He was paid $20,000, and credited, for a four-decade-old lead-vocalist performance in a prison work song used in the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?
In 1959, Carter was a prisoner in Camp B of Parchman Farm, Mississippi State Penitentiary near Lambert, Quitman County, Mississippi, when Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins recorded him in stereo sound leading a group of prisoners singing "Po' Lazarus", an African-American "bad man ballad" (which is also a work song), while chopping logs in time to the music.
Burnett's soundtrack topped the Billboard charts for many weeks and went on to win a Grammy for Album of the Year.
[2] Carter who had spent much of his adult life working as a shipping clerk, told them he did not remember having sung the song 40 years previously.
Fleming then informed him that the soundtrack album was outselling the latest CDs of Michael Jackson and Mariah Carey.