Country music, where art thou?

• Author: Malone, Bill C.

My introduction to the working class world of country music came on a luckless cotton tenant farm in East Texas more than sixty years ago. One of the most cherished musical experiences of those years came when my mother sang the chilling words, "I am death, none can excel / I hold the keys to Heaven and Hell," from the doleful old ballad "Conversation with Death." We needed few reminders in those bleak Depression days that, as my mother phrased it, "life is uncertain and death is sure." It is surprising, and gratifying, to now discover that the song, performed by the great bluegrass singer Ralph Stanley, has been the recipient of a Grammy award, and is at the center of one of America's intermittent revivals of old time country music.

The current enthusiasm was fueled by the phenomenal success of the musical soundtrack from the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? At last count, the compact disc had sold more than three million copies, briefly enjoyed the number one position on the Billboard sales charts, and garnered five Grammy awards, as well as assorted prizes in the country music field. Pretty good for a collection made up exclusively of roots-oriented performances! The O Brother phenomenon has been touted as evidence of a widespread displeasure with the bland and homogenized sounds of Top 40 country radio (where the soundtrack has seldom been played) and of a hunger for authentic, down home rural styles. A few commentators, in fact, have spoken of Americans' renewed romance with the culture and music of Appalachia. And an expensive array of entertainers, composed principally of performers heard on the soundtrack, are now touring the country with a show called Down from the Mountain.

These public paeans to mountain culture obscure the fact that neither the movie nor the music has anything to do with Appalachian culture.

The movie is actually set in Depression-era Mississippi. Except for Stanley's haunting singing, which is clearly rooted in the hills of his native Virginia, the music is generically Southern rural and not explicitly linked to any specific geographical region. Most of O Brother's singers (along with the soundtrack's producer, T-Bone Burnett) come from places like New Jersey, Illinois, California, and Texas. Without discounting the genuine charm of the songs heard on the movie's soundtrack, or of the expertise with which they were selected and performed, the conclusion seems inescapable that the soundtrack owes much of its...