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 ...

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 ...

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 ...