Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 61: Sawyer Fredericks, “Man of Constant Sorrow” 

Sometimes justice is done; sometimes the best man wins, etc.   That’s what happened the other night on The Voice, when Sawyer Fredericks won the popular vote and the contest (a hundred thousand dollars, a recording contract, a new Nissan …).

“Man of Constant Sorrow” was his breakthrough in the blind audition phase, and what’s striking, hearing it now – a few weeks and many episodes later –  is how fully his version carries everything that he brought to the several dozen songs he sang as the competition progressed: vocal strength, grit, restraint, a keen sense of roots that is more punky than curatorial – and above all, the sense that he is singing something he knows and feels.  Other singers in the course of the competition; Sawyer seemed to have it all from the get-go.    

There’s much to say about him – a home-schooled kid who lives on a farm near Fultonville in upstate New York – and I hope to place a profile of him somewhere.   But right now, two things about this song come to mind.

One is that he learned “Man of Constant Sorrow” from the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack – the soundtrack to a movie released, if you can believe it (I can’t believe it), before he was born.   This – strangely, as I tried to work out in  The Atlantic – is how folk traditions are perpetuated: a movie with a roots-music soundtrack puts a young musician in touch with those roots, and eventually tens of millions of people are hearing roots music sung on a slick TV stage – but sung in a way that is anything but slick.   The song, and the singer, are strong enough to withstand the setting.  

The other is that the song – the whole idea of a man of constant sorrow – runs against everything in Sawyer Fredericks’ self-presentation, but it doesn’t matter.   He is sixteen years old, gifted, successful, charming, and evidently happy.  What can he know of constant sorrow?

Through the song, he can know a lot.  This is what art does: it gives us something like direct access to experiences and emotions that aren’t strictly speaking our own.  And this is what artists do: they give voice to a sense of humanity that is larger than their literal selves.