TelevisionAcademy.com 93Cappy said, ‘I know you did one on jazz. That’s why I’m asking. How about
country music, too?’ Ken called me up and said, ‘What do you think about this
suggestion?’ I said, ‘It’s a great suggestion, as long as I’m the one that gets to
write and coproduce it.’ So that started us down that road about ten years ago.”
Duncan, who had written The West (1996) and The National Parks:
America’s Best Idea (2009) for Burns, was a natural choice. “My relationship
with country music would make a good country song,” he says. “I grew up in
a little town in Iowa. The first time I ever performed musically in public, I was
eight years old, singing a Marty Robbins song. That was in 1957. I was a little bit
more of a folky, I suppose, when I was in high school and college. But I listened
to country music.”H
aving made thirty-one projects for PBS, Burns has been nominated for
fifteen Emmys and won five. “We work on ten-year plans,” he explains,
“and that means we vaguely describe that we will be delivering a lot of
different ideas and a lot of different films. We propose several films and other
films to be named later. When we decided a few years into this ten-year plan
that we wanted to do Country Music, we wrote a treatment and submitted
it to PBS’s chief programming executive, who was Beth Hoppe at the time.”
The network, he says, was enthusiastic: “There were no concerns
whatsoever. We always do projects about American history, and their
response was terrific.”
External events affected the timing, however. “Originally we envisioned
the film would be broadcast in 2018, but because of the expansion of the
Vietnam series to ten episodes, it delayed the release,” Burns recalls. “We
decided that we didn’t want to release The Vietnam War in 2016 during an
election year, so we released it in 2017, which meant just moving things along
between the two big projects.”
Big, indeed. And though not inherently political, Country Music is, in
its own way, controversial, as Burns explains: “One of the reasons we’re
so excited about [the series] is that people have some pretty superficial
conventional wisdom about country music. The series just explodes [these
notions], and you quickly see how many different types of music are in
country music. It is impossible to define it as just one thing — it crosses the
borders and intersects with all other music forms, including jazz, R&B, the
blues, folk, rock — so there’s this classically American melting pot that takes
place as you watch the series.”
In the case of Brenda Lee, who had forty-seven U.S. chart hits in the
1960s, the breadth of the genre is seen in a single career. “They categorized
me as a rockabilly,” she says, “then all of a sudden I was rock, then I was pop,
then all of a sudden I became country. When a singer is absolutely passionate
about what she does, I don’t think you should pigeonhole it. Because if you
ask us, it’s music. That’s all it is.”
For his part, Willie Nelson declares: “It’s music, you know. You can’t say
it’s this, that or the other — it’s not a Democrat or a Republican.”
Burns adds, “What you find in art — and in this case, in music — is that our
strength is in our diversity, and not in going to our tribal positions. The only
thing that comes out of tribal thinking is disagreement and division.”
The series makes clear that, as diverse as country music is, all of it —
from Gene Autry to Billy Ray Cyrus — “can exist under the umbrella of country
music,”as Marty Stuart says.B
ut that breadth and history contributed to “a significantly huge licensing
rights problem,” relates Burns, who with Duncan and Dunfey spent eight
years researching and producing the series. “We looked at over 100,000
images, we did 101 interviews — more than 175 hours of interviews — and
almost 1,000 hours of extraordinary footage and 564 music cues. That is a lot
of work, but it is what we do.
“The much more important thing is how to tell the story — how to
interweave dozens and dozens of threads together into a very complex storyBill Monroe (center) performs at the Grand Ole Opry,
Nashville, circa 1958.