Music and Storytelling

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            When Mr. Mitchell asked last week if any of us had seen the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou, the name sounded vaguely familiar but I was pretty sure that I hadn’t seen it. However, when the title screen was pulled up in class on Tuesday morning, I immediately recognized the cover. As it turns out, one of my favorite songs is from the soundtrack and I recognized it as the album cover. The song in question is “I’ll Fly Away” by Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss, which I grew up listening to due to my mom’s love for Alison Krauss (I would recommend listening to the song on the official soundtrack because for some reason the one they play in the movie is a little bit different). It’s just one song of many on my playlist dedicated to music that I heard my parents playing throughout my childhood.
I was thrilled because I think that the soundtrack of a movie is very important in conveying the emotion in a movie. Perhaps my love for folk/bluegrass music makes me biased, but I thought that the soundtrack really sold the movie and gave it an added layer of depth and emotion. I think that this style of music really lends itself to the idea of storytelling. Often, the lyrics contain a story (usually with a melancholy feel). In this movie, the stories that the songs told fit within the bigger storyline of the movie. In class we talked about how O Brother, Where Art Thou taps into a lot of American mythology. Folk and bluegrass music is also very a very idyllic American style of music which nails down the American themes in the movie. As I briefly mentioned earlier, my parents played a lot of folk and bluegrass when I was little, so I really felt a nostalgic edge to the movie. It fit well with the idea of just wanting to go home, which is a little more obvious in The Odyssey than in O Brother, Where Art Thou.

The Odyssey makes brief mentions of poets and bards who tell the stories of myths through music and poetry. I would imagine that as the story of Odysseus was sung it would give the listener the same nostalgic longing for home that Odysseus was feeling. This tradition of storytelling through music is an ancient one that transcends time and culture. Again, I have a very strong love of music, but I really do believe that it has the ability to unite people, and storytelling does the same thing. The combination of these two elements really creates art that brings people together.

Comments

  1. Elizabeth RienstraFebruary 15, 2019 at 9:02 PM

    I really like this observation of O Brother! I think it's really telling how the Coen brothers picked the South with this distinctive style of music for their adaptation of The Odyssey. The Odyssey relies heavily upon the cultural significance of how stories spread, and I think you're right that folk music is really about storytelling. I also think it carries the same function of a story that everyone knows, just like the legend of Odysseus. Many of the songs are familiar to everyone in the area, and some are even familiar to the entire country (You Are My Sunshine was the one in this movie that I think everyone knew). But even if the songs aren't well-known, they still carry the energy and vibe of that vein of storytelling that is very similar to The Odyssey.

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  2. Elizabeth TFebruary 23, 2019 at 12:07 PM

    This is a really good post! I think another cool way music is used in Oh Brother to evoke the Odyssey is in the Man of Constant Sorrow part. Just as bards (with music) spread the story of the Trojan War across Greece, so he was a hero everywhere he went, so the Man of Constant Sorrow spread across the radio so that, at the end, he was able to win over the crowd.

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  3. samFebruary 25, 2019 at 7:55 AM

    this is a great post, the music really solidifies the atmosphere of O Brother Where art thou. most of the songs were actually really old bluegrass tunes from that era or even the civil war. Ill Fly Away was a hymn written in the 20's and the original song Man of Constant Sorrow is a 1920's fiddle tune that has the same lyrics as the O Brother one but revamped to make it more energetic. I also was at a Jam over winter break and Celia Faux introduced me to a bunch of great bluegrass songs and this website has a lot of them http://www.bluegrasslyrics.com/

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