“Go Out and Bring Me Lazarus”: O Brother, Allegory, and a Work Song’s Circuitous Journey

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sung by convicts and recorded in 1959 at Mississippi’s Parchman Farm penitentiary, the work song “Po Lazarus” keynoted 2000ʹs award-winning soundtrack O Brother, Where Art Thou? and, thus recontextualized, helped spark a folk revival. Like its protagonist, “Po Lazarus” has been “messed with” – captured, preserved, aestheticized, commercialized. It’s also been allegorized: explicitly by African-American ministers and implicitly by the soundtrack, which limns the circular journey of high Romanticism, a trope originating with Plotinus and Augustine. Moreover, the soundtrack evokes the Manichean allegory of European colonialism, working to simultaneously critique and reproduce the racialized imaginary of Southern vernacular culture.