Ken Burn’s epic love letter to country music, even at 8 parts and 16-plus hours, has left country music fans wanting more. Some at SavingCountryMusic.com are irate, in fact, that Glen Campbell, the Dixie Chicks, Alan Jackson, Johnny Paycheck, Ray Price, John Prine, Gentleman Jim Reeves, the Statler Brothers, Conway Twitty, Don Williams and a hundred more didn’t get enough screen time. And, a bit of frustration with the amount of screen time that Johnny Cash and his daughter Rosanne got.
You may know that Cash married into the first family of country music. His second wife, June Carter Cash, is the daughter of Mother Maybelle Carter and the niece of A.P. Carter and Sara Carter, the three of whom made up the original Carter Family. Later, the second iteration of the Carter Family consisted of Mother Maybelle and her three daughters. The Carter-Cash nexus was explored in literally every single one of the 8 parts of the series. Now, I admire Johnny Cash and I like his music. But, it was all a bit too much, and little less of Johnny and Rosanne might have meant a little more of Campbell or Twitty or some other worthy.
In any event, country music is a big subject and, thankfully, Country Music is not just a cavalcade of stars. It’s that, but it’s also a serious, if not altogether successful, attempt to explain the social and cultural history of country music and the culture that sustains it.
Still, undoubtedly, many viewers simply saw Country Music as terrifically entertaining, which it is in precisely the way that most of Burns documentaries are terrifically entertaining. The historical film and video clips of artists from Fiddlin’ John Carson and Uncle Dave Macon in the 1920s to Bob Wills in the 1940s; from Hank Williams in the 1950s to Willie Nelson in the 1960s; and from George Jones and Tammy Wynette in the 1970s to Dwight Yoakum in the 1980s are all big fun. Watching Bob Wills bouncing around on stage like the speed freak that apparently he was brings back memories of Burns’ earlier documentaries featuring films of baseball greats Honus Wagner (1900s), Ty Cobb (1910s) and Babe Ruth (1920s) and jazzmen Louis Armstrong (1920s) and Benny Goodman (1930s). No wonder many viewers wanted more.
Bottom line, Country Music earns an A+ as entertainment, and even as history and sociology it gets a C because, as everybody knows, Americans “don’t know much about history” and, so, anything they picked up here would have to be counted as progress. But, seriously, what have we really learned about the history of country music from Burns’ series? And, why just a C? There are four major takeaways from the series that I could see.
Authenticity and Innovation
Burns fashioned his biggest frame around country music in his very first episode. The first two stars of country music, the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, are taken to represent two sides of an ongoing dialectic between authenticity to a tradition (the Carters) and innovation around that tradition (Rodgers). And, while Rodgers and other innovators are mostly presented in a positive light, the Carters and the traditionalists clearly are the good guys. We are told again and again that it’s crucial for country music and country musicians to “remember where they came from.” Or, according to the Lester Flagg/Earl Scruggs composition that serves as the title of the 8th and final episode, “Don't Get Above Your Raisin.” “Be true to your roots.” “Be who you are.”
Corollary to the authenticity theme is the idea that country music is just one big family, as we are told over and over again. Country musicians are loyal to their roots like they are to family, and the country music industry was and is inclusive of blacks and women, as we also hear over and over again. We also see again and again that the big stars all turn out for one another’s funerals.
So, country music is presented as a push/pull between that tradition—English, Irish and Scottish folk songs and songs that sound like them; that high, lonesome wailing vocal style; string bands; and loyalty to roots and family—and all of the innovations of the following 80 years—new and different instruments from electric guitars to symphony orchestras, a pop vocal style, a rock & roll beat, urban lifestyles, and so on. Sometimes the innovations are reported favorably. Sometimes not. The once-per-generation return to the roots of country music—bluegrass, the folk revival, the “new traditionalists,” etc.—is always seen as a good thing, and rootsy musicians get most of the screen time, which is only fair and understandable, since the overriding theme, again, is “Don’t Get Above Your Raisin.”
The Nashville Sound
Burns does an especially good job of covering the Nashville Sound. And, make no mistake, Country Music may be a love letter to country music, but it is no love letter to Nashville. And, with the big public relations apparatus of country music, the Grand Ole Opry, the Country Music Association (CMA), the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, et al, the easiest thing in the world would have been for Burns to simply cast country music as a creature of that mythic town, Nashville, TN. But, he decided not to do that, and his history is vastly richer (and more true) for that decision.
Right from the beginning, Burns noted the existence of country music in places like Texas and southern California—well, OK, not places like Texas and southern California but, specifically, Texas and southern California. Early on, in the 1930s, we see Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys playing Western swing around Fort Worth and in Oklahoma, and the Maddox Brothers and Rose doing something similar in L.A. Later, when Buck Owens and Merle Haggard emerge with the Bakersfield Sound, we realize that it didn’t come out nowhere (though there were complaints that Buck Owens influencer Wynn Stewart was not mentioned).
Later still, Burns gives the so-called Outlaw Country of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, and Texas songwriters from Kris Kristofferson to Townes Van Zandt their due, and places them within what is by then a well-cultivated tradition of Texas country that retains the rough edges that Nashville has gone to such pains to smooth over. (Of course, there are complaints concerning the absence of David Allen Coe, Billy Joe Shaver and other “outlaws.”)
The key episodes cover the 1950s through the 1970s, when the hoary Nashville clichés begin to fall flat. Specifically, the younger generation of southern boys, like white boys across America, were captivated and captured by the more boisterous sounds of rhythm & blues. Honky-tonk (Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Thompson, et al) moved country in that direction with drums and electric guitars, but did not satiate the desire for something new, something more vigorous. So, the next generation of country singers—Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, even Johnny Cash and Marty Robbins—declined (or were unable) to fit into Nashville’s mold and moved off in a different direction.
Presley is of course a unique case. His manager, Col. Tom Parker, thought that rock & roll was just a fad and that Presley’s long-term success would come by singing sentimental pop ballads. He as good as destroyed Presley with such ideas, and Elvis had too little ego strength to push back. His decline into sentimentality was completely analogous to Nashville’s.
Producers Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley were already intent on crafting a smoother, a more pop sound, replacing fiddles and steel guitars with symphony orchestras and vocal choruses consisting of ethereal “oohs” and “aahs.” It worked for Patsy Cline! So, they spent the next 20 years trying to shoe-horn everybody, even Willie Nelson, into it. It didn’t work.
What Burns shows beyond any dispute is that the greatest music of the era was not the product of Nashville, it was the product of originals and iconoclasts like Presley, Cash, Roger Miller, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Dolly Parton. Faced with a variety of talents almost equally as great as Presley, Nashville chose the one sound and the one style that was least appropriate to the kind and caliber of talent that came knocking on its door after 1955. Some of them recorded big hits in Nashville but Nashville, it turns out, stymied and stifled some of the era’s greatest musicians for 20 years. From the late 1950s to the late 1970s, Nashville succeeded largely in spite of itself.
Black and White
It is harder to credit Burns’ storytelling on the subject of race. Burns whitewashes the obvious historical racism of the country music establishment and of its fans. This is, of course, the music of the rural south where, during the early days of country music from the turn of the century to 1950, more than 2,000 black men were lynched by white vigilante mobs, often dressed in white Ku Klux Klan hoods and garb.
Yet, Burns goes to great pains to show country music as a mixing of the white and black cultures of the south. We are told five or six times in the first couple of episodes that the banjo came from Africa. Burns gives three of the very precious few successful black country singers, Charley Pride, Rhiannon Giddens and Darius Rucker, a fair amount of time as talking heads; and he notes that Ray Charles’ greatest album was a collection of country songs. What he doesn’t mention is that country radio stations refused to play it.
Now, it’s true that Burns reports that country’s first star, Fiddlin’ John Carson, routinely played at Ku Klux Klan rallies in the 1910s and ‘20s, and one black musician notes that white folk “loved our music but they hated us.”
Early in the show Burns defines country as “the music of people who felt that they were looked down upon” and, certainly, rural southern whites were looked down upon by middle- and upper-class whites everywhere. Burns goes on to show that they endured their second-class citizenship stoically, with songs that emphasized their own sinful character rather than showing any awareness of their exploitation by the economic or political forces that largely controlled their lives. But, they compensated very powerfully for their own lack of status by looking down upon the Negroes they found in their midst and by demanding that they (African-Americans) would be treated as third-class citizens. This is all glossed over.
Strong Women
Burns amplifies his theme of inclusiveness not only by overselling the role of African-American culture in the history of country music, but he also focuses throughout the series on a variety of strong women of country music. Now, in this case, the emphasis is about right, because there have been a lot of great women singers in country music. Of course, the same can be said of folk and jazz and pop and soul music (though not so much concerning rock & roll).
Mother Maybelle and her niece Sara Carter were there at the very birth of country music, and they were followed by artists from Rose Maddox to Kitty Wells, and from Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn to Dolly Parton, and from Tammy Wynette to Shania Twain. So, the story here is not so much that Burns oversold the importance of women singers, but that he gives the country music establishment something of a pass concerning their trials and tribulations. Again, what Burns shows but doesn’t say is that the country music industry also has succeeded with women singers in spite of itself.
Kitty Wells was the most popular woman singer of the 1950s thanks to her smash hit “Honky Tonk Angels.” It was an answer to Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life,” in which he sang that (paraphrasing) “the world was going to hell and faithless women”—that is, “Honky Tonk Angels” who hung around in bars and seduced married men and broke up marriages—“deserved a good deal of the blame.” Wells responded in her song that, to the contrary, “married men who (act like) they’re still single (have) caused many a good girl to go wrong.”
Country radio stations found “Honky Tonk Angels,” sung from the woman’s point of view, to be too provocative and refused to play it. It climbed up the charts, however, through millions of jukebox plays until the radio stations could no longer ignore it. The irony is that “The Wild Side of Life,” sung from the man’s point of view, had also been a big hit and no country music station had ever raised the slightest concern about its content.
Later, Burns shows how Parton rose to country music stardom. Again, he doesn’t overstate (or understate) her importance or her prominence. But, he is ambivalent as to the lesson that we might draw from her story. Is it that a strong woman can, indeed, find fame and fortune in country music? Or, is it that a powerful man—in this case, Porter Wagoner—was able to control and stifle her for seven years?
The Folk Revival
The strange relationship of country and folk music over the years, which one might characterize as an estrangement, also calls into question the alleged inclusiveness of country music. Burns shows that country music and folk music were precisely the same thing until the Great Depression and Dust Bowl of the 1930s. That’s when Woody Guthrie and other hillbilly singers began to write and sing songs that didn’t reflect the accepted stoic philosophy, that didn’t necessarily place blame for these twin catastrophes on the victims themselves. Instead, they found and sang about explanations with a political bent, that placed blame on economic practices and government policies, on bankers and lawyers and politicians. Marty Stuart describes Guthrie as an authentic country singer, a hillbilly singer “through and through,” and yet the country music establishment as good as disowned him for singing about those kinds of ideas.
Pete Seeger and others kept those songs alive through the red scare of the 1950s—the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, the blacklists, and all of that. Finally, in 1959, a folk group called the Kingston Trio broke through with the smash hit “Tom Dooley,” a murder ballad written in North Carolina in 1866. It went to #1 on the pop charts but the Grammy Awards gave “Tom Dooley” the award for Best Country and Western Performance. Country music and folk music remained virtually indistinguishable.
The following year the Grammies initiated a Folk category. The Kingstons won for Best Folk Performance, while Johnny Horton won for Best Country Performance for “The Battle of New Orleans.” Burns credits the Kingstons with kicking off a historical “story song” craze on the country charts, with Cash’s “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town;” Horton’s “Springtime in Alaska,” “The Battle of New Orleans” and “North to Alaska;” Stonewall Jackson’s “Waterloo;” and Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” all going to #1 over the following 18 months.
In 1963 Bobby Bare enjoyed two hits with “Detroit City” and “500 Miles.” Both have early 1960s copyrights but both are reminiscent of earlier folk tunes such as “Sloop John B.” and “900 Miles.” Coming at the peak of the folk revival, their folky sound was no accident. But, the Kingstons were from San Francisco, while Bare recorded with producer Chet Atkins at Nashville’s RCA Records studio. So the Kingstons were folk, while Bare was country. But, the two styles still sounded very much alike.
Burns goes on to report that bluegrass music, Bill Monroe’s invention from the 1940s that recreated country music as he wished it had been played in some mythical “good old days,” also came to be shunned by Nashville, and specifically by country radio. Bluegrass managed to find a home among folk music fans, mostly on college campuses, during the folk revival as it continued on from the Kingstons to Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Had it not been for the folk revival and its fans on America’s college campuses—had it been left up to Nashville and the country music establishment—bluegrass may well have been dead and gone by the time the 1960s had ended.
Nashville vigorously pats itself on the back for all the folk and rock artists who came to Nashville to record, principally Bob Dylan and the Byrds, though neither the country charts nor country radio ever paid the slightest attention to either, and lots of country fans apparently objected to Dylan’s presence in Burns’ series. It’s true that the Byrds were invited to play at the Grand Ole Opry, but it’s also true that they were hooted off the stage.
Still, Nashville hit it big with at least a couple of artists associated with the counter-culture in Kris Kristofferson and Emmy Lou Harris, though Nashville execs initially were skeptical of Harris. She had sung folk songs and looked like a “hippie.” They were the exceptions to the rule, however. John Prine was never embraced in Nashville until he had been recording for some 40 years. Of course, Prine was from Chicago but his people had come from the hills of Kentucky and, well, you can take the boy out of the hills, but you can’t take the hills out of the boy. His song “Paradise,” about coal mining in his ancestral home in Muhlenburg County, Kentucky, is as country as it gets. But, his debut album album also contained hippie tunes like “Illegal Smile” and “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” so Nashville demurred.
The folk or “alternative” music scene—encompassing all the styles that had been shunned by Nashville, from Woody Guthrie to John Prine—always remained so vital that around the year 2000 it spawned a new category or genre called Americana. It was all really country music at heart. It was music that was true to is roots, that didn’t get above its raisin. Country music and folk music or Americana remain joined at the hip. Yet, the country music industry hasn’t had any idea what to do with it and has mostly kept it at arm’s length for more than 80 years.
Inclusive?
So, in the final analysis, Burns says that country music is inclusive—inclusive, he says or implies, of African-Americans, of women, of city slickers as well as country bumpkins, of folkies and hippies and iconoclasts of all kinds. Yet, his own reporting shows something different. The country music establishment has more of the character of a jealous, fearful, narrow-minded parent. Burns shows that the country music establishment was keenly aware of its image as purveyors of “hillbilly” music. Encouraged by Nashville’s upper-crust, it tried hard to change that image. Thus, the smooth, poppy Nashville Sound. Eventually, respectability came to be regarded as almost as important as success. And, so, hillbillies, hippies, lefties and long-hairs were shunned. Like Kris Kristofferson, who was disowned by his own parents, those who were unafraid to speak their mind were shunned. Drinkers and druggies were shunned, unless they were superstars like Johnny Cash and George Jones. Topical folk-singers were shunned. Non-conformists of all kinds were shunned.
All of the country music industry’s quirks are there in Burns’ stories, but he’s too nice to connect the dots and say what it all means. Another of the frequent criticisms of Burns’ series was its ending in 1996, which seems arbitrary. As a result, Burns avoided having to talk about the shunning, the boycotting of the Dixie Chicks after they announced their opposition to the Iraq War from a stage in 2003. The Dixie Chicks’ controversy would have undermined Burns’ theme of family and inclusivity in country music. So he ignored it.
Bottom line: Burns' series showed country music for the fearful, narrow-minded phenomenon that it is, all the while claiming, most unconvincingly, otherwise.
