"O Brother, Where Art Thou?": Mass Media and Folk Music --Katie Moore

            Shortly after finishing this week’s readings last night, my boyfriend convinced me to take a break from my homework to watch a Coen Brothers’ classic, O Brother, Where Art Thou?  With Levine’s arguments and the various reactionary responses fresh in my head, I snuggled into my couch with the plan of turning off my brain for a little while to watch a movie I had enjoyed a few times before.  However, we were not far into the movie when I found myself looking at the film with a fresh set of eyes and ears, and I realized that I would not be able to keep myself from making connections between the readings for this class and the movie.

            For anyone who hasn’t seen this movie, it is an entertaining and well-crafted satiric adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey set in the Depression era Deep South.  O Brother follows Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) and his gang of Soggy Bottom Boys as they escape from a chain-gang and evade the law on a quest for buried treasure in the form of 1.2 million dollars.  The film is perhaps most noted for the (Grammy-winning) folk music that is interwoven into almost every scene of the movie, whether it is a part of the scene or serving as a backdrop.  Folk music is situated within the era of burgeoning growth in technology, mass communication, and popular culture, precisely the subjects that are the meat of Levine’s article.  O Brother gives context to the modernization of the Deep South, the power of the media, and a folk culture in transition yet still buzzing with vitality.

After meeting up with a young black man who claims to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the ability to play the guitar, the financially-strapped runaways hear about a nearby radio station where “there’s a feller in there that’ll pay you ten dollars if you sing into his can.”  On the spot, these men form a slapdash folk group to play the “ol’-timey material” that the radio station manager insists upon.  The men, obviously without any preparation or practice, belt out a perfectly harmonized rendition of “Man of Constant Sorrow” in a traditional style that rings out over the airwaves, making them virtually an overnight success (unbeknownst to them as they continue on their treasure hunt).  Evident in this scene is the inherent form and procedure of traditional folk music that is understood by all of the men, although they don’t necessarily have any past musical experience.  The men are able to improvise their performance according to the understood musical forms of the time, much like the understood forms discussed in Thomas and Ender’s Bluegrass and ‘White’ Trash that allow Al’s unpolished and unpracticed bluegrass band to eek by in most performances through the understood conventions of chord progressions and passing off solos in bluegrass music.  

The song “Man of Constant Sorrow,” an improvised celebration of “ol’-timey” or traditional folk stylings, is eagerly devoured by the audience in a later scene when the Soggy Bottom Boys come together again to perform live and begin to realize their widespread success despite the fact that they had only performed together once before (the power of mass broadcast).  The song had moved far beyond its spontaneous and humble beginnings, beyond the control of the original artists.  Their authentic folk style is quickly exploited by a local politician up for re-election as he tries to regain the support of his “constichency” by allying himself with the popular folk group as a symbol of the goodness in tradition and the ways of the past (i.e. the way things were run during his last term).  This brings into play several aspects of this week’s readings, including “cultural creation and cultural reception” (Levine 1992: 1398), questions of power and control in popular culture and its use, and the contextual validity of transmission in folk or popular culture through new technology.—“Must authentic ‘folk culture’ always be oral, face-to-face, and local?” (Davis 1992:1410). 

Fittingly, the film actually takes its title from Sullivan’s Travels, another satire filmed in 1941 and mentioned in Levine’s article as an “elaborate apologia” illustrating the transformation a film can take after it “became the property of the viewers” (Levine 1992:1391).  The birth of mass media with radio in the 1930s opened a Pandora’s box of questions for studies of folk and authenticity in an uncharted context that isolated performer from audience and allowed for the spread of local motifs and styles to the public at large.