The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Ken Burns talks country music series
With PBS’ ‘Country Music,’ documentarian Ken Burns digs through the past to show how genre belongs to us all
Director Ken Burns says his first goal for each documentary he’s made is simple: find and tell a great American story. ¶ “Country Music,” a new eight-part, 16-hour documentary series that premieres Sept. 15 on PBS, turned out to have so much of that quality that Burns — whose previous work includes such acclaimed docu-series as “The Civil War,” “Baseball” and “The National Parks” — says he was surprised he hadn’t thought to do it sooner. ¶ “It’s a very big, wide, diverse, complicated story,” Burns says before a public event to preview “Country Music” at the Autry Museum of the American West earlier this summer. “I think particularly today we sort of need the universal truths that remind us every body’s in the same boat.
“As we watch the tendency to retreat to our tribal corners, there might be some medicine in these universal songs,” Burns says. “Now, we don’t ever approach a subject with that in mind — when it’s done you begin to realize it could do that.
“For us, it’s spending the 8 1/2 years trying to master a really complex series of intertwined stories that have meaning. So this is as good as it gets for us. It’s American history firing on all cylinders.”
At the Autry, Burns and producerwriter Duncan Dayton and producer Julie Dunfey were continuing a road trip on which they’d embarked months earlier, taking clips from the documentary to various parts of the country and screening them as sneak peeks of what’s to come.
In Los Angeles, they showed a segment on the singing cowboys of Hollywood movies — a group that included the museum’s namesake, the late Gene Autry — as well as a clip on the Bakersfield Sound and the Los Angeles country-rock scene that included singer-songwriters such as Emmylou Harris.
The filmmakers exuded an excitement for the subject and the places “Country Music” took them; those included the converted refrigerated boxcar in Bakersfield that had served as the boyhood home of country legend Merle Haggard.
“While we were there, we got a personal tour of it from his 98-yearold big sister, Lillian,” Dayton says. “Merle is in virtually every episode talking about things besides his own career. In a section about Bob Wills, he talks about sneaking out the window in the night and bicycling 5 miles to the Beardsley Ballroom to peek in the window and see Bob Wills playing.
“So we made Lillian tell us which window it was,” he says. “It was just a thrill for us all to be in that thing.”
Instead of portraying country music as a slice of American life, Burns says it’s an essential ingredient.
“It’s the whole pie,” he says. “You know the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. complained that there was too much pluribus and not enough unum” — too much emphasis on the many, not enough on the one. “We’re into unum. So we’re looking for stories that speak to everybody.
“We tend to segregate — either through convenience or commerce or other reasons — country music into some sort of categories as if it’s separate, distinct, one thing.”
But it’s not one thing, it’s many, Burns says. Country music evolves over the course of the 20th century from such earlier influences as the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers to Bill Monroe and Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton and so many more. It all gets mixed up into something new that cross-pollinates with nearly every other kind of music over time.
“It coexists adjacent to all the other American music forms,” Burns says. “Adjacent to the blues, adjacent to rhythm and blues, adjacent to jazz and folk and rock and pop. There’s no borders.
“How do you get rock ‘n’ roll unless Johnny Cash from Dyess, Arkansas, and Elvis Presley from Tupelo, Mississippi, are not only listening to hillbilly music and gospel music, which they are, but R&B?” he says.
Burns notes that in the documentary, singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson quotes a passage from the English poet William Blake about doing what one’s heart requires and not what anyone else tells you you should do.
“It’s the path of Kris Kristofferson,” Burns says. “William Blake said you can find a world in a grain of sand. And so in each of the projects we do it might seem deliberately limited or focused, but everything about who we are is in that grain of sand. Or in this case, multiple grains of sand. That’s what we do.”
The documentary ends somewhere in the mid-’90s — after the arrival of Garth Brooks sets modern country on a new commercial course, as laws that allowed the consolidation of radio stations change the landscapes of the broadcast air, and as Cash, one of the last titans, enters the productive final phase of his career, Dayton says.
The past two decades are left alone, because as historians the filmmakers don’t want to judge the present until it settles, he and Burns say.
“We’re focused on the past,” Burns says. “Those arguments about what is country and what isn’t have been going on since the beginning. And what’s genuine and what’s not genuine. And should we go in that direction — and if we have gone in that direction, shouldn’t we pull it back to this direction?
“Underlying all this is Lil Nas X,” he says, referring to the singer of “Old Town Road,” the country rap hit that held the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for 19 weeks but was controversially removed from the Billboard country charts. “Billboard doesn’t put him on their charts? Who cares? Transcend that. It’s the No. 1 song. Everybody likes it. That means that the commerce aspect of this just dissolves and the purity of it remains.”
Burns says that over the course of making of the series, friends and other visitors often entered the editing room in New Hampshire with one idea about country music or the documentary and left with an entirely different perspective.
“People came in over the years, big experts on country music, and they left going, ‘I had no idea. I’ve studied this all my life and I can’t believe I had to come to New Hampshire to find out more about my city, Nashville, and my music, country,’” he says.
“Or people would say, ‘You know what? I don’t know much about it,’ “he continues. “And then they look at it and they go, ‘Oh, I actually do know a lot. I knew all these songs, and I knew this person, and I liked that at that period.’ … And then you have people who say, ‘I don’t really like country music,’” Burns says. “As if of all the musical forms, this is the one. I had a friend who said, ‘Ken, I love all the things you do, but country music? I don’t know.’”
Burns says the friend stayed for four days to watch all eight two-hour episodes.
“Thursday afternoon he’s a puddle, sobbing out of control,” he says. “He’s been apologetic for the last year and a half: ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got everything of Merle’s; I’m now moving on to the Louvin Brothers.’”
Open your eyes and ears, your heart and mind, Burns says, and discover what the filmmakers found as they dived deeply into the history of country.
“We’re sharing with you a process of our discovery,” he says. “Which is, ‘Hey! You can’t believe what we just got!’
“You know Dolly Parton, you know that song, ‘I Will Always Love You,’” Burns says. “Wait till you hear the story of why she wrote ‘I Will Always Love You.’ So we’ve got Whitney Houston’s amazing version that raises the hair on the back of your neck. When you see Dolly sing it after she tells you why she sung it and what she needed to do to sing it, what the circumstances were, it will be equally, if not more, chilling.
“And it happens again and again in this series.”