Dismissed at the time as a lightweight Coen Brothers effort, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, for me, grows in significance with each passing year.  In its ‘00 depiction of ‘30s America at a literal and metaphoric crossroads, there’s something moving and elegiac about it—even subversive.  Where else in American cinema has anything, everything felt so wonderfully possible?

Recording a hit song, taking down the Klan and crooked politicians, having your sins washed away in a nearby river, it’s all a matter of course in O Brother’s vision of America.  And while I know that’s probably not an authentic vision for how things were back then, it still feels like an excellent vision for how things should be.

Whether through flooding or baptism, O Brother equates water with the possibility of transformation.  So, too, does Kevin Coultas in his notes on Dust-To-Digital‘s new, carefully authentic release, Take Me To The Water: Immersion Baptism In Vintage Music And Photography:

The Christian sacrament of baptism has its ritualistic origins in the Jewish mikvah (or collection) in which one is purified, typically in a ‘collection’ of living water (river, lake, ocean, etc.).  New Testament prophet John the Baptist adopted this tradition and used the River Jordan to cleanse sinners so that they might enter a new life of repentance.

Based on the clip below, Take Me To The Water looks like quite a package.  Assembled by collector Jim Linderman, it puts together 75 American baptism photos from 1890 - 1950 with a 25-track disc of early 20th-Century music from the likes of The Carter Family, Washington Philips, and The Jubilee Singers.

As Luc Sante writes of the photos in an accompanying essay, “One is reminded of the commonality of the human experience when viewing a collection of this ilk and there is nothing wrong with that.”

 
Take Me To The Water @ Dust-To-Digital

Kevin Coultas on Take Me To The Water @ Other Music