Jimmie Driftwood (the recording and performing name of Arkansas school teacher, folklorist, and multi-instrumentalist James Corbitt Morris) began writing songs as a way to help his students learn about American history, and by the time all was said and done, he had written or adapted and recomposed over 6,000 folk songs, and his catalog is as rich as any in Americana, perhaps surpassed only by Woody Guthrie.
Film composer Carter Burwell, who scored Joel and Ethan Coen’s Netflix release, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, is the next guest on The Hollywood Reporter's Behind the Screen podcast series.
Behind the Screen, hosted by THR tech editor Carolyn Giardina, features interviews with cinematographers, editors, composers, production designers and other creative talent behind the making of motion pictures.
Burwell has composed the music for more than 80 feature films, including 17 with the Coen brothers such as Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men and True Grit. He’s also a two-time Oscar nominee for Carol and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. …
The Wild West cowboy occupies a symbolic and central place in popular culture. The lone rider, out on the range… The white-hatted hero facing up to a gang of outlaws in a gunfight… The wagon train heading out over the horizon… Celebrated in cinema since the beginning of movies, the cowboy has also found a regular home on record, as this double CD collection testifies. Listen to these songs and, with just a little imagination, you can picture the solitary cowboy on his trusty steed, watching a cattle round-up, or making his way into a town like Tombstone… A timeless myth, captured forever in these Songs Of The Wild West…