August 2019 | Rolling Stone | 33
presented, especially the sections that
involve her dad, Johnny Cash, whose
death in Episode 8 is effectively the
series’ end point. “The more [the film-
making process] went on, the more re-
assured and impressed I was with what
they were doing,” she says. “They went
as deep as you could go.”
Cash was also among the first to see
the finished film. “They connected
every dot,” she says, “from Appalachia
to Bob Wills to Bakersfield to my dad.
It was artfully done, and so moving.”
B
URNS IS A CHILD of the Sixties —
by his own description, a hippie
in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who
sold the first issue of ROLLING STONE
as a clerk at Discount Records on South
University Avenue. His mom died when
he was 11, and his dad was an academic
ill-served by the academy, a legacy no
doubt informing his son’s path.
Burns has been living in rural New
Hampshire since 1979, not long after he
finished at Hampshire College. In 1991,
flush with the success of The Civil War,
he bought a rambling Victorian house,
which would become the editing hive
of his company, Florentine Films. One
day this spring, a team there was fo-
cused on a six-hour Ernest Heming-
way documentary. Lined with posters
of musicians and baseball players, with
dog beds, imperfect wooden floors,
and employees in T-shirts, the building
is like off-campus housing tricked out
with cutting-edge postproduction gear.
The rest of the New Hampshire site,
including the 66-year-old filmmaker’s
home, is perched on top of a hill about
1.5 miles outside town. Burns’ office
is a museum of American history and
his own work. He likes to show people
around; in a gesture you sense he’s re-
peated a few times, he hands a visitor
an iron manacle, dating to the days of
American slavery. “This is the United
States also, you know?” says Burns.
Among Burns’ past visitors is
Marty Stuart, one of Country Music’s
secret weapons. He’s something of
a genre Zelig. As an 11-year-old, he
met hit singer Connie Smith at a con-
cert he attended and told his mother
he’d marry Smith someday (he did).
Stuart hit his career stride at 13 playing
virtuoso mandolin with bluegrass ar-
chitect Lester Flatt; he joined Johnny
Cash’s band (and married his daugh-
ter Cindy) in the Eighties, became
a solo hit maker in the Nineties, and
an Americana standard-bearer in the
2000s. Stuart is also one of the world’s
foremost country archivists; he owns
Jimmie Rodgers’ guitar, Cash’s first
black performance suit, a handwrit-
ten copy of Hank Williams’ “I Saw the
Light,” and the boots Patsy Cline was
wearing when she died.
Stuart was impressed by how
Burns’ film engaged with country’s di-
versity issues. “Women have had to
fight — and at this minute are having
to fight — for their equal share in the
world of country music,” he says, al-
luding to the gross underrepresenta-
tion of women on country radio. That
fact is especially outrageous given
how integral Maybelle Carter’s sig-
nature “scratch” guitar style, Sara
Carter’s vocal approach, and the lega-
cies of Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly
Parton, and others are to the music, as
Country Music makes plain.
The film also points out how many
country greats had African American
musical mentors, and how little-known
their contributions are. Hank Williams
learned from Rufus “Tee Tot” Payne,
Bill Monroe from Arnold Schultz,
Johnny Cash from Gus Cannon. Lesley
Riddle helped the Carter Family col-
lect and learn songs; Rodgers learned
to sing and play the blues from black
musicians as a railroad water boy, and
made one of his most famous record-
ings, “Blue Yodel No. 9 (Standin’ on
the Corner),” with Louis Armstrong.
The film doesn’t sidestep racism in the
music’s history. DeFord Bailey, one of
the Grand Ole Opry’s biggest stars, was
fired for dubious cause. Johnny Cash,
thanks in part to his progressive poli-
tics, was the target of a proposed boy-
cott by the Ku Klux Klan, which circu-
lated fake news stories that his Italian
American wife, Vivian, was black. Prior
to a Seventies CMA broadcast, Loretta
Lynn was warned of the optics of get-
ting too close to Afri can American
country legend Charley Pride when
presenting him with an award (she
made a point of both hugging and kiss-
ing him). Pride is one of the film’s most
profound commentators.‘I
T’S REALLY IMPORTANT people
know country music is a hybrid,
a creolization that comes out of
African and European cultures mix-
ing,” says singer Rhiannon Giddens,
an early- American-music scholar who
drove that point home earlier this year
on a concert program with Burns,
Marsalis, Stuart, and the Jazz at Lin-
coln Center Orchestra. “Also, most im-
portantly, it comes from working-class
people mixing. That’s the thing that’s
often forgotten, that where people
made these interactions musically
was in the fields, on the riverboats,
or wherever — and that this music is
our music, all of us together. It’s very
dangerous to subscribe to it as ‘white
music,’ or as this monolithic thing, be-
cause it’s not. And that’s the beauty of
America, I think — all the positive stuff
comes out of that aspect of the mix.”
In a year when country’s biggest storyis a queer black rapper from Georgia,
these lessons couldn’t be more timely.
Ultimately, the core power of Burns’
documentaries is their emotional
potency, and Country Music is no
different. Its single most stirring mo-
ment might be Vince Gill choking up
during a rendition of “Go Rest High
on That Mountain” at George Jones’
funeral. “It was hard to be the one to
completely fall apart,” says Gill, look-
ing back with a faint chuckle, “but it
kind of gave everybody the license to
fall apart too.”
There’s also the scene where
Rosanne Cash, after a backstage dis-
agreement with her dad, describes
watching him walk away from her, as
he’d done “so many times before,”
most notably when he abandoned
her and her mother. It’s heartbreak-
ing, but she was willing to go there.
“By that time, I trusted [Ken and his
team],” Cash says. “And you know,
what’s the point of not going there?
Truth is powerful.”
The series coda is a slide show of
modern artists — Taylor Swift, Little Big
Town, Sturgill Simpson, and others —
but it effectively ends in the Nineties,
Johnny Cash’s death notwithstand-
ing. Those who want framing on the
Dixie Chicks’ mid-2000s blacklisting,
the gender politics of modern country
radio, or the cultural ramifications of
“Old Town Road” may be frustrated.
But Burns, whose Jazz series was crit-
icized mainly for its final episode’s
reductive run-up to the present, de-
murs. “We’re in the history business,”
he says. “This modern period, 20, 25
years out, is nothing I can touch. I
don’t know who in our gallery of con-
temporary stars is going to be as dura-
ble as a Merle Haggard, or as important
as a Johnny Cash or a Loretta Lynn.”
Stuart is pragmatic about what
Country Music might accomplish. “I
don’t expect this to affect contempo-
rary country music radio,” he says. But
he does believe it “will bring aware-
ness and understanding about where
country music comes from, and how
deep it goes. And I think for any cul-
turally minded contemporary coun-
try singer or songwriter — a star or a
would-be — it will help them under-
stand what they’re really a part of.”
“This is a history of an art form
whose roots are dark and complex and
part of our collective unconscious,”
says Cash, “rooted in our migration
and history and who we became as
Americans. It’s all there in this story.
All these songs that came from Scot-
land and England and Ireland into Ap-
palachia, and the slave songs and work
songs that came from Africa, the meld-
ing of that: That’s our history. And it’s
important to know your history.”KEY TRACKS
FROM THE
SERIES
Jimmie Rodgers
“Blue Yodel #8
(Mule Skinner Blues)”
This 1931 recording — an
African American-rooted
folk blues — has echoed
down the ages of country.
Bill Monroe did it for his
Opry debut, and Dolly
Parton and Merle Haggard
cut memorable takes. The
Byrds’ Clarence White’s
supergroup Muleskinner
was even named after it.The Carter Family
“Can the Circle Be
Unbroken”
This song of grief for a
mother’s death, reworked
from an English hymn, was
released by the Carter
Family in 1935 and went
on to be perhaps country’s
greatest spiritual. The Nitty
Gritty Dirt Band named
their 1972 hippie-hillbilly
LP after it. And the Opry
begins every show with it.Patsy Cline
“Crazy”
Willie Nelson wrote and
recorded the song that be-
came Cline’s signature, but
his oddball phrasing made
it a commercial out lier.
With Cline’s resplendent
voice and Owen Bradley’s
lush production, it became
a hit in 1961, and it’s still
considered the most popu-
lar jukebox song in history.Kris Kristofferson
“Me and Bobby McGee”
Many rank Kristofferson
among country’s best
writers. Proof is in
recordings like Johnny
Cash’s “Sunday Mornin’
Coming Down.” But
he made his biggest
mark with this song,
immortalized by
Janis Joplin.Dolly Parton
“I Will Always Love You”
Written as a farewell to col-
laborator Porter Wagoner,
Parton’s 1974 hit is one of
the genre’s greatest vocal
performances, with its spi-
raling high notes. Whitney
Houston’s cover made
it one of modern R&B’s
greatest vocals too. W.H.