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spanning a century of American life. This, of course, involves the writing and
the editing, bringing them all together in the edit room, which is where these
films are made.”
Of the 101 talking heads in Country Music, Bill C. Malone is the only
fulltime historian, Dunfey says; his formidable 1968 book Country Music USA
remains the definitive history of the art form. The other hundred interviewees
are stars, past and present, including forty members of the Country Music
Hall of Fame — twenty of whom are no longer with us.
Particularly insightful quotes come from Stuart and Lee, as well as
Dwight Yoakam, Kathy Mattea, Vince Gill and Rosanne Cash, who describes
Sara Carter’s singing as “like wailing at the grave... it just sort of pierces you,
so plain-spoken and so without any kind of embellishment, just telling the
truth, one note at a time.”
The episodes covering the 1970s and ’80s focus on those headliners who
eschewed the “commercial” Nashville sound in favor of a more authentic,
rootsy approach. There’s Emmylou Harris, who recorded whole albums of
classic country songs, and Reba McEntire, who insisted on the spare sound of
a whining guitar and solo fiddle instead of a pop-style string section.
According to Ketch Secor, front man and cofounder of the contemporary
roots band Old Crow Medicine Show, “In all things country music, we see a
response: how far are they going to take country music? Well, it’ll come back
around again. It’s always reminding itself who it is, and the old ghosts are
always rising up and refusing to be cast aside.”C
ountry Music focuses on the socially progressive as well as the musically
authentic. Challenging the stereotype that country is the exclusive
province of white men in cowboy boots, Burns and his crew illuminate the
essential role African Americans have played in this art form.
“As you’re passing through the film, you can begin to count,” Burns says.
“A. P. Carter of the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe
and Johnny Cash, just to name five great founders. You might put them on
an early Mount Rushmore of country music, right? Well, all of them had an
African-American tutor who helped to make them worthy of that Mount
Rushmore.
“So what you begin to see is that our own narrow categorizing is just
that: narrow and arbitrary categorizing. And what we have to do is see country
music as part of a continuum of American music that is completely related
to jazz, to R&B and to the blues, and it is one of the parents of rock and roll.”
(To that end, trumpeter and bandleader Wynton Marsalis, one of the principal
voices in Burns’s 2001 series, Jazz, also appears in Country Music.)
The series features touching and convincing portrayals of DeFord Bailey,
the first black star of the Grand Ole Opry, and of Charley Pride, still country
music’s only African-American superstar. It also focuses on Kitty Wells
and Loretta Lynn, who sang about women’s concerns well before the term
feminism was in common use.
The eight episodes cover roughly eight decades, from the 1920s to the
’90s. Each era has its great men and women who take center stage. For
example, the account of Merle Haggard watching Johnny Cash’s famous 1959
concert at San Quentin — from the audience, as a prisoner — is especially
moving. So is the tale of Dolly Parton writing “I Will Always Love You” in
1974 as a way of telling Porter Wagoner, her mentor and employer (on TV’s
syndicated The Porter Wagoner Show), that she was ready to move on.W
hile making the series, Burns says, “We did regular progress reports,
and we would always invite PBS to significant screenings of rough cuts
and fine cuts. We consider it all one piece, so we don’t work on one
episode, finish it and go to the next. We treat it as one big film, so we would
have marathons — several-day screenings in New Hampshire [where his
production company, Florentine Films, is based] — and PBS would come and
look at it, along with consultants, historians and advisors.“When the last episodes were going online, we had a screening in
Manhattan, and PBS was there. They already knew it was going to be a good
series and had confidence that we would do the postproduction work the way
we always have.”
Like a mighty river, a topic this broad sometimes overflows its banks
or, in this case, programming slots. “When PBS first saw it, they were more
interested in having standard time slots for broadcast —a full hour, ninety-
minute or two-hour time slot,” Burns recalls. “The seventh episode was well
over two hours. If I remember correctly, a PBS programming executive said,‘I
think you are going to have to cut it.’
“I said, ‘I tried really hard and I got everything down to time, but this
episode is so great that I think it needs this amount of time.’ She goes, ‘I don’t
think so, but let me watch it,’ and as soon as she did, she said, ‘Of course,
you can have the non-standard time,’ providing again one of the myriad of
reasons why we work with PBS: they were willing to yield to the art — and not
to the broadcast schedule.”
Burns says he and PBS are always aligned on the ultimate goal: “We are
trying to engage people in the complexities of their own history. We are trying
to tell an inclusive story that doesn’t exclude anybody but instead, makesCOURTESY OF SONY MUSIC ARCHIVES