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He was falling apart. Brilliant and tor-
tured, devout and driven, Johnny Cash had been dis-
covered in the Memphis of Sun Records—the musi-
cal milieu that gave America Elvis Presley—and had
built a career that, by the late 1960s, he seemed de-
termined to destroy through an addiction to pills.
Lost in a fog of speed and drink, Cash missed shows
and was exiled from the Grand Ole Opry in Nash-
ville after he kicked out the footlights of the stage at
the fabled Ryman Auditorium. His first marriage in
tatters, Cash was in love with June Carter, of coun-
try music’s iconic Carter Family, but June refused to
marry him until he sobered up. At last, June and her
parents isolated Cash at his house near Nashville to
dry him out and get him right.
After white-knuckling his way to sobriety, Cash
accepted a January 1968 gig at Folsom State Prison
in California, the setting for his legendary “Folsom
Prison Blues.” “I knew this was it,” Cash recalled,
“my chance to make up for all the times I messed
up.” The men in the audience had suffered too, and
Cash’s voice and experience formed an inherent
connection between singer and convict. “The same
guy who sang, ‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch
him die’ sang ‘Were You There When They Cruci-
fied My Lord?’—in the same show,” Cash’s daughter
Rosanne said. His music, like his life, was complex
and contradictory.
As is America, which has always been the source
material for the sound we know as country music.
That point is a running theme of Ken Burns’ illumi-
nating and engrossing new documentary, Country
Music, which premieres Sept. 15 on PBS. Arguably
the most influential interpreter of American history
of the past three decades, Burns tells the story of the
genre in his trademark style and, in so doing, makes
it gracefully and implicitly clear that country music
reflects not just red America but blue America too.
The music’s roots lie partly in the 1920s, a
period like our own—with massive shifts in the
economy, culture, population and media dividing
the country into those who embraced the future
and those who clung to the past. Tellingly, country
music was marketed as a nostalgic product from the
beginning—so-called old-time music even though
it was quite new.
Such reminders are helpful at a moment when