The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is the soundtrack to the 2018 Coen Brothers anthology film of the same name, featuring Willie Watson and Tim Blake Nelson in the musical roles the film's six stories demand. Watson — an old-time and folk singer whose solo work has brought archaic American musical traditions to contemporary audiences — contributes performances of austere, period-appropriate beauty, while Nelson provides a contrasting voice suited to the film's comic and elegiac tonal shifts. The soundtrack draws on the folk, cowboy, and parlour-song traditions of the nineteenth-century American West, treating historical musical material with the Coens' characteristic blend of deadpan humour and genuine affection. It stands alongside O Brother, Where Art Thou? as one of cinema's most effective engagements with American vernacular music.