Dan Tyminski
Photo: Doobie Shea

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — Although the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack has been the talk of the 2001 International Bluegrass Music Association convention, it won't be without competition at Thursday's 12th annual awards presentation.

Some of the competition will be coming from one of the disc's own artists. Dan Tyminski, who sings "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" in two different settings on the soundtrack, is nominated for 10 awards and could win as many as seven.

In addition to his "O Brother" contributions, Tyminski released a solo album this year titled Carry Me Across the Mountain, which competes with the "O Brother" soundtrack for Album of the Year. Two songs from his album vie with "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" for IBMA Song of the Year.

The Dan Tyminski Band, featured on his solo album, is up for Emerging Artist of the Year; Tyminski is nominated for Instrumental Performer of the Year (Guitar) and Male Vocalist of the Year; and another project featuring Tyminski, Knee Deep in Bluegrass: The AcuTab Sessions, is up for Instrumental Album of the Year and Recorded Event of the Year.

Tyminski is scheduled to give one of 11 performances during Thursday's two-hour awards show at the Kentucky Center for the Arts. Steve Wariner will join Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder on Bill Monroe's "Heavy Traffic Ahead" toward the beginning of the evening. Grammy winner and banjo specialist Alison Brown will appear with an acoustic group whose lineup includes Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, David Grier and Todd Phillips.

The Lonesome River Band, up for Entertainer of the Year, Vocal Group of the Year, Instrumental Group of the Year and Album of the Year (Talkin' to Myself), will appear third on the bill. The band's Ronnie Bowman is up for Male Vocalist of the Year, while Sammy Shelor is nominated for Instrumental Performer of the Year (Banjo) and Kenny Smith is up for Instrumental Performer of the Year (Guitar).

Also slated to perform are Sonny Osborne, Mountain Heart, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, Nickel Creek, reigning Entertainer of the Year winners the Del McCoury Band, and Mark Newton, who will pay tribute to IBMA Hall of Honor inductees the Carter Family with a performance of "Back to the Fold."

Rhonda Vincent & the Rage, nominated seven times, will perform "Is the Grass Any Bluer." The song, a tribute to the late Bill Monroe, appears on Vincent's latest, The Storm Still Rages. "Lonesome Wind Blues" from Vincent's previous album, Back Home Again, is up for Song of the Year. Vincent is the IBMA's reigning Female Vocalist of the Year, while Rage fiddle player Mike Cleveland and banjo player Tom Adams are nominated as the best in their respective instrumental categories.

The 2001 International Bluegrass Music Awards will be recorded for syndicated rebroadcast to more than 300 U.S. markets and 14 international networks. The Bluegrass Fan Fest, with performances by many of the nominees, continues through Sunday at the Galt House Hotel.

• T-Bone Burnett
• Dan Tyminski

Photo: Lost Highway

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — Although they voiced no doubt that the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? has been a shot in the arm for bluegrass music, registrants gathered for a special session Tuesday at the 2001 World of Bluegrass convention in Louisville to consider what the film's specific benefits have been. Chief among these, of course, has been the soundtrack album, which has so far spent a total of 21 weeks at the top of Billboard's country albums chart and sold 3 million copies worldwide.

"It's a great case study of what we can do when we work together," said Nashville talent manager Denise Stiff-Sheehan, who moderated the discussion panel. Her fellow panelists were John Grady, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Mercury and Lost Highway Records; Ken Irwin, a founder of Rounder Records; and Norma Morris, senior publicist for the Press Office, a Nashville entertainment publicity company.

Stiff-Sheehan, who assisted producer T Bone Burnett in finding and bringing together the artists for the album, gave a short history of how the film and soundtrack projects developed. She said Burnett recorded all the music before the movie was filmed. There were some later edits of the music, she noted, including one which required Dan Tyminski (George Clooney's musical voice in the film) to come all the way from his home in Virginia to Nashville to re-record a single word to fit Clooney's lip-synching.

From the start, Stiff-Sheehan said, Burnett predicted that Tyminski/Clooney's "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" would be a radio hit and that the album would sell a million copies. While radio generally avoided playing the song, it did become a music video hit, and album sales have long since surpassed Burnett's prediction.

Country radio's refusal to play "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow," Grady said, became the subject of many articles. "Ironically," Irwin added, "it might have sold more records because of their refusal than if they had played it."

Morris explained how his presence on the soundtrack album had helped raise awareness for her client, bluegrass patriarch Ralph Stanley. Although she was working with Stanley before the movie got under way, she noted that his involvement with it assisted in generating articles about him in such non-bluegrass outlets as Rolling Stone, Spin, Mojo and The New Yorker. She said the film and soundtrack have had a "multiplying effect," by which the activity of one artist tended to spotlight all the others. Another plus, she said, was that the movie had such a long set-up and promotional time that it gave the artists a long period of exposure.

"No one was coming at it from a financial angle," Stiff-Sheehan said of the album. "It was all for the love of the music."

Grady said that many reporters who wrote about the album knew so little about the music and the musicians that they relied heavily on those involved to guide them, clearly a publicity plus. Because Mercury Records is a major mainstream label, Grady pointed out that he felt he had to persuade the bluegrass industry early on that the album wasn't an "outsider project," in which his label would skim the money and run. One of his first moves toward credibility, he explained, was meeting with Irwin and others at Rounder to tap into their years of bluegrass expertise.

According to Grady, a main reason Burnett chose Mercury over other interested labels to handle the soundtrack album was the company's unlikely — and unexpected — success in turning Shania Twain into a superstar recording act.

All on the panel agreed that the soundtrack concert held at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium in May 2000, months before the film and soundtrack were released in the U.S., was a special and energizing event for everyone who took part — including the tough music industry audience that came out to see it. The film of that concert became the basis of the documentary (and second soundtrack album), Down From the Mountain. "There were some people who didn't want to do the Carnegie [Hall] show [in June 2001]," Grady said, "because we didn't know if we could capture lightning in a bottle twice."

Selling the record involved meeting with non-traditional outlets as well as conventional record stores. "I don't think any retailer in America knows their customers like Amazon.com," Grady said. He learned that the "big thing" for that company — in sparking album sales — is an artist's appearance on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" or "A Prairie Home Companion."

O Brother, Where Art Thou? was released in Europe six months before it debuted in the U.S. By November of last year, Grady reported, 80,000 copies of the soundtrack had been sold in France alone.

Largely on the strength of the O Brother album, Grady reported, many record store chains have added a bin specifically for bluegrass records. He likened the phenomenon to the Grammy-winning album and documentary Buena Vista Social Club, which served to revive interest in Cuban music.

From January to mid-February next year, there will be an O Brother/Down From the Mountain tour, which will feature most of the acts on the soundtrack and play 20 major-market cities. A follow-up tour on the same theme is being considered for next summer. It will include bluegrass acts not on the soundtrack and play venues of 5,000 to 10,000 seats. "Down From the Mountain" will be released on home video October 23.

The panelists concurred that the O Brother magic may soon wear thin. "My biggest fear," Grady said, "is that there are going to be some bad [O Brother-inspired] records made."

• T-Bone Burnett
• Dan Tyminski

Photo: Mercury Nashville

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — The benign shadow of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" loomed over the opening ceremonies of the 2001 World of Bluegrass convention as it kicked off Monday.

Convention-goers at the Galt House Hotel heard not one but two keynote addresses on the wonders worked for bluegrass music by last year's popular Coen brothers film.

T Bone Burnett, producer of the best-selling "O Brother" soundtrack album, was scheduled to give the opening address but canceled for family reasons. His remarks were read by John Grady, a senior vice president at Mercury Records, the label that issued the album. Grady supplemented Burnett's musings about the movie and music with his own observations.

"It's great to come back where something you said came true," Grady said, beaming. "Last year, I came here touting a soundtrack that could possibly do something great for this music. ... I was just the flaky guy from Nashville who sold Shania Twain records."

Grady reported that the soundtrack has sold more than 3 million copies worldwide and that its spinoff, the recently released Down From the Mountain (Lost Highway), has sold 300,000. When the soundtrack artists played Carnegie Hall in June, Grady said, it sold out in less than three days — at $115 a ticket. The movie itself, Grady noted, reaped more than $45 million — more than twice the total generated by the Coens' critically lauded "Fargo."

"Down From the Mountain," the D.A. Pennebaker/Chris Hegedus documentary about the making of the soundtrack, will debut December 6 on PBS, Grady said, and in January, many of the musicians featured on the soundtrack will launch a 25-city tour.

Burnett's conclusions about the music ranged from the aesthetic to the technical. "It has been a good year for traditional American music," the musician/producer wrote. "I have heard this record referred to as bluegrass music, and I suppose that is a good enough catch phrase for it. But when we were doing it, we thought we were making a rock and roll record — that is to say we thought we were making swing music, dance music, love-not-war music. ... For me, this record began about five or six years ago when I was in my kitchen with the abstract artist Larry Poons, talking about Ralph Stanley."

Burnett said Poons had remarked to him that, "We live in an age of music for people who don't like music." This set Burnett to thinking about real versus manufactured music. "What he was saying was this: the record business learned years ago that not that many people like music. Some people can do without it, some people are annoyed by it. ... The basic record company philosophy has for some time been that if you remove the aspects of [a particular form of music] that the audience finds challenging, you have a better chance of selling the stuff. I suppose you could find parallels in country music as well."

Nonetheless, Burnett noted, authentic music can benefit from wide exposure, alluding to the upsurge in popularity jazz experienced from Ken Burns' PBS series on the music.

While understanding bluegrass' impulse to compete with flashier forms of music, Burnett lamented the modernization of the genre. "As technology began to make incursions into music, bluegrass musicians began attempting to apply it to their craft. Everyone got his own microphone. Everyone had a monitor. People began to put pickups on banjos. ... I have been fighting plastic drum heads for many years. I would say the same about banjos. They sound better with calfskin heads."

"We have concentrated too long on attack," he wrote. "We must turn our interest back to tone. The attack is the least interesting part of the sound of the drum. The tone and the overtones are the most crucial elements in the alchemy of music."

After he finished reading Burnett's speech, Grady told the audience that all the bluegrass and traditional albums he has heard since the "O Brother" soundtrack success have met the high standards Burnett talked about. "I can't spot in any of these records where anybody sold out," he said. "You need to keep believing. You need to embrace the music. ... The purity of this music is what sold it."

A panel discussion on "What We Can Learn From 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?'" is scheduled for Tuesday's sessions.

The 2001 World of Bluegrass will continue through Sunday. On Thursday, the International Bluegrass Music Association, which sponsors the convention, will hold its annual awards show at the Kentucky Center for the Arts in Louisville.

• T-Bone Burnett

Patty Loveless
Photo: Epic Records

T Bone Burnett, producer of the double-platinum O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack album, canceled his keynote appearance next Monday at the International Bluegrass Music Association's convention in Louisville, Kentucky, due to flight-scheduling uncertainties.

Nancy Cardwell, the IBMA's special projects coordinator, said that no replacement for Burnett has been chosen.

Cardwell also said that Patty Loveless and the Nashville Bluegrass Band will not perform at the convention. Loveless, whose recently released Mountain Soul album parades her bluegrass influences, was scheduled for a showcase next Monday, and the Nashville Bluegrass Band was slotted to close the evening performance on October 3. Cardwell said other acts will fill in.

Although there have been many inquiries from convention registrants about whether the event will be altered as a result of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., Cardwell said there have been no more late cancellations this year than in years past.

The IBMA World of Bluegrass Week runs October 1-7 and includes showcases, trade exhibits, seminars, mentoring sessions, music workshops and the annual IBMA Awards Show, scheduled for October 4. Most convention activities will take place at the Galt House hotel; the award show will be held at the Kentucky Center for the Arts.

Bluegrass Fan Fest occupies the three days following the awards ceremony and will also be held at the Galt House. The event, ticketed separately, will feature performances by nearly 50 acts, including Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder, Rhonda Vincent & the Rage, the Del McCoury Band, Blue Highway, Larry Cordle & Lonesome Standard Time and Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver.

Country star Steve Wariner will host the IBMA Awards Show, which will be carried by delayed broadcast on "several hundred radio stations," the IBMA said.

• Patty Loveless
• T-Bone Burnett