You know a song is a classic when people have been singing it for so long that nobody’s even sure who wrote it. Such is the case with “Man of Constant Sorrow.” The traditional folk ballad was first published by Kentucky musician Dick Burnett under the title “Farewell Song” in a 1913 booklet called Songs Sung by R.D. Burnett — The Blind Man – Monticello, Kentucky.
When asked in an interview towards the end of his life if he was the original songwriter, Burnett claimed he couldn’t remember.
“I think I got the ballad from somebody…I dunno. It may be my song,” Burnett told Charles Wolfe.
But considering the details of Burnett’s life, it’s hard to believe the lyrics aren’t autobiographical. Before becoming a songwriter, the banjo player was shot in the face during a robbery and lost his sight. The original version of “Man of Constant Sorrow” seems to tell that very tale:
I am a man of constant sorrowI’ve seen trouble all my daysI’ll bid farewell to old Kentucky,The place where I was born and raised.Oh, six long years I’ve been blindFriends, my pleasures here on Earth are done.In this world I have to ramble,For I have no parents to help me now
Burnett never actually recorded the song he published in that booklet. The first recording was by an artist named Emry Arthur in the ’20s, who changed the title to “Man of Constant Sorrow.” But it was the Stanley Brothers who popularized the tune with their version in 1951.
Ralph Stanley apparently thought the song was much older than Burnett, by a hundred years or more.
“The first time I heard it I was a small boy,” Stanley told NPR. “My daddy had some of the words to it, and I heard him sing it, and my brother and me, we put a few more words to it, and brought it back in existence. I guess if it hadn’t been for that, it’d have been gone forever.”
A number of other iconic musicians covered “Man of Constant Sorrow” after the Stanley Brothers, including Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Rod Stewart. In 2024, Rolling Stone ranked the Stanley Brothers’ rendition at #22 on their list of the “200 Greatest Country Songs of All Time,” with music journalist Richard Gehr pointing out that “Man of Constant Sorrow” “launched a full-on Americana revival with its prominent placement in the Coen brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou?” in 2000.
In the movie, the song is performed by The Soggy Bottom Boys, a fictional group including George Clooney as one of the members. It’s not really Clooney singing, though: Dan Tyminski from the band Union Station sang lead, with backing vocals from Harley Allen and Pat Enright. The track also featured Union Station members Jerry Douglas, Barry Bales and Ron Block.
As Craig Havighurst of WMOT wrote earlier this year, O Brother, Where Art Thou? “did pretty well, commercially and critically, but the soundtrack became the dog and the movie the tail.”
Indeed: The soundtrack won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2002 and became a #1 country album, selling between 8 and 9 million copies.
Related: 1975 No. 1 Hit, Ranked Among ‘Greatest Country Songs of All Time,’ Is Still an Outlaw Anthem 51 Years Later
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