The Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, are celebrating twenty-five years for a movie that is probably the most Coen movie of them all, meaning no one else could have made it.

When accepting the Oscar for Best Director for No Country for Old Men, Joel thanked Hollywood for letting Ethan and him play in their corner of the sandbox. What he meant was they were one of the few free-range movie makers that didn’t have studio executives breathing down their necks. After all, how would they have gotten a movie greenlit with these bullet points:

A musical that isn’t a musical.
A script based on an ancient text, Homer’s Odyssey.
Set in the South during the Great Depression.
Not enough Dapper Dan.

Doesn’t scream box office bonanza. Still, the Coen Brothers achieved something that no other movie maker has ever achieved. Their soundtrack for O Brother Where Art Thou? won the Grammy’s Album of the Year without any original music. Even rarer, the soundtrack reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Album Chart 63 weeks after it was released.

All thanks to T-Bone Burnett who was responsible for assembling a who’s who of musical artists to sing these old-timey songs from bluegrass and country to blues and gospel. Some of the artists that answered the call:

Ralph Stanley “O Death”
Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris “Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby”
The Fairfield Four “Lonesome Valley”

Then, the hit song. George Clooney was all set to sing “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow.” For some reason the Coens thought Clooney could sing because his aunt, Rosemary, was a famous jazz singer. Clooney felt no need to dissuade them. It was only in the recording studio the Coens discovered that starring in musicals will never be in George Clooney’s future. Even Clooney described his recording as: “… like a cat caught in the wheel well of a truck driving down the street.”

No one looked at Clooney when he stepped out of the recording booth. T-Bone quickly moved on to Dan Tyminski. And to show that the Coen Brothers have a sense of humor and George Clooney is a good sport, they placed a giant old-timey microphone in front of Clooney’s face when his character, Ulysses Everett McGill, sings the pivotal song.