Metro Pulse/Gamut/Down from the Mountain

What:
The Down From the Mountain tour, featuring Alison Krauss & Union Station, Emmylou Harris, Patty Loveless, Jerry Douglas, Ricky Skaggs, Ralph Stanley, Norman & Nancy Blake The Del McCoury Band, Nashville Bluegrass Band, and The Whites

When:
Tuesday, July 16, 7 p.m.

Where:
Smokies Baseball Park, Sevierville, TN (off I-40 at Exit 407)

Cost:
Reserved seat tickets range from $29.50 - $54.50. Call 656-4444.

Ralph Stanley, the Coen Brothers, and the cult of authenticity

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

How did Ralph Stanley get to the Grammys?

Sure, the music awards show has been striving toward some degree of legitimacy and relevancy in recent years, but it is still a largely empty-headed exercise, as likely to lionize marginal old-timers (Steely Dan) as flavor-of-the-year new kids (Alicia Keys). It's a good way to shift units—Grammy performers can typically expect a sales boost the following weeks—but as a celebration of either innovation or tradition, it leaves a lot to be desired.

So what on earth was the septuagenarian Stanley doing there this past February, standing alone on a stage in front of millions of television viewers, singing an a cappella Appalachian lament called "O Death"? And how did that grizzled, weary performance (of a song that was anything but comforting in the post-September 11 world) catapult its source material, the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, back to the top of the charts?

It was just the strangest chapter in the saga of O Brother. Another one rolls into Sevier County this week in the form of the Down From the Mountain tour, which features Stanley and most of the other performers from the soundtrack, along with some friends: Alison Krauss & Union Station (including guitarist Dan Tyminski, whose rendition of "Man of Constant Sorrow" became an unlikely hit); Jerry Douglas; Emmylou Harris; Norman and Nancy Blake; Patty Loveless; The Whites; the Del McCoury Band; Ricky Skaggs; and others.

Now, as any bluegrass or traditional music fan can tell you, that's a pretty impressive line-up. Weather permitting, it will probably be a heck of a show. Stanley is a rightful living legend. Krauss and Harris are two of the finest American singers working in any genre. Blake and Douglas are virtuoso musicians—Douglas is generally acknowledged as the best dobro player alive. And the rest of the bill isn't far behind.

So why does all of it rub me just a little bit the wrong way?

I'm happy for the success of the O Brother juggernaut. I'm glad that an album of great American folk songs, performed by great American folk musicians, somehow managed to sell more than five million copies and win five Grammys—without, mind you, any support from commercial radio or MTV. I'm sure the artists involved are thrilled to be playing to bigger crowds, selling more CDs, and generally being accorded an iconic status usually reserved for rock stars. And I bet ol' Ralph really got a kick out of singing at the Grammys. He probably even hugged a pretty girl or two.

But still...there's something about the phenomenon that's a little hard to swallow.

It may be partly that, from an East Tennessee standpoint, there's nothing all that special about Ralph Stanley, Alison Krauss or Emmylou Harris coming to town. We love them all dearly, of course, but we get to see them an awful lot—usually in much more intimate settings than the Smokies Baseball Park, a slick new minor league stadium right next to the interstate. None of them are actually from here, but they're familiar enough that there is something faintly ridiculous about all the hype. It's like some of our friends went to the West Coast, got a marketing plan, and came home with a brand name and a PR entourage. From our own place in the Appalachian foothills, this isn't so much "Down From the Mountain" as "Straight Outta Hollywood."

But more than that, it's hard to get past a certain sense of chicanery here. Through little fault of the performers themselves, who are merely playing music they love, the entire enterprise has taken on a sanctimonious air. Much of it revolves around the persistent mythology of "authenticity." In interviews, producer T-Bone Burnett and other people involved with the soundtrack have repeatedly reinforced the notion that the music of O Brother is somehow more "real" than modern American music. People are look-ing for something real, goes the pitch. Especially after September 11, etc. etc.

There is undoubtedly something to this. Americans are always looking for something "real." It's the flipside to our constant impulse to escape the past, to tear down what's old and rotten and replace it with something shiny and new. Even as we pave over our history, we are afflicted with a nagging sense of loss, a longing for connection to things we discarded somewhere along the way. That desire is not a bad thing—it's what compels us to restore old houses and preserve what we can of our cultural heritage.

There is danger there too, however. The cult of authenticity is founded on false premises. The fetishization of any one cultural form, the enshrinement of any single era—whether it's the '30s or '40s or '50 or '60s—clouds our view of ourselves. It fosters a mythological sense of our origins, and it diminishes our ability to understand our own place in history.

In the case of O Brother, the music so enshrined is not really any more "authentic" than the music of the Beatles or Stevie Wonder or Eminem. Songs like "Keep on the Sunny Side" and "You Are My Sunshine" were pop music of their day, recorded with the best technology available and packaged and marketed as deliberately as Britney Spears. And some of the songs may indeed have come "down from the mountain," but it's not as if they just bubbled up fully formed from some Appalachian spring.

What makes Appalachian music so crucial to American music as a whole is not its "purity" but its dense cross-pollination. For a century before the advent of radio and mass marketed recordings, the mountains were criss-crossed by Scots-Irish musicians, African American singers and pickers, minstrel shows, Eastern European immigrants, and a lot more besides. They all learned, borrowed and stole from each other—tunes, styles, instruments, lyrics. The belief in some raw, untouched form of music is almost a kind of cultural fascism, a quest for an unpolluted bloodline in a miscegenated world.

To its credit, the movie that the O Brother soundtrack accompanied touches on some of those themes, albeit haphazardly. In bundling together and then undermining a host of Old South clichés, director-producer team Joel and Ethan Coen poke sometimes gentle and sometimes savage fun at a particular set of American myths. The music is central to the story, particularly in the climactic scene where a racist candidate for Mississippi governor tries to rile a crowd against a band of mixed-race musicians. But the music is so good, the crowd turns on the candidate instead. It's almost as if the Coens, smart-ass Yankees if ever there were (and believe me, I know—I'm a smart-ass Yankee too), are extending a cultural olive branch. They're allowing everyone—black, white, Southern, Northern—to imagine a past in which our shared heritage (and shared love of a good song) overwhelms our painful divides.

Personally, I don't think the movie is entirely convincing. The Coens never seem sure when to take themselves seriously, and that uncertainty fuzzes up their fable's moral force. But the film at least seems aware of the contradictions inherent in the whole idea of authenticity (in a scene featuring the Ku Klux Klan, a hooded leader repeatedly invokes "our culture" and "our heritage"). So the marketing and reception of the soundtrack as an expression of that same authenticity is all the more ironic.

In a way, I suppose none of this matters much. Most people bought the CD because they liked the songs they heard in the movie. For many, it probably serves the same purpose as something like the Buena Vista Social Club album, an all-in-one introductory genre package. I'm sure it's the only American folk music CD in a lot of people's collections, and there's nothing wrong with that. It may have encouraged others to go back and buy some old Stanley Brothers LPs, or to check out Gillian Welch's terrific (and very contemporary) Time (the Revelator).

So go ahead and go to the show. I intend to. And when Ralph Stanley steps to center stage and starts into "O Death," just like he did on the Grammys, I doubt I'll be thinking much about authenticity or purity or anything besides how fine ol' Ralph still sounds—even better than he did on TV.