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If country music had a Mount Rushmore, Hank Williams would be a shoo-in.
Many music fans would agree with this assessment, but that means a lot from Dayton Duncan, producer and lead author of "Country Music," a new documentary directed by Ken Burns.
Burns put it another way: "For me, Hank Williams is the knee of the bee. … If all you have is Hank Williams, that's all. That's all you need. "
Deceased in 1953, Williams remains a legendary figure in the world of music and a singer-songwriter of great influence. Not surprisingly, it is featured prominently in Burns' PBS, an epic production spanning eight episodes and covering much of the twentieth century.
"Country Music" debuts tonight on Alabama's public television at 7 pm. CT. The following episodes, lasting approximately two hours each, will be broadcast at the same time from Monday to Wednesday, 15-18 September and 22-25 September.
Viewers will have to wait for the third episode to meet Williams, with each installment in the series covering approximately ten years of songs, artists, and history. And although his primacy is clearly established, Williams is only a crucial figure in a pantheon including the Carter family, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Jimmie Rodgers, Bill Monroe, Tammy Wynette, and Emmylou Harris. George Jones.
Burns said his team had conducted 101 interviews for the film, including 40 members of the country music Hall of Fame, and listened to tens of thousands of songs. "Country Music" took about eight years and the 16.5 hour film was distilled from about 175 hours of interview footage. The finished product also includes photos, videos and a narration by Peter Coyote.
Bobby Horton of Birmingham, music historian and multi-instrumentalist, worked on this film, as he has done for several other Burns projects, including "Baseball", "Mark Twain", "National Parks" and " Lewis & Clark ".
Horton was present in March – and applauded by the public – when Duncan, one of Burns' long-time collaborators, presented an overview of "Country Music" at the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery . The vignettes featured that night focused on Williams, but they also highlighted another pioneering Alabama act, the Maddox Brothers and Rose.
In recent interviews with AL.com, Burns and Duncan discussed the contributions of Alabama musicians, country music in general, and Country Music in particular. Here is what they said:
Q: What was so convincing about this topic? Why were you attracted to this as a filmmaker?
burns: This is the story of the human experience. People make fun of country music by saying they are good old boys, hunting dogs and six-packs. But this really concerns universal human affairs. It's about jealousy, rage, a broken heart, being in good relationship with God. It's a beautiful piece of poetry and a beautiful piece of music, married. All my work has been trying to understand who we are and what motivates us. I am a mechanic in the soul. I love to lift the hood.
Duncan: It is precisely what we have done in the past and our passions, namely, to explore the history of the United States, in particular, who are the Americans. … We are more interested in ascending stories than descending stories. Country music went up and down. He was mainly motivated by the need and desire of people who often felt despised, or left out, to tell their story, to talk to each other or to talk to the world, who they were and what they were going through. . , through music.
It's also a story that can remind us, if we listen to it, that we are all together. We live the same emotions, that's what country music is. These are basic but universal things. It's broken heart. It's death. "I saw the hearse come rolling to take away my mother," is not it?
It is to be deceived. It's about deceiving someone. It's a question of failure. These are difficult times and hard work, and sometimes hope of redemption. All these things know no boundaries because they are human.
Q: What did you learn about country music while working on this film?
burns: All. I am a child of R & B and rock 'n' roll. It was not my music. That did not mean I hated it; I did not know. For me, it was like saying that you plunged your foot into a pool and that you suddenly plunged into the depths. This film raises many questions about geography, economics, racism, women. I just do not think I'm prepared in any way for the emotions I feel.
Duncan: What you find in country music, once you start watching it and seeing how it has developed, is that there are no borders. There are no racial or gender boundaries, because it is an art form. Artists know, before the rest of the culture knows, what works best is when you're on these edges, you encounter something and you pull another, then you pull out a party that makes sense to you.
All the great figures of the country music pantheon – A.P. Carter, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Bill Monroe – were all influenced in their youth by African-American musicians. And it was not a one-way street. Charley Pride wanted to sing like Hank Williams. He was discovered when he was a semi-professional baseball player in Helena, Montana, working in a metalworking factory, playing baseball and working in a bar, singing. Two guys from Grand Ole Opry heard him sing a song from Hank William and told him, "Dude, with such a voice, you should come to Nashville."
The thing that keeps coming up in our film is a kind of cross-pollination. If it's good music, it's for everyone, and to become good music, do not stay in a narrow silo or fence. In country music, it's America at its best.
Q: What is the importance of country music in the state of Alabama and its musicians?
burns: For me, Hank Williams is the bee's knees. Kris Kristofferson said this with a lot of poetry: "I wish he had lived as old as me, because I know there are many good songs. I did not know anything at 29, but he had already written "Listen to this solitary loneliness" and "I have a Ford hot-rod and a two-dollar bill." "If all you have is Hank Williams, that's all." you need.
Duncan: Alabama is very important for country music because Hank Williams is at the center of this story. He embodies all that country music is. He is the only person we named one of our eight episodes. The title of episode 3 is "The Hillbilly Shakespeare". Hank was an agent of change and expansion of country music through honky-tonk, and he is also the best representative in songs of sorrow and sorrow. It's an important part of our third episode and in subsequent episodes, like Episode Seven, you can see the people who are influenced by it.
It is so important for later generations that Townes Van Zandt, a great minstrel native of Alabama but not from Texas, was obsessed with the fact that on the day of his 29th birthday, he used it thinking that He was going to die because that was the age of Hank Williams. It's the size of Hank Williams and his big shadow. … If you had a Mount Rushmore (country music), Hank Williams would obviously be there.
Q: Several other musicians from Alabama appear in this documentary. How important was Emmylou Harris, born in Birmingham?
Duncan: I hope one of the things that our eight episodes do is that she puts Emmylou Harris in the important role she played in the 1970s and early 1980s, influencing an entire generation of listeners.
Her first two solo albums, along with Waylon Jennings' Dreaming my Dreams, brought me back to my country. I have worn all these albums. With Waylon, it was his attitude and the songs he was singing. With Emmylou, of course, it was his voice. It is impossible not to fall in love with his voice. But she sang those songs, of which I did not know many songs, but they were country songs, like Buck Owens, '' Together Again. & # 39; & # 39 ;. His interpretation was incredible.
Then there is "Love Hurts", an Everly Brothers song written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. So, she brought that, but giving it a flavor and a slightly different angle, which invited a new generation to country music. People like Dwight Yoakam say, "The reason I started this adventure and went to California to play the country singer was because of Emmylou Harris." OK? Complete stop. I hope that she will be considered, hopefully, as an extremely important person in the evolution of country music.
Q: Alabama has produced other musicians who have played a fundamental role in country music, such as the Brothers of Louvin. What role do the Louvins play in your film?
Duncan: They are very important. They get neither the space and the time that Hank Williams has in the film, nor the space and time that Tammy Wynette has, nor the space and time Emmylou Harris has. But we're talking a lot, in the '50s, when rock'n'roll seemed to scare off the country music from the airwaves and in record sales, we're talking about different responses to that. This is where we present the Louvin brothers. Part of the argument we make is that they always kept this "fraternal harmony", but they introduced an electric guitar and a drums in a style of music that did not allow it before. It was a bit in response to rock 'n' roll.
Later, when Emmylou talked about Gram Parsons' country music tutorial, she said, "I had never heard of the Louvin brothers." She added, "I listened to the Louvin brothers. I did not know that Ira Louvin was a man, with that high voice. But she said, "Gram has introduced this, and I wanted to go out and buy all the Louvin Brothers albums."
After the death of Gram Parsons, when she finally made her own albums, the two musical signals used in this episode were "Boulder to Birmingham," her emotional reaction to Gram Parsons' death, and "If I could only win your love, which was an old song of the Louvin brothers.
Q: While watching this film, viewers will discover "the most colorful group of Hillbilly in the United States," the Maddox and Rose brothers. They were from Alabama. How did you discover them?
Duncan: Merle Haggard gave me some time (for an interview) and he said, "The Maddox and Rose brothers; do you know about them? And I said, "No, sir, I do not know it. And he said, "You want to examine them. They are great. He loved talking about it. With some of these people, they are more motivated to talk about history and their heroes than for themselves.
Q: Do big country artists have something in common?
Duncan: Well, you did not have to grow up in poverty or in difficult circumstances to be a great country artist. But many of the great artists that we have mentioned in the film have grown very poor or in difficult conditions.
Hank's father, in essence, came out of his life when he entered the hospital. Tammy Wynette was sure it was hard. Brenda Lee was the main source of income for her family in Georgia at the age of 7. Dolly Parton's parents paid the doctor who delivered it with a bag of cornmeal.
There is Loretta Lynn, the daughter of the coal miner. And George Jones … his family lived in social housing in Beaumont, Texas, and his father drunk beat him at night, unless he sang for him. His father placed him at the corner of a street, because he had such a good voice, a handshake, a busk. He was the 9 or 11 year old boy, and the father took his son's money and went to the bender.
Q: Is there anyone you want to interview for the film, but it did not work for some reason?
Duncan: Ray Price agreed to be interviewed, but he died before we could arrange the interview, and the same thing with George Jones. He had agreed to be interviewed and we were too late to start. But we had "Cowboy" Jack Clement, the legendary producer, in his office, in his little office, eight steps from his bedroom, about a month before his death. We had Merle probably a year before his death. We have Little Jimmy Dickens.
Q: The film has a quick schedule, but it ends before the present day. How did you choose a stop point?
Duncan: We stop around 1996. We do it because we are historians and not journalists. The difference is an expanse of time, which allows you to look back and triangulate, and see what was important at that time and that might not have been recognized, because something has obscured it . All the films we made have what I call this historical link.
In 1996, Garth Brooks exploded on the scene. He brought the popularity of country music to America at the height of the stratosphere. It was an iconic change, and we also follow what it meant for the pressure on producers. Expectations for sales had been lower. You know, it went from "A gold record would be good" to "An album of four platinum records would be good." This is also the year of Bill Monroe's death, and we will follow him since the second episode.
Q: If you had to find a solution to remember for those who watch "Country Music", what would it do?
burns: These are human stories. It's happened to me to work in human history, as a painter works in watercolor or oil. Human nature does not change. What we see when we tell our historical stories are evergreen themes. … We are, as Americans, an alloy. There is no us; there are not them. That's the message of country music.
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