James Carter Dies
James Carter — whose lost-and-found tale was among the most
heartening among those sparked by the success of the O Brother,
Where Art Thou? soundtrack — died on November 26th after
suffering a massive stroke; he was seventy-seven.
Carter had forgotten about the day forty years ago when Alan
Lomax brought a recording device to Camp B at the Mississippi State
Penitentiary and recorded the singer leading a crew of inmates
through an a capella version of “Po Lazarus” punctuated with the
sounds of the men chopping cotton. After producer T-Bone Burnett
included that field recording on his O Brother, Where Art
Thou? soundtrack, it yielded a $20,000 royalty check for
Carter last year, likely the first real money Carter ever made by
singing and hardly the last, as he also received songwriting
publishing for the song, yielded to a singer after a lyric becomes
public domain.
Carter was the son of a sharecropper and born in Sunflower,
Mississippi, in 1926. He left home as a teenager and repeatedly ran
afoul of the law. For better or worse, his recidivism led to his
crossing of paths with Lomax in 1959. Upon his release from prison,
believed to be around 1967, he served as a Marine and ultimately
settled down and raised a family in Chicago, which is where Burnett
and Lomax’s daughter Anna Lomax Chairetakis (who supervises her
father’s vast archive) — who initially assumed him dead — tracked
him down.
“It’s a song with tremendous soul,” Burnette told Rolling
Stone last year. “And this recording was so pure and spare. It
was a beautiful recording.”
A memorial service for Carter will be held on Thursday at the
Living World Christian Center in Forest Park, Illinois. He is
survived by his wife, three daughters and nine grandchildren.