september 16–29, 2019 | new york 89neartheendofBetrayal—ornearthebeginningofthe
betrayalwithinBetrayal,sinceHaroldPinter’s 1978 playabout
a seven-yearaffairrunsinreverse,fromtheinfidelity’saftermathtoits
inception—a sousedwould-beloverrattlesona bit:“Lookattheway
you’relookingatme.I can’twaitforyou,I’mbowledover,I’mtotally
knockedout,youdazzleme...Mylifeis inyourhands,that’swhatyou’re
banishingmeto,a stateof catatonia,doyouknowtheStateof Catatonia?
Doyou?Doyou?Thestateof...wherethereigning
princeis theprinceofemptiness,theprinceofab-
sence,theprinceofdesolation.I loveyou.”
IntheroyalfamilyofWesterndrama,Pinterhim-
selfmightbeexactlythefigurehisintoxicated,infat-
uatedcharacterdescribes.Hislaconic,subtlybrutal
plays—knownfortheloadedpausesnowidentifiedBare-BonedandOff-Balance
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THEATER/ SARAHOLDREN
BETRAYAL
BYHAROLDPINTER,
JACOBSTHEATRE.
THROUGH
DECEMBER8.long enough to let us notice that everyone
in the frame is white save for one or two
African-Americans, then zoom in to isolate
them, underlining the point that, while the
artistic cross-pollination was mostly affec-
tionate and democratic, the money still
landed mainly in white folks’ hands. Unfor-
tunately, it’s in these sociopolitical aspects
that Country Music loses focus and, seem-
ingly, nerve. Which brings us to phase two
of the Ken Burns Effect: the moment when
the viewer realizes that an episode—and by
extension, the series as a whole—doesn’t
have as firm a handle on the big-picture
stuff as it wants you to think.
Like so many other Burns projects—in
particular The Civil War,Jazz,Baseball,
and The Vietnam War—Country Music
diligently brings up the social iniquities
baked into the American experiment and
shows how they manifested themselves
through unequal access to money, opportu-
nity, and power, but the series doesn’t
always follow through. You get a bitter little
taste of racism here and there—mostly at
the start of the films-within-a-film, where
Burns zeroes in on a performer and stays
with them for a few minutes. But then the
series becomes intoxicated by the legend of
whoever’s life is being recounted (under-
standably so, when the subject is as com-
plex and charismatic as Johnny Cash, Dolly
Parton, or Loretta Lynn) and turns into a
glorious info-dump of newsreel images,
photos, music, and mementos (including
the envelope containing the fan letter that
Cash wrote to a young Bob Dylan).
Burns gets dinged by conservatives for
turning his blockbuster projects into con-
siderations of American racism—as if
national life wasn’t not so secretly about
that anyway—but this time, he keeps doing
a catch-and-release thing, which is frus-
trating given how revelatory and damning
the details are. A photo of white minstrels
in blackface; a section dealing with Cash’s
thwarted attempts to get “The Ballad of Ira
Hayes” on the radio and being harassed by
white supremacists for having a “colored”
wife (who was actually Italian); an account
of Jimmie Rodgers, the Anglo son of a rail-
road foreman, being taught blues music by
poor black railroad workers, then inventing
his “Singing Brakeman” persona and
becoming country’s first superstar: Such
mesmerizing sequences suggest a bolder,
more challenging, but far less pledge-drive-
friendly series.
Country Music’s treatment of sexism is
even more intermittent: It should have
made more of how so many lesser-known
female domestic partners and colleagues
did artistic or emotional heavy lifting for
famous men without getting proper com-
pensation or credit. (One of them was Elsie
McWilliams, who wrote 39 songs for Rodg-
ers but got credit for only 20 and helped
him learn them by ear because he couldn’t
read music.) Female country superstars like
Parton and Lynn do their share of heavy lift-
ing for Burns as well; ditto Charley Pride,
one of country’s few African-American
stars, who emerges as one of the series’ most
eloquent and wrenching commentators.
Burns isn’t cynically avoiding the subject
of inequality, mind you. It’s all over Coun-
try Music, just not as consistently as in his
masterworks. Whenever he loses that
thread, it’s often because he’s so excited
about whatever performer he’s profiling
that he can’t help turning into one of those
brilliant teachers whose recitation of all the
cool stuff they discovered during research
becomes a show in itself at the expense of a
more pointed historical critique, or in this
case, a sense of how the promise and prob-
lems of country music resonate in the pres-
ent. Like Jazz, which jammed the past
three decades of the genre into a few min-
utes, Country Music avoids commenting
on anything that happened after 1996.
Burns says this is because he’s in the “his-
tory business,” an explanation that lets him
sidestep political minefields like the Dixie
Chicks’ anti–Iraq War protests and the
incendiary statements of Charlie Daniels
and Hank Williams Jr.
And it’s here that we enter phase three of
the Ken Burns Effect: You look over the
totality of what he has done in this produc-tion and others; at his generally solid track
record at being all things to all people, even
ones who gripe about what he could’ve done
better; and at his knack for getting millions
of people to hang on every minute of, say, a
12-hour series about national parks, and
you are forced to conclude that he is, indeed,
some kind of master, and that this is, all
things considered, one hell of a show.
Even the stoniest resolve tends to crum-
ble whenever Burns’s sensibility intersects
with screenwriter Dayton Duncan’s tum-
bling Faulknerian sentences and narrator
Peter Coyote’s matter-of-fact delivery of
them (which dries them out and makes
them paradoxically even more affecting).
The three of them together are as crackling
an ensemble as the bands they profile. The
account of Jimmie Rodgers’s death from
tuberculosis at 35 should come with a
warning for viewers to keep Kleenex
within reach: “The Southern Railway
added a special baggage car to its New
Orleans run to carry the Singing Brake-
man home,” Coyote intones, in his bar-
room Atticus Finch rasp, over Rodgers’s
recording of “Miss the Mississippi and
You.” “His pearl-gray casket covered with
lilies rested on a platform in its center, with
a photograph of Rodgers dressed in his
railroad uniform: two thumbs up, the
brakeman’s symbol that everything was
ready to move on.” Then Burns cuts to that
very photograph of Rodgers with his
thumbs up, and you fall to pieces.^ ■