E4 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2019 S LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR
you: It can be explained in just one word: sin-
cerity.”
Veteran filmmaker Burns and his New
Hampshire-based crew spent more than
eight years, conducted more than 175 hours
of interviews with more than 100 subjects,
pored over thousands of photographs and
feet of vintage film footage and crisscrossed
the nation in making their exploration of
that quintessentially American style of mu-
sic.
Yet ask Burns or the show’s writer, Day-
ton Duncan, to define country music, and
despite — or perhaps because of — the
depth of their research, you’re likely to get
an enthusiastic, richly informed disserta-
tion rather than a pithy bromide. But not for
lack of trying.
“One of the central themes of our film is
that country music isn’t, and never was, just
one style of music,” Duncan said recently.
“That’s probably the biggest thing that kept
hitting me in the face doing the research.
“From the get-go,” he said, “it’s been a
mixture of hymns and blues and minstrel
songs and work songs and sentimental
songs and old work songs and ballads from
the British Isles. It never did congeal into
any one thing. I’m mixing my metaphors
here, but it came from many roots and then
started its own branches.”
Today those branches include signifi-
cant elements of pop, rock, R&B and hip-
hop music, nowhere more up front than in
“Old Town Road.” Those genres have inter-
sected with and informed “traditional”
country music increasingly over the last
decade or more.
Among the most prominent examples:
Jason Aldean’s 2011 hit “Dirt Road Anthem,”
Sam Hunt’s breakthrough 2017 single “Body
Like a Back Road,” pop-R&B singer-song-
writer Bebe Rexha and country duo Florida
Georgia Line’s No. 1 2017 collaboration,
“Meant to Be” and Kane Brown’s new duet
with EDM producer and DJ Marshmello,
“One Thing Right.”
For Burns himself, a key mission of his
project has been to look beyond the clichés
and the quips often served up about country
music to reveal its origins in some of the
poorest regions of America’s rural South as
well as to highlight often deceptively simply
stated expressions of the subjects country
songs address.
“There’s something that we do in our cul-
ture in which we’re OK with sentimentality
and nostalgia,” Burns said. “I don’t know
why, but that’s the enemy of good anything.
We’re frightened of real, deep emotions. So
we mask [discussions of country music]
with jokes about pickup trucks, dogs, girl-
friends and the beer.
“When in fact,” he added, “it’s about el-
emental things: birth, death, falling in love,
out of love, seeking redemption and erring
and all the things human flesh is heir to.
That’s the stuff country music is about.”
“It is part of who we are as Americans —
as much as the New Deal and the Civil War
and the slave trade,” said Rosanne Cash, a
key voice in Burns’ film, commenting both
from the perspective of an outsider who
fought to establish her own musical identity
in the late 1970s and as the daughter of coun-
try icon Johnny Cash. “All the violence and
all the beauty — it’s part of who we are, and
we should know it.”‘Wouldn’t let you do anything’
Forward-thinking musicians have chal-
lenged assumptions about what qualifies as
country music — about what is “authenti-
cally” country — nearly since the beginning.
Pioneering singer and songwriter Jim-
mie Rodgers hailed from Meridian, Miss.,
where he grew up hearing the work songs,
field hollers, blues laments and gospel mu-
sic of African Americans. In 1929 he teamed
with the most influential African American
musician of the early 20th century, New Or-
leans trumpeter and singer Louis Arm-
strong, and his wife, pianist Lil Hardin Arm-
strong, who added jazz licks to Rodgers’ re-
cording “Blue Yodel No. 9.”
In the 1930s, Texas-bred musician Bob
Wills, like millions of his contemporaries
around the country, was smitten by the
sound of big-band swing music. He put his
own spin on the genre, focusing on fiddles in-
stead of clarinets and trumpets and giving
birth to the country genre of western swing.
Kentucky singer-mandolinist Bill Mon-
roe transformed the mountain music he
heard around him in Appalachia, grafting a
musical proficiency and intricate vocal har-
monies that rivaled jazz and classical music
in establishing the “high lonesome sound”
that came to be known as bluegrass music.
In the 1950s, Nashville attempted to stem
the swelling tide of rock ’n’ roll in capturing
the fascination of America’s youth. So lead-
ing record producers Owen Bradley and
Chet Atkins turned toward a more sophis-
ticated sound they hoped would draw in the
parents of rock-obsessed young listeners.
Banjos, fiddles and steel guitars were down-
played, replaced by sweeping orchestral ac-
companiment and background choirs for
what became known as “The Nashville
Sound,” exemplified in hits from the period
such as Patsy Cline’s recording of Willie Nel-
son’s song “Crazy,” Don Gibson’s “Oh Lone-
some Me” and Jim Reeves’ “Four Walls.”
“Now we’ve cut out the fiddle and steel
guitar and added choruses to country mu-
sic,” Bradley once said. “But it can’t stop
there. It always has to keep developing to
keep fresh.”
A jolt of such freshness came in the early
’60s, when soul music great Ray Charles first
gained artistic control of his time in the re-
cording studio. He radically re-imagined a
batch of country songs for his 1962 album
“Modern Sounds in Country & Western Mu-
sic” with big band accompaniment and his
blues and gospel-drenched vocals.Meanwhile, musicians based in Bakers-
field were recording much of their music at
Capitol Records in Hollywood. The two
kingpins of “the Bakersfield Sound” were
Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, who had
no qualms against steel guitars and fiddles
and threw electrified Fender guitars into
the mix to add a dose of rock ’n’ roll energy to
their recordings.
The smooth, adult bent of Nashville con-
tinued into the ’60s, sparking another rebel-
lion among a loose crew of musicians who
bridled at the restrictions imposed on them.
Willie Nelson recorded with little success
trying to squeeze his idiosyncratic, jazz-in-
flected vocals into Nashville’s square hole,
as did Waylon Jennings, whose assertion of
their artistic independence sparked the
“Outlaw Movement” of the 1970s.
“They wouldn’t let you do anything. You
had to dress a certain way: you had to do
everything a certain way,” Jennings once
told an interviewer. “They kept trying to de-
stroy me.... I just went about my business
and did things my way.”
Johnny Cash pushed at the boundaries
of country convention by recording and re-
leasing a string of concept albums about so-
cial issues he passionately believed in, while
Loretta Lynn tested radio’s loyalty to her
homegrown music with proto-feminist
songs drawn from her hardscrabble life, one
of which was banned by some stations: her
1975 single “The Pill,” which celebrated the
new level of control the oral contraceptive
gave women over pregnancy.
More debates over country’s identity
sprouted in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Af-
ter “Saturday Night Fever” fueled a craze for
disco music and clubs, the film’s star, John
Travolta, took on country music next with
his starring role in “Urban Cowboy.” That
film sparked a national upsurge in interest
in country music and coincided with a raft of
pop-leaning country hits at the time includ-
ing Dolly Parton’s “Here You Come Again”
and “9 to 5” and Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a
Rainy Night.”
A different kind of challenge arose in the
mid-’80s when country loosened up enough
to give rise to a freshman class of literate,
critically acclaimed acts including Dwight
Yoakam, Lyle Lovett, k.d. lang and Steve
Earle.
Progressive country lighted up the
charts during that short-lived era Earle
likes to call “the great credibility scare of the
mid-’80s,” just before the arrival of Garth
Brooks, Alan Jackson, Clint Black and other
so-called hat acts of the ’90s pushed those
predecessors aside, into the newly emerging
wing called “Americana.”
Shortly after the dawn of the new millen-
nium, Texas country rapper Cowboy Troy
generated headlines and further contro-
versy when he put forth a musical hybrid he
deemed “hick-hop.” A one-liner tossed out
commonly by comedians and some country
musicians was built around the punch linethat a combination of country and rap
equals “crap.” It wasn’t long, later, however,
before country with rap breakdowns began
cropping up with greater frequency in the
wake of the breakaway success of Aldean’s
“Dirt Road Anthem.”
“When people complain about country
going pop, what they often mean is country
is sounding too black,” said historian
Charles Hughes, author of “Country Soul:
Making Music and Making Race in the
American South” and director of the Lynne
& Henry Turley Memphis Center at Rhodes
College in Memphis. “The entire history of
the genre has wrestled with people who are
not considered to be part of the country
family, and ‘Old Town Road’ is just the latest
manifestation of that.”
One thread running through country
music almost since the beginning and which
tacitly connects it to today’s buzz over Lil
Nas X is the recurring debate over new el-
ements that work their way in. Each time
the argument surfaces, some fans moan
that such changes are diluting “true” coun-
try; others parry that fresh ingredients
strengthen and expand its reach.
“Fans of country music are invested in
the identity of the genre in a way that a lot of
pop music genres aren’t,” Hughes said. “You
hear similar arguments at various times in
hip-hop: ‘Did hip-hop sell out?’ But there
are few genres in which there’s such a deep
investment in the question, and you hear
that in the music itself.”
That question has been heard loudly and
clearly in 2019 surrounding “Old Town
Road,” which spent a record 19 weeks atop
Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart. Even more
recently, Atlanta musician Blanco Brown’s
dance-floor-minded, steel-guitar-driven hit
“The Git Up” has spent nearly two months
atop of Billboard’s Hot Country Song chart.
“Fans should be the judge of a song’s
genre,” Billy Ray Cyrus told The Times last
week by email. Cyrus famously pitched in on
a remix to help bolster “Old Town Road’s”
country credentials. “Music has always
evolved sonically and there will always be
naysayers. Country fans requested and
wanted ‘Old Town Road’ played on radio.
It’s the people’s song. They made it a suc-
cess.”Just check the charts
Whether “Old Town Road,” “The Git Up”
or other tracks that buck tradition qualify
as country is, on one level, an easy call, said
Chuck Aly, vice president and general man-
ager for Country AirCheck, a radio monitor-
ing service. “The answer for me is the airplay
charts, and for us, country music is what’s
on the charts.”
Yet country radio has long been resistant
to innovation, both in terms of gender and
race, whether it was singer Charley Pride,
whose music was initially sent out by his
record label in the ‘60s with no photos to give
away that he is black, or stations that re-IN 1962,Ray Charles released “Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music.”
Express Newspapers / Getty ImagesKANE BROWNbrought country and crossover flavor to Coachella back in April.
Kevin WinterGetty Images
BILLY RAY CYRUS, left, lent some country-western cred as well as a measure of chart-Ken Burns’ series reframe
[Country,from E1]
WHAT IS C