![]() ![]() Watching this series straight through, in chronological order, is rewarding but not a little daunting: After a star-studded introductory flourish-Merle! Dolly! Garth Brooks! Charley Pride! Kris Kristofferson!-the first episode, “The Rub,” settles into its time period (logged as “Beginnings - 1933”) and its central aim (tracing the twin histories of the banjo and the fiddle). What Country Music offers instead, in terms of provocation, is the fairly aggressive thesis that country music was (a) a nostalgia-obsessed, old-timey proposition from day one, and (b) never solely the province of the white working class, however angrily the white working class might insist otherwise. The series wraps up in the mid-’90s, conveniently allowing Burns to avoid addressing both the stupendous commercial rise and disheartening political fall of the Dixie Chicks, which is, tragically, the genre’s single most significant development of the past 20 years, an actual instance of “cancel culture” chilling and risible enough to make any self-pitying 2019 comedian spontaneously combust. (Most indulgently, Branford Marsalis dismissed free-jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor as “self-indulgent bullshit.”) The first half of Country Music-which burns off its fourth episode Wednesday night, and returns Sunday to start plowing through the remaining four, one nearly two-hour installment per night-brooks no such hostility, and seems determined to avoid any intra-Nashville warfare. This is Burns’s second major musical project after 2001’s similarly gargantuan Jazz, which caught some heat less for what it valorized than what it dismissed. ![]() But country music itself knows a thing or two about weaponizing silliness and folksiness, about flaunting its weaknesses with enough charisma to recast them as strengths. Yes, the fake movie theater Burns constructs to screen a clip from a 1930s Gene Autry “singing cowboy” flick is a little dorky, as are the glass-breaking sound effects as Charlie Daniels describes postwar honky-tonk nightclubs as “skull orchards,” as is the United States map Burns deploys to convey the gargantuan 50,000-watt radio signal of Nashville’s own WSM, home of the fabled Grand Ole Opry. The Ken Burns documentary experience-as he’s applied it to such American institutions as The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), Prohibition (2011), and The Vietnam War (2017)-is itself an American institution at this point, thorough to the point of exhaustion, vibrant even at its stuffiest, winsome in its warm embrace of its own clichés. But it’s worth trying to absorb it all anyway, so long as you’re cool with failing. ![]() ![]() It’s a lot to absorb there are far less foreboding gateway drugs. Anybody singing anything on camera is an instant highlight, whether it’s Dolly Parton tearing through the old folk song “Barbara Allen” or Dwight Yoakam crooning and then rhapsodizing Hank Williams’s “Lovesick Blues.” (“There’s a sentimental heartache to that song, but yet there’s still a raw-edged, kind of raucous, mud-in-your-eye, flipping-your-finger-at-the-world-because-you-feel-this-bad side of it,” Yoakam explains, and then croons a little more, and yeah, geez, he’s got a point.)Īs a work of country music scholarship, Country Music is virtually without equal in terms of scope and size and hard-nosed but heartwarming sincerity. “Nobody thought anything about it.” Though the effect on young Hag was, of course, profound: “It was an intriguing moment for me.”Ĭountry Music is dense with intriguing moments, with silly asides and tragic flourishes, with grandiose sociopolitical theories and feather-light flexes of pure star power, with slow pans over sepia-toned photographs and sonorous proclamations from series narrator Peter Coyote, who is, indeed, named Peter Coyote. “You used to have some really good brawls at them country dances,” he observes, wistfully. One time, at 10 or 11 years old, Haggard snuck out of his house and biked five miles to a Wills gig at Bakersfield, California’s iconic Beardsley Ballroom, arriving just in time to witness a righteous, sailor-driven fistfight in the parking lot. But he’s even more ferocious in his praise for pre- and post-WWII Western swing titans Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys: “If somebody don’t like Wills, he’s immediately under suspicion with me.” Big smile. “I think that’s the best she ever sung!” he likewise enthuses several hours later, after belting out Loretta Lynn’s 1960 debut single “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl.” (The notion of Loretta Lynn peaking with her first single, when the Hag expresses it, somehow doesn’t sound like a neg.) He recounts, as you figure he will, his memory of Johnny Cash’s famous show at San Quentin State Prison on New Year’s Day 1959, which Haggard infamously enjoyed in person, as an inmate. “It’s just good!” Haggard declares, after crooning a scrap of the 1930 Jimmie Rodgers classic “Mule Skinner Blues,” capping it with a boisterous laugh. ![]()
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