T Bone Burnett

Stephen Bruton, a Texas musician long admired and much in demand as much for his astute guitar work as for his insights as a songwriter, died Saturday in Los Angeles of complications of cancer. He was 60.

Alison KRAUSS must feel as if she's dreaming. Across the crowded green room at the NBC-TV studios early on a recent morning, a walking hot dog and a 6-foot-tall ketchup bottle are talking to Popeye and Olive Oyl. Then Hugh Hefner and a Playboy bunny come through a door. Blinking, Krauss heads to the coffee urn. She's been up since 3:30 a.m.

A small segment of mainstream America might remember T Bone Burnett from the 2002 Grammy telecast, where this tall, mysterious fellow picked up the album-of-the-year award instead of U2 or OutKast. Burnett was the producer of the surprise winner, the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack, a collection of blues, folk and bluegrass whose huge sales and acclaim helped reshape the pop landscape.

T BONE BURNETT took home an armload of Grammys two years ago for his work putting together the music for "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Music he oversaw for "A Mighty Wind" and "Cold Mountain" will be up for four Academy Awards next Sunday. What next? A Nobel Prize? Burnett says he'll leave that honor for his friend Bono. But he does have a new goal for music from "The Ladykillers," which reunites him with Joel and Ethan Coen, the makers of "O Brother."

The gospel music-laced soundtrack produced by T Bone Burnett for the new Coen Brothers comedy "The Ladykillers" probably doesn't have a prayer of selling anywhere close to what their last collaboration did. That was the 6.6-million-selling bluegrass and country music collection Burnett put together for the Coens' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

Like a Bolt From Out of the Bluegrass Soundtrack producer T Bone Burnett said the biggest thrill of the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" success was the recognition that has come to bluegrass veteran Ralph Stanley and an unexpected turn of events a week ago. "The first song on the album is a work-gang song by James Carter and prisoners, recorded in 1952 at the Parchment Farm [prison] in Mississippi," Burnett said. "Alan Lomax went down there and recorded these chain-gang hollers.

How can Sam Phillips have failed when she's never really tried ("The Power of Failure," by Randy Lewis, July 15)? I have followed her career for 15 years: She rarely tours; when she does perform, she stands absurdly still and never connects with her audience. She is an artistic hothouse flower, once nurtured and now smothered by her producer-husband, T Bone Burnett. All this angst and doubt that she expresses in her albums and interviews are a little troubling coming from a 39-year-old.

Every Ulysses needs a little traveling music, and in the case of George Clooney's Everett Ulysses McGill, the 1930s incarnation of Western civilization's archetypal wanderer, it's the old folk lament "Man of Constant Sorrow." That tune is the recurring centerpiece in a feast of traditional music that enriches "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," Joel and Ethan Coen's loose, comedic adaptation of "The Odyssey" set in Depression-era Mississippi. The movie opens Dec.