heard, either. Instead we get T Bone Burnett’s remarkable assemblage of
‘‘ole-timey’’ white music, which is the film’s plot motor and pleasure. And
this, too, is wrong in another way.
Ole-timey—the descriptor spoken by the movie’s blind white radio sta-
tion manager and recording engineer—hardly seems appropriate to Jim-
mie Rodgers’s ‘‘He’s in the Jailhouse Now’’ or Louisiana governor Jimmie
Davis’s ‘‘You Are My Sunshine,’’ both new in the s. Ole-timey really
means traditionalmountainmusic, the death-y lamentations of Appala-
chians such as the Carter Family and the Stanley Brothers. (Ralph Stanley
himself won a Grammy for his rendition of ‘‘Oh, Death’’ on the film’s sound-
track, which became a hit.) I am persuaded that differing elevations and
geologic morphologies yield differing sensibilities and musical styles. Not
that flatlanders and highlanders were unaware and/or unappreciative of
each other’s musical traditions in the age of automobility and radio. Rather,
I suggest, the Coen brothers and musical director Burnett were engaged
here in a playful homogenization of upland and lowland white Souths. A
historical Appalachian band, the Foggy Mountain Boys, becomes the ad
hoc Soggy Bottom Boys, rather like one of Walker Percy’s characters’ hilari-
ous misappropriations of legend. The ‘‘South,’’ then, always a singular idea
despite its irreconcilable varieties, is effectively leveled. AndO Brotherbe-
comes, to me, a wistful poem to us about southern landscapes in our own
lifetimes.
Consider first southern Appalachia. Never a great agricultural commodi-
ties empire like the South’s piedmonts and deltas, the mountains nonethe-
less were home to many farmers for a long time, many of them participat-
ing in remote markets. Deep Appalachian farmland (i.e., not on plateaus
and broad river valleys) was typically ‘‘cove land,’’ narrow, fertile stream-
side settlements. Hardly anyone lived on heavily forested ridges and peaks.
This land held rains, filtered water, and provided fuel, building materials,
and selectively cut timber for downriver markets. Then came railroads and
timber and coal corporations. Forests were clear-cut, and mines, whether
‘‘slope’’ or ‘‘deep,’’ brought forth not only coal but slag wastes including
toxic minerals that tumbled down ridges onto farms and into streams.
Farmers went to work in the mines or left for the Midwest, and by , agri-
cultural census takers designated most of the subregion as either ‘‘indus-
trial’’ or some rural-undeveloped descriptor.^3
Then appeared a quantum leap in mining technology: giant machines
that could strip away vegetation, dirt, and rock to reach seams of coal ap-
proximately parallel to horizon or slope. Federal and state legislation dur-