’s denied tenure at her uptight Ivy League university in 1907. Retreating to her sister’s mountain school, she discovers a treasure trove of pure music in the hillbilly folk she initially despised. Realizing that these tunes are the direct descendants of old ballads and tavern songs from the British Isles, she sets out to record them and shake up the academic establishment.
As far as history goes, the fanciful music-obsessed South that the Coens conjure up is probably closer to the truth than the virgin vein of musical gold that Maggie Greenwald, writer-director of Songcatcher, depicts. Musicologists pieced together the Old World origins of Appalachian traditions over many years in the early 20th century, unraveling a tapestry with thousands of strands and building on work done by their predecessors, who had no access to recording equipment. Intellectual preoccupation with “pure” or “native” folk traditions goes back to the 18th century and Rousseau’s popularization of the notion of the “noble savage,” untouched by civilization, from whom the decadent fops of modernity can learn spiritual lessons. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, classical composers like Béla Bartók devoted themselves to cataloging and recasting the folk songs of their native countries. The Coens, who poke slyly at the faddish and profit-driven commodification of “tradition,” correctly contend that by the Great Depression, regional and “race” music was all the rage in the nascent recording and broadcasting industry. What we perceive as organically springing up from the dusty, rocky soil of America’s heartland was shaped from the very start by the intentions of those listening, preserving, and eventually remaking the songs of the equally lionized and exploited Folk.
The reason these songs are again motivating filmmakers and soundtrack buyers is the reissue of Harry Smith’s seminal 1952 collection The Anthology of American Folk Music. This collection appeared in a new, deluxe CD edition in 1997, and just as it originally ignited a passion for traditional music that bore fruit in the early-’60s folk revival, it has now inspired artists in another medium. The O Brother soundtrack contains bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley’s version of “O Death,” a song made famous by Dock Boggs, who is featured in two Anthology cuts. Deana Carter provides a rendition of “The Cuckoo Bird,” one of the Anthology’s strangest and most haunting numbers, for the Songcatcher soundtrack. Although the Anthology hasn’t sold more than 3 percent of O Brother’s million-plus units, and it costs seven times as much, it has reached the ears of the most influential music fans and critics, as revealed by its overwhelming victory for best reissue in the Village Voice’s 1998 Pazz & Jop Poll—its total vote count was higher than that for Hanson’s “MMMBop,” the winner for the year’s best single.
With Harry Smith’s anthology priming the pump, filmmakers filling the bucket, and country artists toting it to market, the traditional music revival might last a couple more years and inspire a few more sales. But if film is going to continue in the catalyst role, it’s clear that the music will have to be the story, not just ornament it. Otherwise, listeners will get as tired of old-timey ballads as they have of the sellout pop acts that superfluously decorate most soundtracks.
With Harry Smith’s anthology priming the pump, filmmakers filling the bucket, and country artists toting it to market, the traditional music revival might last a couple more years and inspire a few more sales. But if film is going to continue in the catalyst role, it’s clear that the music will have to be the story, not just ornament it. Otherwise, listeners will get as tired of old-timey ballads as they have of the sellout pop acts that superfluously decorate most soundtracks.
