Fast-forward to about 1997, when producer T-Bone Burnett rediscovered "Po' Lazarus" while listening to music in Lomax's New York City archives the song struck such a profound chord that when Burnett was tapped to work on the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou - filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen's surreal Depression-era fable inspired in part by Homer's The Odyssey - he sequenced "Po' Lazarus" as the opening cut, ahead of performances by Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris, and Alison Krauss. In Chicago he worked as a shipping clerk until retirement, and by all accounts never pursued a career in music at any time in his life. During the interim, Carter was released from prison for good, although he had trouble holding a job and ultimately relocated to Chicago in 1967 with his wife and their children. It didn't, but it was decades before "Po' Lazarus" would finally receive its due. Backed by a chorus of his fellow inmates, Carter agreed to perform the old work-gang song "Po' Lazarus," the tale of a man pursued and gunned down by a relentless sheriff Lomax added the recording to his vast archive, Carter basically forgot the event ever occurred, and by all the rights, the story should have ended there. While serving a term at Camp B in the state pen in Lambert, MS, Carter was chopping wood and cutting cotton one mid-September afternoon in 1959 when Lomax, who was traveling through the south with his tape recorder and documenting amateur performances of traditional folk songs, approached him to make a recording of his own. The son of a sharecropper, Carter was born and raised in Mississippi, leaving home at age 13 and going on to enter the state prison system on four separate occasions: twice he was convicted of theft, once for parole violations after he was found in possession of a firearm, and once on a separate weapons offense. Singer James Carter is best known for his rendition of the traditional work song "Po' Lazarus," the opening track on the Grammy-winning soundtrack to the 2000 film O Brother Where Art Thou - a performance captured over four decades earlier by famed archivist Alan Lomax while Carter was imprisoned in the Mississippi State Penitentiary.