This one’s a little tongue-in-cheek, since of the two versions from 2000, the same person’s singing.
In the (what I consider) classic film OBrother, WhereArtThou? George Clooney leads an inept trio of runaways from a chain gang, which at one point pretends to be recording artists called the Soggy Bottom Boys.
Now, despite being the nephew of Rosemary Clooney (WhiteChristmas), George didn’t sing on the soundtrack, so when his character leads “Man of Constant Sorrow,” that’s Dan Tyminsky you’re hearing, and that’s Tyminsky with Alison Krause in the second video. The soundtrack was by far a bigger success story than the movie itself, leading to a renaissance for Americana music that also led to a brief revival of interest of folk music later that was another reason rock lost favor with critics and/or fans.
Eventually “Man of Constant Sorrow” gained enough traction to carry cover versions from the likes of Home Free. Despite being more than a century old today, it wasn’t until Tyminsky covered it in 2000 that it reemerged into the popular consciousness.
But as with many things, we can circle the conversation back to Bob Dylan:
Here’s the Stanley Brothers before him:
Here’s Joan Baez singing “Girl of Constant Sorrow”:
I’ve blogged about this phenomenon before, but it still fascinates me and has actually gotten bigger since then…
This time I’ll go a little deeper. Let’s rewind to Russell Crowe in the ‘80s, when you had to be Australian to know he existed. At this point he really was making his name as a pop act. The song most relevant to later eras would be “I Just Wanna Be Like Marlon Brando.” Eventually he did in fact become an acting icon.
But he never left his interest in music behind. He ended up making friends with Alan Doyle of the Newfoundland folk band Great Big Sea, and they made music together and Doyle showed up in a number of Crowe’s movies. (Their biggest musical collaboration would be “Testify,” a song so good I still swear it can’t possibly originate with them or is a testament to just how good Crowe really is.) Doyle’s biggest role was as Alan-a-Dale in RobinHood. When you cast an authentic musician in the role who regularly performs folk music and composes original material, the likelihood of something great resulting increases. He cobbled together a tune that’s half in the background of one scene, forgot about it, and a few years later was made aware that folk acts had claimed it and made it their own, finishing it out however they felt like, and the music scene began crediting it as another folk traditional from some point long in the past, original composer “unknown.”
So he finished it out himself and released it on an album. In recent years, after acts like Mumford & Sons made it briefly seem folk music would explode again in all the ways fans still lament Bob Dylan abandoning in Newport, there’s once again been a resurgence. Nathan Evans went viral with “Wellerman,” a traditional sea shanty, and on the album he subsequently got to make he included a cover of Doyle’s “Bully Boys.” Colm McGuinness has a video where he accompanies himself brilliantly, and that’s become a favorite of mine…
It’s strange how these things turn out. When I started this series I didn’t immediately think to include “Bully Boys,” since I’d covered it before (heh), but it would be woefully incomplete without it. Anyone can look up traditional songs that trace back centuries. This is one that played out over very recent history in the most unlikely ways. It will probably never top any charts, but has woven its way deeply across the English speaking landscape (and for all I know, elsewhere). This is the kind of thing that fascinates me.
This one's a departure from what I've been talking about, since all three versions of "The Weary Kind" included above were done at the same time, for the same reason, a film called Crazy Heart.
It's just interesting, to me, that even that's possible, that we so seldom think of how radically different a song can sound if a different person is singing, not merely in a rearrangement but in the vocals themselves. Jeff Bridges sounds completely different than Colin Farrell, Bridges playing the cagey veteran who gifts Farrell the song, which in the real world was composed by Ryan Bingham, who later became a little better known for a supporting role in Yellowstone, where he sometimes sings, too (his introduction merrily jokes about how depressing his music sounds).
And I've loved the song, regardless of who sings it, since I first saw the film. I was reminded recently of how canned music written for movies has become in recent years, but "The Weary Kind" is a considerable exception. Much of what Bridges sings to represent a legendary career is a little on the nose (written sometimes to comment on the state in which we find him rather than to reflect on a heyday). "Weary Kind" is a song that eclipses this fictional output and sounds like it could easily have landed on the radio in real life. Maybe it did? I don't know.
The convoluted saga of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” is another you can read about elsewhere, but it’s worth talking about in a more general sense. Like a lot of listeners, it was a clear highlight of late Nineties radio for me, one of those contradictions you can’t help but laugh about when people say rock was a wasteland by that point (always greatly exaggerated). I didn’t know anything about the legal battles that tanked the Verve in its wake. It seems the band borrowed some notes from an orchestral version of a Rolling Stones song in order to achieve its signature sound.
Anyway, it’s a great song, still one of my favorite ever. More recently British indie hip hop star Ren offered his version, which carries the same string arrangement but all-new lyrics (no one does it quite like him), once more emphasizing just how far the Verve reached, very much like how the Animals completely reinvented the sound of “House of the Rising Sun,” making the song its own, though “Bitter Sweet Symphony” literally is its own song. I just don’t get how petty people can be.
Listening to “Only Wanna Be with You,” in hindsight, it’s half tribute to Bob Dylan. It’s not something I picked up on, back in the day. Hootie haters, today, they only hear “I only wanna be with yoooou,” the refrain, but the song is better known, in some circles, for the legal problems the band got into for borrowing wholesale from Dylan’s “Idiot Wind.” At one point it’s just Darius Rucker singing from it. It’s something, again, you don’t notice if you’re not paying attention, but inescapable once you do.
I’ve gotta figure some of the backlash Hootie faced was the rock scene not figuring this out, that Hootie was completely immersed in the music it loved. For years they toured as a bar band, so they played what they loved, interspersed with their own stuff. Not nearly enough is made of how much the band adored R.E.M., how Rucker tried singing like Michael Stipe on many tracks in Hootie’s early releases. Rucker isn’t Stipe, though, so to hear him bury his full-throated grandeur in Stipe murmur can be disorienting.
But aside from “Only Wanna Be with You,” Hootie never really pursued Dylan. There isn’t an outright cover in any of the band’s recorded material. Just imagine! A huge part of Dylan’s legacy is other artists eagerly covering his music, and a significant portion of the history of rock music is a result of that. By the time Hootie came around, Dylan was beginning a reemergence, but aside from “Make You Feel My Love,” which Billy Joel happily covered, the scene had begun to move on. At any rate, Hootie’s audacious sampling of “Idiot Wind” was a new way to spotlight Dylan, but it didn’t really catch on, except to say some five years later when Old Crow Medicine Show resurrected “Wagon Wheel,” which Rucker eventually made his own, bringing the whole thing full circle.
“House of the Rising Sun” is another song you can read about on Wikipedia, its incredible origins. Like a lot of people I first heard it as a song recorded by the Animals, and I thought it was a song by the Animals for the longest time, until very recently, when I learned not only Bob Dylan had recorded it on his debut album a mere three years earlier than the Animals version, but Woody Guthrie before Dylan…and apparently it was a well-traveled folk song for…probably…centuries before that. Like true folk songs it becomes impossible to learn the actual origins, only the places here and there where it surfaces, like little signposts.
So in effect it’s one of the purest folk songs we currently enjoy. The Animals version is iconic in its own right, a defining moment in the band’s relatively short history, in the history of the era it came from (the Sixties), rock music itself, and apparently folk (most people tend to associate Dylan as straddling the line, but history flattens everything). It’s one of my favorite songs, anyway, caused me to track down an Animals hits compilation for my collection a decade ago once I realized how important the song was to me.
And as someone who likes collecting songs to try and learn to sing, it’s always nice to think of this as a part of a long tradition. Because that’s what music is really all about.
Darius Rucker, 2012Bob Dylan sketch, 1973 Old Crow Medicine Show, 2003
The story of “Wagon Wheel” is pretty well detailed (have a look at Wikipedia), but I want to write about it as an authentic version of how a song enters the popular consciousness, not just as a pop song that does well on the charts but permeates in folk fashion, so that it feels like it was always there, and always will be.
Dylan gets the initial credit, but even he’s riffing on earlier material. Bob Dylan is recognized by discerning music fans as one of the defining artists of the past hundred years, with his own belief that he was just trying to live up to earlier acts like Woody Guthrie, whom more recent generations know only through Dylan’s admiration (pop music can be fickle). Dylan’s voice, heavily criticized in recent years in its current state, has actually been a source of contention throughout his career, which is okay since his songwriting has always been his calling card and he’s been covered heavily through the years, so it’s not surprising that even an abandoned sketch ends up with a meaningful legacy.
Old Crow Medicine Show picked the sketch back up some thirty years later, completing it in its current state, around the same time Darius Rucker was trying to start up a solo career. When he first tackled the idea of being a country act, nobody took him seriously (possibly because he seemed to be lampooning the idea himself in commercials), but then started recording anyway. By his own admission he stumbled on “Wagon Wheel” almost by accident, initially unsure the material fit him.
It ended up becoming a career-defining song, the kind country bars play so much people get sick of hearing it.
To get to that point is improbable. Rucker first made his name as lead singer of Hootie & the Blowfish, the band credited with ruining rock music in the ‘90s, the antithesis of the grunge sound that was supposed to be the next evolution of the format but ended up dying with Kurt Cobain instead. Hootie for about a year was inescapable, and then was turned into a punchline and an afterthought. Rucker’s reinvention as a country star was a solid second act, but “Wagon Wheel” returned him to levels of success he’d previously enjoyed with Hootie, and, arguably, beyond.
If Rucker is remembered in a hundred years it’ll be for “Wagon Wheel.” It’s very likely the song will outlive him. That’s the way these things go. It’s also done it with Dylan, with the blues artists who toyed with it previously, even with Old Crow Medicine Show.
Far too often today we tend to grow precious with our current interests, believing that if they no longer exist in the exact form we know them they’re instantly and forever ruined. But history adapts everything it remembers. That’s the whole point. If it endures it’s changed at some point, with the times, waiting for some new source of inspiration. The lineage of “Wagon Wheel” is a vivid example of that.
