CU of hand ejecting Stones CD. Switching on radio. Switching stations.
COEN BROTHER #1
Hell, there’s nothin’ on but wall-to-wall
Wal-Mart country music.
CU of hand reaching to turn off radio. Just as the hand touches the knob, "If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time" comes on. Another hand comes into the frame, reaching over to stop him from turning it off.
COEN BROTHER #2
Leave that on, that’s Lefty Frizzell, boy!
The Ur-hand of the Ancient Appalachian Entity has reached out of Lefty’s twangy, smoky, whiskey-cured voice and grabbed the Brothers Coen by the throat of the mind. The motherload of our hillbilly, high-lonesome, mule-skinner patrimony leaking into classic country honky tonk. Jesus, this stuff is almost biblical and the people who done sung it are like people outta the Bible. And, incidentally, it’s just given them the elusive premise for their next movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou? Well, that’s the way I heard it, anyway. And they’re trying to tell us it was based on The Odyssey. Yeah right, and Die Hard was based on Robinson Crusoe. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is more like Preston Sturges’s hallucination of The Odyssey as recalled by him at 3 a.m. in the bar of the Garden of Allah Hotel.
But, anyway, this isn’t about O Brother, Where Art Thou? (a typical Coenhead picaresque romp through Southern folklore and Dixie chestnuts). It’s Down From the Mountain that we’re interested in here, the documentary on the concert by the folks who sang on the movie’s best-selling soundtrack.
I thought I’d go straight to the horse’s mouth and ask D.A. Pennebaker (who made the film along with his wife and collaborator, Chris Hegedus, and Nick Doob).
How did this collaboration with the Coen Brothers come about?
I got a call from Bobby Neuwirth saying the Coens are working on a new movie and you oughta see it—it’s got this great music in it, they’re maybe gonna do a concert of it and maybe it would be a good idea if you guys make a film of it! They hadn’t even finished the film. So we went down to see a work print of it and talked to ’em and saw the movie and the music was terrific, I mean it was real, it was an amazing kind of production actually. And then they said they wanted to do something; they were trying to get hold of the Ryman Auditorium and do a concert down there in Nashville—with all these people that did the music for the movie, plus a few others thrown in, and would we be interested in making a film about it? We just went out and shot it and came back and edited it pretty fast and that was it! Once you had all those people in one place and that music bubbling around, it was hard to go wrong.
Wasn’t the Ryman the original home of the Grand Ol’ Opry?
Absolutely, and it’s a most lovely place to do any kind of music recording because you have this huge wooden place that’s kind of nicely shaped. It was a church, originally, so it has a nice churchly resonance. The sound was fantastic. We just stuck it all on DAT and T-Bone Burnett mixed it for us. And then we just dropped it into the film.
I thought I read somewhere that O Brother, Where Art Thou? was inspired by the music?
Well, they love this music and they listen to it a lot and they thought, "What can we do to get this music on a screen?"
The atmospheric black & white footage of collieries and freight trains that opens the film—is that stock footage, or—
No, Bobby Neuwirth shot that. He went up to hear the great Ralph Stanley, who was at some festival—this was after the concert—I couldn’t go, we had to go back to New York. So we gave Bobby a camera and he just drove up to one of these festivals in the mountains, I don’t know where, and on the way he shot. So I used that.
There are great traditional musicians in the documentary: the eerie harmonies of the Cox family singing, "I Am Weary (Let Me Rest)," the reverberating gospel choir of the (five) Fairfield Four, and the disarmingly off-key singing of the little Pearsall Sisters. But the glory of the movie’s soundtrack and of the documentary is Dr. Ralph Stanley. Down From the Mountain gets its title from the good doctor’s decision to bring his "plain people’s music" down from the hills and up from the hollers, and everything revolves around the dark center in which the quasi-legendary Ralph Stanley sings "O Death." It is an absolutely chilling sonic revelation, one that opens up the strange and numinous world that gave birth to this unsettling song.
Hold on, my old buddy Homer Hedgepeth wants a word here. Homer?
Waal, I bit my hand so’s I wouldn’t say a discouraging word about the music here, but dogblammit, if you got the curmudgeon bug in you, you know it gotta come out no matter what. Looky here, it’s this soppy folkie thing in folk music that bites my rat. I mean there’s indigenous mountain music made by seriously rural folk a-settin’ on thar porches, tipplin’ from a jug—and then there’s this made-in-Japan folkie music created by white, middle-class, suburban kids from vinyl. And goldarnit, in the name of fifty hootin’ huddird, it ain’t the same thing, no matter how well it’s done. No, sir. So don’t go tryin’ to pawn off yer Emmylous and autoharp damsels, and your flat-pickin’ boys as the genwine artikkle. Gabrubbit, it’s as agrivatin’ as ’shine made with battery acid and I AIN’T GONNA ABIDE IT. Lukly, there’s more than Emmy Lou Harris to this movie. So gwane and see it. I give it five outhouse moons, that’s mah highest ratin’.
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