The Soggy Bottom Boys is the musical group that the main characters form to serve as accompaniment for the film O Brother Where Art Thou?. The name is in homage to the Foggy Mountain Boys, a bluegrass band led by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. In the film, the songs credited to the band are lip-synched by the actors, except that Tim Blake Nelson does sing his own vocals on “In the Jailhouse Now”. After the film’s release, the fictitious band became so popular that the country and folk musicians who were dubbed into the film got together and performed the music from the film in a Down from the Mountain concert tour which was filmed for TV and DVD. They included Ralph Stanley, John Hartford, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Chris Sharp, and others. (More from Wikipedia)
The first Bob Dylan album, Bob Dylan was released with great fanfare by Columbia Records in March 1962; it is a relatively conventional folk album that is not unlike those that Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Peter, Paul and Mary were recording at the time, with just two original songs. The album was produced by John H. Hammond, the legendary talent scout who signed Bob Dylan to Columbia. Though excellent in every way – for instance, the album includes “Man of Constant Sorrow”, the song (as performed by the Soggy Bottom Boys, with George Clooney on lead vocals) that was made famous in the 2000 Coen Brothers film O Brother Where Art Thou – Bob Dylan sold just 5,000 copies initially; and Columbia Records executives began grumbling about Dylan’s being “Hammond’s folly”.
