It was such a beautiful version a soulful version of a great song
It was such a beautiful version, a soulful version of a great song.”The song seemed perfect for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Joel and Ethan Coen’s reworking of Homer’s The Odyssey, and Burnett had little hesitation in incorporating it into the soundtrack. The success of the album took many in the music industry by surprise, however, and precipitated a search for Carter, who, despite having vanished into obscurity, was entitled to a series of royalty payments.Initial suspicions that he might be dead proved groundless and, through the hard work of both Don Fleming of the Lomax Archive and Chris Grier of The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, he was finally tracked down to the Chicago apartment he shared with his wife of 57 years.Born into a sharecropping family in Sunflower, Mississippi, he had left home at 13 and regularly found himself in trouble with the authorities. Incarcerated within the state’s prison system on four occasions – twice for theft, once for a parole violation and once for a firearms offence – he then joined the Marines and, in the late 1960s, moved to the Windy City, where he found work as a shipping clerk.He barely remembered his recording session with Lomax and had not heard of the film that so memorably featured his voice. He was grateful, however, to be presented with a Platinum Disc and a royalty cheque for $20,000. In 2002 he attended the Grammy Awards ceremony that saw the O Brother project scoop five trophies, including Album of the Year, later commenting: “I did the best job I could with that song I hope people listen to it for a long time.”Paul Wadey. Paul Simon, politician and educator: born Eugene, Oregon 29 November 1928; US Congressman for Illinois 1975-85; US Senator 1985-97; married 1960 Jeanne Hurley (died 2000; one son, one daughter), 2001 Patricia Derge; died Springfield, Illinois 9 December 2003.
A catalogue of American oddities would record Paul Simon as the country’s youngest-ever newspaper proprietor – a tender 19-year-old when he dropped out of college in 1948 and borrowed the princely sum of $3,600 to buy a weekly paper in Troy, just across the Mississippi from St Louis. He was by common consent one of the most decent, honest, and nicest men on Capitol Hill.With his trademark bow tie and slightly rumpled college professor’s air, Simon occasionally came across as a mite pompous In reality nothing was further from the truth. He treated office interns and mighty committee chairmen in the same way. For him, the ordinary person – the voter – came first.As a senator, he blended social liberalism with fiscal conservatism.
It was the formula now embraced by the outsider-turned-frontrunner Howard Dean, whose quest for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination was endorsed by Simon shortly before his death.Simon believed in an activist role for government – but one paid for out of taxes, not by borrowing against the future. “To be a liberal doesn’t mean you’re a wastrel,” he liked to remark. For years, as massive federal deficits swirled around him, he was one of Capitol Hill’s most impassioned champions of a balanced-budget amendment.With his crusade against corruption that began in his newspaper-publishing days, and his partially successful campaign to reduce violence on television, some were tempted to see him as a pious do-gooder If so, then Simon was proud of the label. Since his days as an Illinois state legislator in the 1950s, he had been disclosing his personal finances. So straitlaced was his image that in Springfield, the state’s capital, that he earned the nickname “Reverend”.But, as Simon learnt in 1988, these qualities did not translate into a presidential campaign.
