James Carter, who led a Mississippi chain gang in singing a work song that was recorded by a famed musicologist and, 40 years later, became part of the top-selling "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack album, has died. He was 77.
Carter, who had been in poor health and suffered a stroke, died Nov. 26 in a hospital in Oak Park, Ill.
The son of a Mississippi sharecropper, Carter served in the Navy during World War II. He then married his childhood sweetheart and, after holding down a variety of jobs, wound up in the Mississippi state prison system -- reportedly four times.
He was doing time on a weapons possession offense in 1959 when Alan Lomax, the pioneering collector of American folk songs, showed up at the prison in Parchman, Miss., with his tape recorder.
To establish a work rhythm and maintain morale during the long days of hard labor chopping wood and working in the fields and on the railroad lines, the prisoners sang.
One of the songs Lomax recorded that hot September day was "Po' Lazarus," a melancholy tune about a man who is hunted and gunned down by a sheriff with a .44-caliber revolver. The rhythmic thump of the prisoners' axes provided the only accompaniment. Although Lomax recorded other work songs sung by the prisoners in Mississippi, "Po' Lazarus" left a lasting impression.
"They were 50 black men who were working under the whip and the gun and they had the soul to make the most wonderful song I'd ever heard," Lomax told National Public Radio in 2002, shortly before his death.
Carter was paroled in December 1967 and joined his wife, Rosie, in Chicago, where he held a number of jobs over the years, including as a shipping clerk and a custodian.
Carter would have remained in obscurity if not for "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Joel and Ethan Coen's offbeat Depression-era film, starring George Clooney, is about escaped Mississippi convicts.
When music producer T Bone Burnett began working on the soundtrack for the 2000 film, he remembered having heard "Po' Lazarus" in the Lomax archives in New York City.
"It just made a deep impression," he told the New York Times last year. "It was such a beautiful version, a soulful version of a great song."
"Po' Lazarus" was used as the opening song on the soundtrack, and the album became a surprise hit that by early 2002 had sold 4 million copies.
