Featured Book: Genre in Popular Music by Fabian Holt

Copy at Case Memorial Library
Mr. Holt writes in Chapter Two, "Roots and Refigurations": "O Brother did indeed boost the popularity of musics that were largely unknown to younger generations. The soundtrack went platinum and was on both the country and pop charts for years. In 2002 alone, it sold 2,736,000 copies, making it the no. 10 album in sales in the United States that year, and by the spring of 2003 it had passed 7,000,000. Fan Web sites, newsgroups, commercial vendors, record labels, magazines, and newspapers devoted a lot of attention to the film and the soundtrack. A publicity Web site for the soundtrack was set up by the label at http://www.obrothermusic.com/, and that was of course accompanied by other forms of publicity produced by the corporate apparatus of Universal. The soundtrack was released on Mercury in Nashville and moved in 2001 to the new label Lost Highway Records, which is based in Nashville and also owned by Universal. … This was not the first time a film had jump-started a revival of musics of the white southern working class. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), for instance, also gave bluegrass a new image" (p. 38).