A Man Of Not So Constant Sorrow | The song that brought Tyminski’s voice to the forefront of bluegrass also introduced the young Hollywood generation to new musical territory.
Fri, Aug 8 (Stage 3: “A Few of My Favourite Strings” workshop, 6-7pm; mainstage, starting at 9pm).
Dan Tyminski is about as famous as a bluegrass musician can get these days. As lead guitarist and back-up vocalist in Alison Krauss & Union Station, he’s won numerous Grammys, been featured in Rolling Stone, and performed on all the major late-night talk shows. But his true breakthrough came in 2000 when he provided George Clooney’s singing voice in the Coen Brothers film O Brother Where Art Thou?, where his jubilant version of “Man of Constant Sorrow” suddenly made bluegrass relevant to a generation weaned on boy bands and morose “alternative” rock.
As Tyminski modestly puts it, it’s “a pretty extensive résumé.” But it wasn’t until last year that he realized one of the all-time highlights of his already-illustrious career: a guest appearance on Sesame Street.
“That was the most fun I’ve probably had playing music,” he said. “We got to do a segment with The Count, and it’s still the same puppeteer running the puppet. He’s the man who taught me to count when I was a kid. Even while they’re standing there with a puppet on their arm, you find yourself looking into the eyes of the puppet and really engaging with this piece of cloth.”
These days Tyminski is on the road with his new band (named, aptly enough, the Dan Tyminski Band) and promoting his second solo record, Wheels, while Union Station remains on official hiatus. It’s an album full of bluegrass staples: farmers, road trips, and spurned lovers dominate the lyrics, complemented throughout by Tyminski’s crisp, warm vocals.
The album feels so much like a traditional bluegrass record that it’s hard to believe most of these songs are originals, written for Tyminski by various friends and fellow musicians. With such an imposing tradition of what a bluegrass song should sound like, and with many of the classics still in active rotation amongst contemporary artists, Tyminski is happy to let others worry about writing new material.
“If I find myself in the moment,” he says, “I’ll sit down and try to bring the song to a piece of paper. But generally if that doesn’t happen, I write a lot of half-songs and then let them slip away, it seems. In fact, the song that I wrote on this record is called ‘How Many Times,’ and that song is really about songwriting. The start of it says, ‘How many times have I started down this road that I’m still on?/I think that it’s all going fine, and then I find it’s gone.’ I was speaking of a song: how many times have I sat here with a guitar and started a song, and then it slipped away?”
No matter the success of Wheels, though, it’s unlikely that Tyminski will have a bigger impact on the mainstream than he did as the voice of the Soggy Bottom Boys in the Coens’ film. Even now, it’s hard to overstate how remarkable this soundtrack is: producer T-Bone Burnett created an eerily beautiful portrait of the Depression by combining scratchy original recordings—like the stunning 1955 recording of a chain gang singing “Po’ Lazarus”—with period pieces re-recorded by modern artists without resorting to using modern studio gadgetry.
Yet “Man of Constant Sorrow” is undoubtedly the centrepiece of both the soundtrack and the film. Even though you never see his face onscreen—as a result, many fans of the film still think that Clooney himself is the vocal powerhouse—Tyminski says there were benefits to being the invisible voice behind one of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors. “When I called my wife to tell her that I had the chance do this voiceover,” he says, “the first words out of her mouth were ‘Oh, a voiceover! That’s great!... What is a voiceover?’ And I explained that you’d be looking at George Clooney on the big screen but hearing my voice coming out. Without hesitation, she said, ‘Damn, that’s my fantasy.’”
While the Coens, Burnett, and Clooney have all seen their stars rise after O Brother Where Art Thou?, Tyminski remains the unsung hero (so to speak) of the project. He maintains he feels no animosity (“a little more fascination than frustration”), and he’s happy to promote Wheels the old-fashioned way: playing live shows and watching his audience and reputation expand, however slowly, through word of mouth rather than celebrity cache.
And he’s not shy about playing “Man of Constant Sorrow” live, either—so look for hundreds of ears to suddenly perk up at the Folk Fest this weekend, as they finally connect that familiar voice with its rightful owner.
