FAQ

Tommy Johnson was a legendary Delta blues singer and guitarist. He was unrelated to Robert Johnson.

Important to note is that like all folk tales that have little basis in fact, this story has picked up a lot of changes and embellishments over time. This story was, in fact, originally told about Tommy Johnson. The story also originally said that Johnson went to the crossroads where a black man taught him to play the guitar. No mention of any devil.

Other details, such as the locations of the crossroads, have changed over time.

O Brother Where Art Thou? is probably the most factually accurate version of the "sold my soul at the crossroads to learn guitar" story ever told.

Yes, Charles Durning played both characters. The two characters otherwise have nothing in common. Pappy O'Daniel seems like a nice guy when the chips are down.

The title of the film is related to the Preston Sturges film "Sullivan's Travels," created in 1941. In the film, Sully, the main character in the movie (a movie producer that specialized in madcap comedies), wants to make a film about the poor. The film that he wanted to make was "O Brother, Where Art Thou?". So in order to get a factual film about them he sets out with only $0.10 in his pocket and when things start to get harder for him because the studio sends a mobile home to follow him with a publicity staff to chronicle his travels, he pulls out and goes back to his normal life. He decides to dress as a bum one more time to distribute $5 bills to the poor on the streets and the hobos in the train yard, but a homeless man knocks Sully in the head and drags him onto a train. He steals his shoes (which has his identification in them in case something happened to him) and runs off. Karma eventually catches up with the man when he is hit by a train. The body, which was completely unidentifiable, was found with Sully's shoes, and therefore Sully was assumed dead. Rather, Sully gets into his own trouble and is sent away for six years at a work camp. The only relief he gets and the only enjoyment he sees in the people around him is when the prisoners go to a Baptist church to watch cartoons with the congregation, and he realizes comedy is what people need to keep their hopes up in those troubled times. Eventually he sees that he's believed to be dead from seeing a paper and he says he committed the murder. When the studio heads come out from Hollywood to prosecute the murderer, they realize who he is. and have him released. He's now even more famous, and the studio gives him carte blanche to make the serious movie, and he declines. The only reason that Sully didn't want to make it is because he saw what suffering really was, and that comedy is the only thing that some people have, so he decides to make a comedy instead of this so to be "epic movie." He understands that the poor really do have it hard and he wouldn't want to make a movie about their hard times, because they know about them already. They would rather see a comedy to make them laugh.