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 ...

Times and dates tend to blur in rural, off-grid Mississippi and so it is too with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which has its feet, hands and fingers in several different decades. The film is re ...

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 ...