THE RELEASE OF THE O Brother, Where Art Thou The release ...

The release of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack prodded me to finally buy a CD to replace my third-generation tape of Mike Seeger's Old Time Country Music from 1962. Best decision I've made in a while.

I recalled Seeger's version of "I'm a Man of Constant Sorrow" as better than anything on O Brother. Maybe yes, maybe no, but I am sure of one thing: If you plan to get just one "old timey" recording, this is it. Indeed, it's as close to a flawless album as anybody's ever produced. This is especially amazing because it was "recorded?in the living room of our home in Roosevelt, New Jersey, in the hurried moments between playing engagements and house moving." Seeger apparently does all the singing and playing (as with all Folkways re-issues I've picked up, the included original notes leave lots of murky areas), with extensive overdubbing-a chancey undertaking then, especially in your living room.

First of all, Seeger is a superb, inspired musician. Here, he plays fiddle, banjo, dulcimer, guitar, mouth-harp, mandolin and autoharp with consummate skill and equal, fluid ease. His voice is as clear as an open window and note-perfect. But these are only the starting points.

Attempts to faithfully "save" and reproduce folk music often become dry, empty exercises. But Seeger doesn't just reproduce old words and music; he reproduces the intent behind them. He strips each song down to its drawers and then reclothes it so it sounds exactly like the original, except that it's now arrayed as it would be in an ideal world. There's not a song on this record that I don't feel in my gut-rather than from experience-is the definitive version.

No other family in the folk-revival arena has done more than the Seegers: Mike, sister Peggy and, of course, older half-brother Pete. Yet for all their collective public notice, they share a personal reticence that manifests itself in varying ways. With Peggy you see it most clearly in some of her outside comments, rather than in her performances. As for Pete, despite his invigorating stage presence, I've always heard an interior distance. Listen carefully-there's often the sense that, behind all the hooray, his mind is elsewhere, beyond human ken.

Mike is the opposite. An almost painfully skinny guy in his prime, he seemed totally indifferent to stage presence. Yet under his straight-ahead, unflourished singing glows a wealth of boiling emotion. It comes through most earnestly in his playing, where every instrument he picks up-even when backing his many songs of nighttime sadness-sings like the morning.

My favorites? "Lord Thomas" (an American variant of a Scots ballad recorded by sister Peggy and Ewan MacColl), sung to simple autoharp accompaniment, presents a tragic love triangle with quiet, relentless inevitability. "Will the Weaver" treats infidelity with a humor dry as halvah, something only Seeger could pull off.

"Story of the Mighty Mississippi" is a keening lament for the greatest flood in U.S. history (the handling of which by Herbert Hoover led indirectly to one of our most disastrous presidencies). There's the cascading instrumental, "Sourwood Mountain." And, of course, "I'm a Man of Constant Sorrow," which Seeger picked up from the Stanley Brothers almost 40 years before Ralph Stanley pulled in a Grammy for "Oh, Death."

For more of Mike Seeger's earliest days, listen to any of the many albums put out by the New Lost City Ramblers-Seeger, John Cohen and Tom Paley. (Tracy Schwarz replaced Paley on later NLCR collections.) Cohen's slinky-slidey humor loosens up Mike's often-dour outlook, and Paley's backyard voice gives the "Tom Cat Blues" (which is actually about a cat!) a crackerbarrel charm. And you certainly wouldn't want to miss "It's a Shame to Beat Your Wife on Sunday" ("When you've got Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday?").