One autumn day in 1959, a field recordist named Alan Lomax sat at the roadside and watched a Mississippi chain-gang chop logs. One of the prisoners, James Carter, led a chorus of his fellow inmates in a bluesy work-song as they swung their axes. Lomax taped the men before proceeding on his way. The song slipped its chains, lived on and roamed free. The singers at the roadside, God help them, stayed put.
Carter’s primitive prison work-song, “Po Lazarus”, would eventually resurface on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Joel and Ethan Coen’s freewheeling comedy about a trio of dopey fugitives in Depression-era Dixieland. You can hear it playing over the opening scene, just before George Clooney’s preening, wiley Ulysses Everett McGill cuts through the cornfield to the railroad to escape. Everett has convinced his sidekicks (played by John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson) to join him in a search for buried treasure, but the man is a huckster who lies as naturally as he breathes, and so it’s likely his treasure will amount to a pile of fool’s gold.
