The aural companion to the Joel and Ethan Coen film ["O Brother, Where Art Thou?"] starring George Clooney has made believers out of many who might have scoffed at the notion that hillbilly music could serve as a reservoir of emotional depth. It's also answered a yearning for the authentic in a super-slick pop cultural marketplace.

"The more we become immersed in technology, the more we look for authenticity," says soundtrack producer T-Bone Burnett, who, with the Coens' aid, led the audio tour through the white and black rural South. "When I was growing up, my family had books, records and games, and they were all different shapes and sizes. Now everything is the same — it all comes on a shiny silver disc. That's stripping us of our sense of who we are. It makes us more and more Stepford. And people are looking for more than that."

Los Alamos is a tiny town, a one-industry town, brooded over by "The Lab," the pervasive power of The Hill.

It is a place that inspired a zealous attachment in those who love it, a frightened contempt in those who cannot exist in its all-consuming atmosphere.

Children's book author Judy Blume, who lived there for two years as the wife of a physicist, calls it a "fearful town," and refers to it as "Stepford," after the movie in which housewives were turned into mechanical dolls.