But Burns has uncovered some unlikely commentators who occasionally threaten to steal the whole show. So the medium through which the music reached its audience has always had a disproportionate influence on what direction the music took.Īn ironic footnote to all that: Chet Atkins, the music producer and record executive most responsible for making country as slickly palatable to the widest possible audience, broke into country music as an unknown guitarist supporting Mother Maybelle Carter and her three daughters.Īnyone who cares a lick about the subject already knows who most of this doc’s smartest talking heads are going to be: Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Rosanne Cash, and Emmylou Harris. They weren’t professional musicians until radio and RCA said so.
People like the Carter family played for themselves and their neighbors. Country, on the other hand, did not exist as a category before radio more or less made it up. By this I mean, jazz was going strong before it got on the radio and would have gone on being jazz whether radio and record execs paid attention or not. But nearly every genre, from blues to jazz to rock and roll, existed as musical styles before being gobbled up by the music industry. Of course, chart success determines who gets sold and promoted in any genre. But so it does, and thus the insanely popular but musically uninteresting Garth Brooks gets an embarrassing amount of screen time, while Bill Monroe, one of the orneriest but greatest geniuses of all American music, just gets the occasional respectful nod.Īnother point that Burns only makes implicitly and I wish had explored in more depth: More than any other genre, country is the creation of radio and the record business. That’s surely the impulse that has almost always driven the Nashville music establishment, but it needn’t have influenced the shape of this doc so much. Sometimes that thinking seems almost knuckleheaded: if you were a hit, you were important. It’s not as much trashy, surreal fun as any given performance of the Grand Ole Opry or even Hee Haw, because Burns just doesn’t do trashy, but if you need a starter course in country, this is it.Īnd although Cash was never the musical equal of singer-songwriters like Haggard or Parton, he is at least a welcome exception to the rule that silently guides this documentary: chart success on the radio. If you want to see this study in multiple musical personalities displayed in fascinating detail, tune in to Ken Burns’ eight-part documentary on country music that debuts tonight (Sept.
Another word for this, of course, is schizophrenic. Sometimes the two strains were at odds, and sometimes the tension between the two created works of genius. Together, over the course of a century, these two strands stitched a durable crazy quilt broad enough to accommodate Bill Monroe and Lynn Anderson, the Bakersfield sound and countrypolitan, fiddles and syrupy violins. So who was going to fuss about stylistic differences when the records were selling? But both appealed to the working class white audience that record companies were just beginning to cultivate. The Carters were more about spirituals and traditional mountain music.
Rodgers sounded slicker, more commercial, like Tin Pan Alley injected with the blues and a yodel. But Rodgers’ and the Carters’ music, while similar, drew upon dissimilar traditions. Ralph Peer, the record company’s producer and talent scout, immediately signed both acts. Think about that serendipitous August in 1927 in Bristol, Tennessee, when, two days apart, both Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family auditioned for the Victor Talking Machine Company (which would ultimately become RCA Records). Call it diffuse or call it elastic, but it has always run on two tracks: one was rough and one was slick, one rooted in tradition, the other more modern. Country music has been having an identity crisis since it crawled out of the cradle.
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