Feb 24, 2023
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Burns’s ‘Country Music’ and the New Civil War
by Doniphan Blair
Johnny 'The Man in Black' Cash meets with President Nixon in 1969, shortly before the former played the White House and eviscerated the latter. photo: courtesy The White House
DOCMASTER BURNS HAS DONE IT AGAIN.
I only wish my fellow progressives had bothered to tune in to his latest investigation of American culture, which showed in September on PBS (but can be streamed any time here).
While Ken Burns’s first long-form documentary, “Civil War” (1990), fought to a just conclusion the last battle—that of the historians—of that grotesque, fratricidal tragedy, his latest, the eight-episode, sixteen-hour “Country Music”, sheds light on America’s current conflict. Indeed, it was released just in the time for the impeachment proceedings.
Trump may be Middle American’s false idol and Jesus their eternal lord, but the actual stars in their firmament go by names like Cash, Parton, Cline, Nelson, Haggard, Kristofferson, Pride and the monumental early saints: Hank Williams, Jimmy Rodgers and the Carter Family.
And what gods they were.
Growing up in New York City, I didn’t hear a lick of country except Woody Guthrie, who enraptured me at age ten.
Mentioned only a couple of times in “Country Music”, Guthrie was the indefatigable Oklahoma troubadour, who criss-crossed the nation and composed thousands of songs on top of his greatest hit, “This Land Is Your Land”. As it happened, that song was based on a tune he “borrowed” from the Carter Family’s “Little Darling Pal of Mine”, which, in turn, they borrowed from a song by a black preacher.
Among his thousands of songs, Woody Guthrie played a few Yiddish ones to entertain his wife Marjorie's Brooklyn family (shown here circa 1946). photo: courtesy W. GuthrieGuthrie didn’t crossover to country royalty, perhaps because he settled in Brooklyn, with his Jewish wife, Marjorie, and he was a serious lefty. For years his guitar bore the sticker: "This machine kills fascists."
Even as a teenager, the only country name I learned was Merle Haggard, due to the conflict between his patriotic “Okie from Muskogee” and The Youngblood’s “Hippie from Olema”, a town near San Francisco. Never in a million years would I have imagined that Haggard, who was actually from Bakersfield, California, was inspired to write his song while rolling a joint on a tour bus rolling through Oklahoma. Or that he also authored:
I turned twenty-one in prison,
doin' life without parole,
No one could steer me right
but Mama tried, Mama tried,
which I first heard played by The Grateful Dead, at the first concert of theirs I attended, also in Brooklyn, 1971.
“Country music is telling stories based on what all of us have experienced—like the joy of birth, the sadness of death, falling in love, trying to stay in love, losing love, being lonely, missing somebody, seeking redemption,” explained Burns, pedal-to-the-metalling his mouth, as if some snooty media exec might suddenly cut him off, in a video interview by the music magazine Pitchfork (6/18/2018).
“We can’t deal with the four-letter words that country music is about: pain, hurt and love,” Burns raced on. “So we say ‘Oh, it’s about pickup trucks, hound dogs and six packs of beer’—and it’s not.”
To prove his point, the New York City-born, elite-university-educated filmmaker commenced quoting the idiom’s greatest bards.
“Hank Williams said, ‘You hear that lonesome whippoorwill, he sounds too blue to fly, the midnight train is moving on, I’m so lonesome I could cry.’ Johnny Cash has a song, ‘I Still Miss Someone’—second verse, so simple, it’s like a haiku. ‘I go out to a party, to have a little fun, but I find a darkened corner, because I still miss someone.’”
It took me decades to finally search out and listen to those tunes, but, by the time I was attending that Dead concert in 1971, Cash was already close friends with Bob Dylan, the great counterculture prophet as well as poet and musician.
Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, one of America's most famous radicals and Republicans, respectively, as well as close friends, Nashville, 1969. photo: courtesy B. DylanGuthrie’s premier disciple, Dylan was so enamored of country that, after he wrote the album “Blonde on Blonde” (1966), with The Band in Woodstock, New York, he bombed down to Tennessee and recorded it with Nashville session players.
That sparked still more hippie-hillbilly rancor, while producing some scintillating Dylan tunes: “Just Like a Woman”, “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”. His following albums, “John Wesley Harding” (1967), which includes the masterpiece "All Along the Watchtower", and “Nashville Skyline” (1969), were also quite country.
The Band must’ve been stunned by Dylan’s departure, even though he brought along their lead guitarist/songwriter, the half-Jewish, half-First People Robbie Robertson. Not covered in Burns's “Country Music”, The Band responded by recording as well as writing a few brilliant country songs of their own: “Rag Mama Rag”, “Cripple Creek” and one of the genre’s great epics, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, later covered by Cash and other country artists.
Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist and leader of The Grateful Dead, as well as of the LSD Generation, actually came up as a banjo player in the early ‘60s. Although he continued to jam spectacularly psychedelic in the middle of songs for the rest of his life, he brought The Dead back to his blue grass roots. In fact, in 1970, The Dead released not one but TWO masterful but also very country albums, “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty”, which finally earned them mainstream accolades.
Garcia realized, as did Dylan, that the best way to conquer America was to become America.
Three years later, Garcia started a side project, Old & In the Way, a bluegrass band, which introduced a lot of Dead heads, as his fans are called, to country music. Although Burns doesn’t mention Garcia by name, he inserts a closeup of the beaming and bearded hippie guitar god, holds it for a few seconds and zooms in, in keeping with his now-famous “Ken Burns Effect”.
Moreover, “Country Music” is narrated by another famous old hippie, Peter Coyote, who had already done eight Burns’s docs, including “Vietnam War” (2017), “Prohibition” (2011) and “Baseball” (1994-2010).
Jerry Garcia, when he was banjoing for the Hart Valley Drifters in 1962, shortly before he dropped his first hit of LSD. photo: courtesy J. GarciaThe Dead were preceded in going country by The Byrds, who were from LA but had songs like "Nashville West", and followed by The Rolling Stones. Their “Exile on Main Street” (1972) consisted of authentic-sounding country oldies of their own invention, albeit recorded in a studio in Southern France. With an album cover featuring dozens of Robert Frank’s photos, from his “America” series, “Exile” remains one of The Stones most artistic and critically-acclaimed albums.
Decades before the hippies, the poets and renegades of poor white America were often country musicians. I lost count of how many of them grew up so strapped they barely had shoes, let alone a guitar—Dolly Parton in a “holler” in Appalachia, Johnny Cash in an Arkansas farm house with no glass in its windows—but began penciling poems on scraps of paper. I also lost count of how many did drugs.
Living in the south, side by side with African-Americans, from whom they learned and borrowed a lot of musical material—notably the blues and the banjo—they would eventually repay their even more impoverished, mistreated neighbors with interest.
Black country music is famous for its three Charleses: rhythm and blues superstar Ray Charles, who suddenly came out with a country album in 1962 and had a number one hit with his rendition of "I Can’t Stop Loving You"; Charlie Pride, a singer/guitarist, who came to Nashville from Montana in 1966 and became RCA’s biggest star since Elvis; and jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, who grew up with country in Kansas and remained an avid fan, to the amazement of his friends, “because of the stories,” he said.
Burns loads “Country Music”, his ninth episodic doc and 33rd overall, with astute observations from African-Americans. In addition to Pride, who has a great story about becoming friends with one of Nashville's notoriously-rascist musicians, there’s Rhiannon Giddens. The female banjo player and lead singer of the old-timey Carolina Chocolate Drops, Giddens also appears in “Country Music”’s masterful teaser, which quick cuts between various, very different banjoists racing the same riff.
Naturally, Winton Marsalis, the elite jazz trumpeter, composer and New York City impresario, appears in force. He's been a friend of Burns ever since he became central to Burns’s other, highly-influential, music doc, “Jazz” (2001).
“If you listen to Willie Nelson’s phrasing, there is nothing about country in his phrasing—it’s all Django Reinhardt, it is all jazz,” elaborated Burns to Pitchfork (see full interview here). “And Chester—Chet—Atkins, one of the great session guitarists and later one of the great [Nashville] producers—all jazz-influenced stuff.”
Rhiannon Giddens, co-founder, lead singer and banjo player of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. photo: courtesy R. Giddens“If, at the end of Johnny Cash’s life, he’s working with a Trent Reznor tune [“Hurt”, originally recorded by the very hard rock band Nine Inch Nails], then you know that country music is sort of omnivorous… They are one of the parents of rock and roll!”
While the blues, hard-bop jazz and rhythm and blues are obvious precursors to rock, the closest forbear is rockabilly—rock plus hillbilly—which spawned Elvis as well as the word "rock."
The simple facts of country music—rising out of nothing, telling such passionate stories, capturing the zeitgeist and producing not only masterful male writers and musicians but so many feminist poet/singers I also lost count: Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, Emmylou Harris and even Taylor Swift—proves it was an egalitarian cultural revolution warranting serious research as well as recognition.
Burns lovingly details its entire, intricate history. Indeed, he was obliged to leave out The Band, The Byrds and The Dead because 16 hours was simply NOT enough time to cover the hundreds of under-acknowledged country greats.
“The big bang of country music,” Burns continued to Pitchfork, stepping all over his syntax as he attempted to summarize, “is a time when a guy named Ralph Peer, the summer of 1927, in Bristol, Tennessee-Virginia—that is to say, the main street of it, one side is Tennessee, one side is Virginia, he’s on the Tennessee side—he records, within a week, the Carter Family AND Jimmy Rodgers.”
“The Carter Family, they’re like Sunday morning,” Burns explained. “They’re the home, family, church values. Mother Maybelle is one of the greatest guitarists of all time. Sarah Carter has this keening voice. A.P. [the husband] wanders around Appalachia collecting songs with a black man.”
“Jimmy Rodgers is a scamp, a rogue. He brings the blues, also training from African-Americans in the railroad yards. He brings another kind of music—they’re so night and day. He’s Saturday night, they’re Sunday morning—[country] has never been one thing—to which they then appended every other musical form, in one way or another.”
In addition to Giddens and Marsalis, Burns includes scores of insightful interviews, from Dolly Parton and Willy Nelson to the offspring of Williams and Cash, Hank Jr. and Roseanne, stars in their own rights. But the man with the most screen time is Marty Stewart.
Connie Smith, country music star since 1964, and her child prodigy, guitarist and singer husband Marty Stewart, circa 2016. photo: courtesy M. StewartA self-taught, child-prodigy mandolinist and guitarist, the young Stewart was taken by his mom to see Connie Smith, an influential country goddess after her "Once a Day" reached number one in 1964. He fell madly in love, in more ways than one.
Stewart soon entered country music's stratosphere: joining Lester Flatt's band at age 12; playing with them the final season of the country music TV show “Hee Haw” (original: 1969-71, other iterations 'til 1997); then moving to Cash's band; marrying his daughter Cindy; finally busting out on his own, which led to a string of hit singles, albums, awards and “The Marty Stuart Show” (2008-16).
A warm, open-minded raconteur, Stewart is also a very romantic country character, given that, after splitting with Cindy, he ended up marrying “the prettiest woman he ever saw,” none other than the star of his first concert, Connie Smith, despite her being 17 years his senior.
Cash was also an insanely-important romantic and moral figure, despite being a dyed-in-the-wool Republican and sometimes tough and troubled in person. Indeed, Cash devoted himself to “the forgotten man,” in his song's lyrics, in his honoring of them by wearing black (country musicians were famous for their fantastic get-ups, especially when appearing at the Grand Ole Opry theater in Nashville) and in his free concerts at prisons. In California’s Folsom Prison, he inspired a devotion to country music in a long-incarcerated kid from Bakersfield—Merle Haggard.
Cash was also a human jukebox who inhaled music and championed musicians very different from him. In fact, Joni Mitchell appeared on the first episode of Cash’s television show, in 1969, along with Dylan and a couple of “regular” country musicians.
In addition to being one of the top country artists, who would eventually sell over 90 million albums, Cash exercised political influence, reaching the height of his power during a command performance at the White House, also in 1969.
“The president’s staff had requested Cash to play two songs—Guy Drake’s ‘Welfare Cadillac’ and Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie from Muskogee’,” according to the White House Historical Association (see article). But they were, “politically-charged anthems that vilified citizens on government assistance and mischaracterized anti-war protesters as rampant drug users.”
“While Cash was actually a vocal supporter of President Nixon and his policies, he informed the White House beforehand that he neither knew those songs nor had the time to learn them. He did, however, oblige the president’s request for ‘A Boy Named Sue,’ [written by Shel Silverstein] opening the night with [it,] his biggest hit of 1969.” He also may have been honoring his own father, Ray Cash, who was in the select audience of only 200 (the song pokes fun at tough fathers).
Dolly Parton, singer, songwriter, entrepreneur and humanitarian, around her 70th birthday. photo: Martin Schoeller/AUGUSTBut “Cash received the loudest applause for his song ‘What Is Truth’. This tune touched on some of the major issues facing America at that time such as war, drug use, generational and cultural differences, and the mistreatment of people because of appearance or political perspective.” As Cash played “What Is Truth”, Nixon squirmed in his seat and, during the thunderous ovation, hung his head.
Instrumental in arranging that evening was the top Nixon aid but also music aficionado J.R. Haldeman, later indicted in connection with the Watergate break-in and cover-up. When Haldeman was brought into the court for the first time, he turned to Cash, who took time out of his relentless touring schedule to attend the entire trial, and said, loudly, for all to hear, “I am sorry.”
So powerful had become the gods of country music.
Country music centers around love affairs and broken hearts, so it’s no surprise that so do the lives of many of its stars. One romantic epic entails how Cash broke with the mother of three of his children, the Italian-descendant Vivian Liberto, who couldn’t handle his months on the road, and got together with June Carter, daughter of Mother Maybelle, who had had been touring with him.
June, who provided a gorgeous, nightingale-voiced but also joke-cracking presence, in turn had trouble with Cash’s affairs and addictions. But she stuck by him, he eventually cleaned up and they married and had a son, John Carter Cash (President Jimmy Carter is a distant relative).
Dolly Parton, meanwhile, is Cash’s opposite, romantically. She remains married to her first husband, Carl Thomas Dean, whom she wed at twenty in 1966. Interestingly, he has only seen her play only once, perhaps because some of her songs can feel VERY personal, for example when Parton plaintively pleads:
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene,
I'm begging of you, please don't take my man.
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
Please don't take him, just because you can.
With the best-endowed figure in country, Parton goes under the knife quite a bit, as she openly jokes, and still looks unbelievable at 73. Currently promoting “Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings,” an eight-episode show from Netflix based on her songs, she is making the rounds of, and obviously enjoying her appearances on, the coastal-elite shows of Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert.
And so it goes, in the middle of America’s biggest civil crisis since the 1960s, a visionary artist, working in long-form documentary, shows us that, in point fact, we are all cut from the same cloth: red, white and blue.
As if “Country Music” didn’t imply that subtext forcefully enough, it debuted just after country music fans crowned as their new king a young, black and queer kid.
Twenty-year-old Lil Nas X recorded his country cross over hit 'Old Town Road' for $50 but it stayed at number one for 19 weeks, beating Mariah Carey's record. photo: courtesy L. Nas XOnly 20 and out of Georgia, Lil Nas X (AKA Montero Lamar Hill), blew up both the pop and country charts (the latter kicking him off ‘til he was brought back by popular acclaim) with his laconic, very country but also rap "Old Town Road". It became the only song EVER in the Billboard Hot 100’s history to stay at number one for NINETEEN weeks—despite the fact that he came out of the closet around week ten!
Winning Lil Nas X innumerable awards—the most for any male musician this year—“Old Town Road” starts with the innocent plinking of a banjo, retaking the African instrument expropriated by country music, until it expands into a solid but slow drawl about the life of a black cowboy, with its super-individualistic refrain, "Ain't nobody tell me nothing”
‘[“Old Town Road”] it is so underrated. I feel happy, I feel joyous,” Burns enthused to Pitchfork. “I feel the cavalry has come over the hill to help us deal with the current trouble."
"I have spent the last eight years working on a history of country music and people everywhere—even people I love—want to in-silo country music into its own narrow thing.”
“EVERYONE listens to other music,” he exclaimed. “The idea that we create musical borders is just commerce’s super imposition, or maybe our desire to categorize something so we don't have to know it.”
Indeed, lieu of ridiculing and reviling Trumpers, who are largely country music listeners, Burns is constantly implying, suggesting and, every once in while, openly demanding that we take a gander at their deepest dreams and desires, their avatars and their poetry, to get a better understanding of what life might be like in their shoes.
A majority of country musicians might not support Trump. Certainly, Willie Nelson, who has become the country’s most prominent spokesperson for marijuana, and The Dixie Chicks, who stood up to President Bush and suffered immensely for it, don’t.
But many do. Perhaps it is time for one of them to pull a Johnny Cash, to rise up in his monumental moral fashion and school a president who, like Nixon, has fallen prey not just to corruption and dirty dealing but betraying the American people.
Regardless of whether some country prophet does that, one thing is for certain: We will not defeat racism, hate and demagoguery with loathing, ridicule and rejection. As any one knows, who has driven more then fifty miles from the coast and had their car break down: the people stopping to help almost all have Trump not NPR bumper stickers.
Accepting your allies is easy. Alas, we progressives are obliged to show an even greater dedication to tolerating our opponents, simply to prove the validity of our values.
Ken Burns discusses his 33rd doc, 'Country Music', which he considers one of his best, in Nashville. photo: Andrew Nelles, courtesy The TennesseanAs it happens, cineSOURCE's hometown of Oakland doesn’t have much of a country scene, aside from perhaps the greatest super hero of hippie country: Creedence Clearwater Revival (from two towns north, admittedly). Also not covered in "Country Music", Creedence were often mistaken for Southerners, blacks or BOTH!
But Oakland does have Family Radio, a Christian network famous for Harold Camping’s Judgment Day announcements, the most recent being the end of the world which was supposed to transpire on October 21, 2011, and many listeners did believe.
What Oakland also does have, like America in general, is an increasingly frayed relationship between its wealthy, white hill dwellers, its people-of-color power brokers, many of whom also live in the hills, and its average folk of all sizes, shapes and colors.
Unfortunately, when I walked around my West Oakland neighborhood at 8 pm on that unseasonably-warm night of September 15th, I didn’t hear Rhianna Giddens's banjo heralding the start of “Country Music”. Indeed, when I mentioned the unbelievable Lil Naz X phenomena, even to black musician friends, few were aware of latest embracing of new sounds and singers by country fans.
Burns’s “Civil War” changed America. As much as the Gettysburg Address can be considered the coda to the Declaration of Independence, “Civil War” is kind of a closing statement to that killer of more Americans than any other war in our history. As explained by the southern historians Burns featured prominently, “Civil War” laid to rest "the war was not about slavery," “the noble South” and “Lincoln is the American Hitler” fantasies of some Southerns, at least those who bothered to watch.
Once the killing was concluded and a majority of Southerners admitted their system had no future, despite carpetbagger abuses, Northerners were comparatively generous victors. Indeed, keeping the South in an undivided house allowed the US to become the super power able to defeat the Nazis, Imperial Japan and the Soviets, which would’ve been hard without all those southern sharpshooters.
Now America has to pull off a similar shape-shifting stunt, to save the world from climate change, the new fascism and the riots from Hong Kong to Iraq wracking democracies. Through the brilliance of Burns's “Country Music” and the poetry, romance and innovation it reveals, perhaps at least some of us can learn that trick fast enough.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Dec 03, 2019 - 03:43 AM
by Doniphan Blair
Johnny 'The Man in Black' Cash meets with President Nixon in 1969, shortly before the former played the White House and eviscerated the latter. photo: courtesy The White HouseDOCMASTER BURNS HAS DONE IT AGAIN.
I only wish my fellow progressives had bothered to tune in to his latest investigation of American culture, which showed in September on PBS (but can be streamed any time here).
While Ken Burns’s first long-form documentary, “Civil War” (1990), fought to a just conclusion the last battle—that of the historians—of that grotesque, fratricidal tragedy, his latest, the eight-episode, sixteen-hour “Country Music”, sheds light on America’s current conflict. Indeed, it was released just in the time for the impeachment proceedings.
Trump may be Middle American’s false idol and Jesus their eternal lord, but the actual stars in their firmament go by names like Cash, Parton, Cline, Nelson, Haggard, Kristofferson, Pride and the monumental early saints: Hank Williams, Jimmy Rodgers and the Carter Family.
And what gods they were.
Growing up in New York City, I didn’t hear a lick of country except Woody Guthrie, who enraptured me at age ten.
Mentioned only a couple of times in “Country Music”, Guthrie was the indefatigable Oklahoma troubadour, who criss-crossed the nation and composed thousands of songs on top of his greatest hit, “This Land Is Your Land”. As it happened, that song was based on a tune he “borrowed” from the Carter Family’s “Little Darling Pal of Mine”, which, in turn, they borrowed from a song by a black preacher.
Among his thousands of songs, Woody Guthrie played a few Yiddish ones to entertain his wife Marjorie's Brooklyn family (shown here circa 1946). photo: courtesy W. GuthrieEven as a teenager, the only country name I learned was Merle Haggard, due to the conflict between his patriotic “Okie from Muskogee” and The Youngblood’s “Hippie from Olema”, a town near San Francisco. Never in a million years would I have imagined that Haggard, who was actually from Bakersfield, California, was inspired to write his song while rolling a joint on a tour bus rolling through Oklahoma. Or that he also authored:
I turned twenty-one in prison,
doin' life without parole,
No one could steer me right
but Mama tried, Mama tried,
which I first heard played by The Grateful Dead, at the first concert of theirs I attended, also in Brooklyn, 1971.
“Country music is telling stories based on what all of us have experienced—like the joy of birth, the sadness of death, falling in love, trying to stay in love, losing love, being lonely, missing somebody, seeking redemption,” explained Burns, pedal-to-the-metalling his mouth, as if some snooty media exec might suddenly cut him off, in a video interview by the music magazine Pitchfork (6/18/2018).
“We can’t deal with the four-letter words that country music is about: pain, hurt and love,” Burns raced on. “So we say ‘Oh, it’s about pickup trucks, hound dogs and six packs of beer’—and it’s not.”
To prove his point, the New York City-born, elite-university-educated filmmaker commenced quoting the idiom’s greatest bards.
“Hank Williams said, ‘You hear that lonesome whippoorwill, he sounds too blue to fly, the midnight train is moving on, I’m so lonesome I could cry.’ Johnny Cash has a song, ‘I Still Miss Someone’—second verse, so simple, it’s like a haiku. ‘I go out to a party, to have a little fun, but I find a darkened corner, because I still miss someone.’”
It took me decades to finally search out and listen to those tunes, but, by the time I was attending that Dead concert in 1971, Cash was already close friends with Bob Dylan, the great counterculture prophet as well as poet and musician.
Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, one of America's most famous radicals and Republicans, respectively, as well as close friends, Nashville, 1969. photo: courtesy B. DylanThat sparked still more hippie-hillbilly rancor, while producing some scintillating Dylan tunes: “Just Like a Woman”, “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”. His following albums, “John Wesley Harding” (1967), which includes the masterpiece "All Along the Watchtower", and “Nashville Skyline” (1969), were also quite country.
The Band must’ve been stunned by Dylan’s departure, even though he brought along their lead guitarist/songwriter, the half-Jewish, half-First People Robbie Robertson. Not covered in Burns's “Country Music”, The Band responded by recording as well as writing a few brilliant country songs of their own: “Rag Mama Rag”, “Cripple Creek” and one of the genre’s great epics, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, later covered by Cash and other country artists.
Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist and leader of The Grateful Dead, as well as of the LSD Generation, actually came up as a banjo player in the early ‘60s. Although he continued to jam spectacularly psychedelic in the middle of songs for the rest of his life, he brought The Dead back to his blue grass roots. In fact, in 1970, The Dead released not one but TWO masterful but also very country albums, “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty”, which finally earned them mainstream accolades.
Garcia realized, as did Dylan, that the best way to conquer America was to become America.
Three years later, Garcia started a side project, Old & In the Way, a bluegrass band, which introduced a lot of Dead heads, as his fans are called, to country music. Although Burns doesn’t mention Garcia by name, he inserts a closeup of the beaming and bearded hippie guitar god, holds it for a few seconds and zooms in, in keeping with his now-famous “Ken Burns Effect”.
Moreover, “Country Music” is narrated by another famous old hippie, Peter Coyote, who had already done eight Burns’s docs, including “Vietnam War” (2017), “Prohibition” (2011) and “Baseball” (1994-2010).
Jerry Garcia, when he was banjoing for the Hart Valley Drifters in 1962, shortly before he dropped his first hit of LSD. photo: courtesy J. GarciaDecades before the hippies, the poets and renegades of poor white America were often country musicians. I lost count of how many of them grew up so strapped they barely had shoes, let alone a guitar—Dolly Parton in a “holler” in Appalachia, Johnny Cash in an Arkansas farm house with no glass in its windows—but began penciling poems on scraps of paper. I also lost count of how many did drugs.
Living in the south, side by side with African-Americans, from whom they learned and borrowed a lot of musical material—notably the blues and the banjo—they would eventually repay their even more impoverished, mistreated neighbors with interest.
Black country music is famous for its three Charleses: rhythm and blues superstar Ray Charles, who suddenly came out with a country album in 1962 and had a number one hit with his rendition of "I Can’t Stop Loving You"; Charlie Pride, a singer/guitarist, who came to Nashville from Montana in 1966 and became RCA’s biggest star since Elvis; and jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, who grew up with country in Kansas and remained an avid fan, to the amazement of his friends, “because of the stories,” he said.
Burns loads “Country Music”, his ninth episodic doc and 33rd overall, with astute observations from African-Americans. In addition to Pride, who has a great story about becoming friends with one of Nashville's notoriously-rascist musicians, there’s Rhiannon Giddens. The female banjo player and lead singer of the old-timey Carolina Chocolate Drops, Giddens also appears in “Country Music”’s masterful teaser, which quick cuts between various, very different banjoists racing the same riff.
Naturally, Winton Marsalis, the elite jazz trumpeter, composer and New York City impresario, appears in force. He's been a friend of Burns ever since he became central to Burns’s other, highly-influential, music doc, “Jazz” (2001).
“If you listen to Willie Nelson’s phrasing, there is nothing about country in his phrasing—it’s all Django Reinhardt, it is all jazz,” elaborated Burns to Pitchfork (see full interview here). “And Chester—Chet—Atkins, one of the great session guitarists and later one of the great [Nashville] producers—all jazz-influenced stuff.”
Rhiannon Giddens, co-founder, lead singer and banjo player of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. photo: courtesy R. GiddensWhile the blues, hard-bop jazz and rhythm and blues are obvious precursors to rock, the closest forbear is rockabilly—rock plus hillbilly—which spawned Elvis as well as the word "rock."
The simple facts of country music—rising out of nothing, telling such passionate stories, capturing the zeitgeist and producing not only masterful male writers and musicians but so many feminist poet/singers I also lost count: Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, Emmylou Harris and even Taylor Swift—proves it was an egalitarian cultural revolution warranting serious research as well as recognition.
Burns lovingly details its entire, intricate history. Indeed, he was obliged to leave out The Band, The Byrds and The Dead because 16 hours was simply NOT enough time to cover the hundreds of under-acknowledged country greats.
“The big bang of country music,” Burns continued to Pitchfork, stepping all over his syntax as he attempted to summarize, “is a time when a guy named Ralph Peer, the summer of 1927, in Bristol, Tennessee-Virginia—that is to say, the main street of it, one side is Tennessee, one side is Virginia, he’s on the Tennessee side—he records, within a week, the Carter Family AND Jimmy Rodgers.”
“The Carter Family, they’re like Sunday morning,” Burns explained. “They’re the home, family, church values. Mother Maybelle is one of the greatest guitarists of all time. Sarah Carter has this keening voice. A.P. [the husband] wanders around Appalachia collecting songs with a black man.”
“Jimmy Rodgers is a scamp, a rogue. He brings the blues, also training from African-Americans in the railroad yards. He brings another kind of music—they’re so night and day. He’s Saturday night, they’re Sunday morning—[country] has never been one thing—to which they then appended every other musical form, in one way or another.”
In addition to Giddens and Marsalis, Burns includes scores of insightful interviews, from Dolly Parton and Willy Nelson to the offspring of Williams and Cash, Hank Jr. and Roseanne, stars in their own rights. But the man with the most screen time is Marty Stewart.
Connie Smith, country music star since 1964, and her child prodigy, guitarist and singer husband Marty Stewart, circa 2016. photo: courtesy M. StewartStewart soon entered country music's stratosphere: joining Lester Flatt's band at age 12; playing with them the final season of the country music TV show “Hee Haw” (original: 1969-71, other iterations 'til 1997); then moving to Cash's band; marrying his daughter Cindy; finally busting out on his own, which led to a string of hit singles, albums, awards and “The Marty Stuart Show” (2008-16).
A warm, open-minded raconteur, Stewart is also a very romantic country character, given that, after splitting with Cindy, he ended up marrying “the prettiest woman he ever saw,” none other than the star of his first concert, Connie Smith, despite her being 17 years his senior.
Cash was also an insanely-important romantic and moral figure, despite being a dyed-in-the-wool Republican and sometimes tough and troubled in person. Indeed, Cash devoted himself to “the forgotten man,” in his song's lyrics, in his honoring of them by wearing black (country musicians were famous for their fantastic get-ups, especially when appearing at the Grand Ole Opry theater in Nashville) and in his free concerts at prisons. In California’s Folsom Prison, he inspired a devotion to country music in a long-incarcerated kid from Bakersfield—Merle Haggard.
Cash was also a human jukebox who inhaled music and championed musicians very different from him. In fact, Joni Mitchell appeared on the first episode of Cash’s television show, in 1969, along with Dylan and a couple of “regular” country musicians.
In addition to being one of the top country artists, who would eventually sell over 90 million albums, Cash exercised political influence, reaching the height of his power during a command performance at the White House, also in 1969.
“The president’s staff had requested Cash to play two songs—Guy Drake’s ‘Welfare Cadillac’ and Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie from Muskogee’,” according to the White House Historical Association (see article). But they were, “politically-charged anthems that vilified citizens on government assistance and mischaracterized anti-war protesters as rampant drug users.”
“While Cash was actually a vocal supporter of President Nixon and his policies, he informed the White House beforehand that he neither knew those songs nor had the time to learn them. He did, however, oblige the president’s request for ‘A Boy Named Sue,’ [written by Shel Silverstein] opening the night with [it,] his biggest hit of 1969.” He also may have been honoring his own father, Ray Cash, who was in the select audience of only 200 (the song pokes fun at tough fathers).
Dolly Parton, singer, songwriter, entrepreneur and humanitarian, around her 70th birthday. photo: Martin Schoeller/AUGUSTInstrumental in arranging that evening was the top Nixon aid but also music aficionado J.R. Haldeman, later indicted in connection with the Watergate break-in and cover-up. When Haldeman was brought into the court for the first time, he turned to Cash, who took time out of his relentless touring schedule to attend the entire trial, and said, loudly, for all to hear, “I am sorry.”
So powerful had become the gods of country music.
Country music centers around love affairs and broken hearts, so it’s no surprise that so do the lives of many of its stars. One romantic epic entails how Cash broke with the mother of three of his children, the Italian-descendant Vivian Liberto, who couldn’t handle his months on the road, and got together with June Carter, daughter of Mother Maybelle, who had had been touring with him.
June, who provided a gorgeous, nightingale-voiced but also joke-cracking presence, in turn had trouble with Cash’s affairs and addictions. But she stuck by him, he eventually cleaned up and they married and had a son, John Carter Cash (President Jimmy Carter is a distant relative).
Dolly Parton, meanwhile, is Cash’s opposite, romantically. She remains married to her first husband, Carl Thomas Dean, whom she wed at twenty in 1966. Interestingly, he has only seen her play only once, perhaps because some of her songs can feel VERY personal, for example when Parton plaintively pleads:
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene,
I'm begging of you, please don't take my man.
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
Please don't take him, just because you can.
With the best-endowed figure in country, Parton goes under the knife quite a bit, as she openly jokes, and still looks unbelievable at 73. Currently promoting “Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings,” an eight-episode show from Netflix based on her songs, she is making the rounds of, and obviously enjoying her appearances on, the coastal-elite shows of Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert.
And so it goes, in the middle of America’s biggest civil crisis since the 1960s, a visionary artist, working in long-form documentary, shows us that, in point fact, we are all cut from the same cloth: red, white and blue.
As if “Country Music” didn’t imply that subtext forcefully enough, it debuted just after country music fans crowned as their new king a young, black and queer kid.
Twenty-year-old Lil Nas X recorded his country cross over hit 'Old Town Road' for $50 but it stayed at number one for 19 weeks, beating Mariah Carey's record. photo: courtesy L. Nas XWinning Lil Nas X innumerable awards—the most for any male musician this year—“Old Town Road” starts with the innocent plinking of a banjo, retaking the African instrument expropriated by country music, until it expands into a solid but slow drawl about the life of a black cowboy, with its super-individualistic refrain, "Ain't nobody tell me nothing”
‘[“Old Town Road”] it is so underrated. I feel happy, I feel joyous,” Burns enthused to Pitchfork. “I feel the cavalry has come over the hill to help us deal with the current trouble."
"I have spent the last eight years working on a history of country music and people everywhere—even people I love—want to in-silo country music into its own narrow thing.”
“EVERYONE listens to other music,” he exclaimed. “The idea that we create musical borders is just commerce’s super imposition, or maybe our desire to categorize something so we don't have to know it.”
Indeed, lieu of ridiculing and reviling Trumpers, who are largely country music listeners, Burns is constantly implying, suggesting and, every once in while, openly demanding that we take a gander at their deepest dreams and desires, their avatars and their poetry, to get a better understanding of what life might be like in their shoes.
A majority of country musicians might not support Trump. Certainly, Willie Nelson, who has become the country’s most prominent spokesperson for marijuana, and The Dixie Chicks, who stood up to President Bush and suffered immensely for it, don’t.
But many do. Perhaps it is time for one of them to pull a Johnny Cash, to rise up in his monumental moral fashion and school a president who, like Nixon, has fallen prey not just to corruption and dirty dealing but betraying the American people.
Regardless of whether some country prophet does that, one thing is for certain: We will not defeat racism, hate and demagoguery with loathing, ridicule and rejection. As any one knows, who has driven more then fifty miles from the coast and had their car break down: the people stopping to help almost all have Trump not NPR bumper stickers.
Accepting your allies is easy. Alas, we progressives are obliged to show an even greater dedication to tolerating our opponents, simply to prove the validity of our values.
Ken Burns discusses his 33rd doc, 'Country Music', which he considers one of his best, in Nashville. photo: Andrew Nelles, courtesy The TennesseanBut Oakland does have Family Radio, a Christian network famous for Harold Camping’s Judgment Day announcements, the most recent being the end of the world which was supposed to transpire on October 21, 2011, and many listeners did believe.
What Oakland also does have, like America in general, is an increasingly frayed relationship between its wealthy, white hill dwellers, its people-of-color power brokers, many of whom also live in the hills, and its average folk of all sizes, shapes and colors.
Unfortunately, when I walked around my West Oakland neighborhood at 8 pm on that unseasonably-warm night of September 15th, I didn’t hear Rhianna Giddens's banjo heralding the start of “Country Music”. Indeed, when I mentioned the unbelievable Lil Naz X phenomena, even to black musician friends, few were aware of latest embracing of new sounds and singers by country fans.
Burns’s “Civil War” changed America. As much as the Gettysburg Address can be considered the coda to the Declaration of Independence, “Civil War” is kind of a closing statement to that killer of more Americans than any other war in our history. As explained by the southern historians Burns featured prominently, “Civil War” laid to rest "the war was not about slavery," “the noble South” and “Lincoln is the American Hitler” fantasies of some Southerns, at least those who bothered to watch.
Once the killing was concluded and a majority of Southerners admitted their system had no future, despite carpetbagger abuses, Northerners were comparatively generous victors. Indeed, keeping the South in an undivided house allowed the US to become the super power able to defeat the Nazis, Imperial Japan and the Soviets, which would’ve been hard without all those southern sharpshooters.
Now America has to pull off a similar shape-shifting stunt, to save the world from climate change, the new fascism and the riots from Hong Kong to Iraq wracking democracies. Through the brilliance of Burns's “Country Music” and the poetry, romance and innovation it reveals, perhaps at least some of us can learn that trick fast enough.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Dec 03, 2019 - 03:43 AM
