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Earlier in 2019, Ken Burns and his collaborators at Florentine Films, Dayton Duncan and Julie Dunfey, took a quick bus trip that quickly guided them through the state of Tennessee. Their itinerary included several venues with significant links to the history of country music: Bristol, site of Ralph Peer's recording sessions of 1927 and 1928, which captured for the first time the Carter family and Jimmie Rodgers; Knoxville and Sevierville, in the heart of the history of Dolly Parton, among others; Memphis, cradle of rock & roll with Sam Phillips' Sun Studio and a major hub for blues musicians; and, of course, Nashville, home to the Grand Ole Opry and the place where the country music industry was finally consolidated.
In addition to inspiring enthusiasm for the eight-part documentary series Country music, the first of which was broadcast on September 16 on PBS, was intended to illustrate a recurring theme of the series. Country music comes from disparate sources and has never been a sound, says the series, as it traces its pre-commercial origins through its commercial high water peak in the mid-90s. Bluegrass Covers, Western, Honky Tonk , Cowboy songs, Nashville sound, Bakersfield sound, and much more, Country music It also makes it clear that this is not music related to a particular geographic area.
"I like country music with free electrons," says Burns, who had made a foray into popular music in 2001. Jazz. "You can not just tie it in. It does not end in an arc."
Written by Duncan, Country music was created over the course of several years and included 101 interviews with legendary artists or other people close to the business world, many of whom have since died, as well as hours of archival archives, music and photographs . Burns and his team have accumulated 175 hours of interview footage, only a small part of which is presented in the 16.5 hours of the series, a fact that always makes the team cry.
"Dayton cries 10 times more than Julie and I," says Burns. "I'm crying twice as much as Julie. You can do the math. "(In March, Burns donated the rest of his interviews to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, so that everything does not go unnoticed.)
Memphis siding in the mirrors of the bus and Nashville in front of us, Rolling stone sat with Burns, Duncan and Dunfee to discuss the process of rewriting the rich history of country music.
With a subject as vast as country music that spans so many decades, how do you select the pieces that will distil it into something that the average person will understand?
Ken Burns: This is a central issue of our entire method. We are interested in telling a complex story with generations and many people in different places. We are interested in following these cities and places, obviously people, for music and songs that change. But also, the writing of the song is an important character of our film. We try to weave stories together so that some [artists] to be emblematic. We can not tell all the stories. We have goal posts for this movie.
Dayton Duncan: It's like an album that contains a lot of individual songs, but it's also a conceptual album. So, it must serve some theme. The central point is that country music is not and has never been a type of music. It was always that amalgam of American music that came from very different roots and that, as it grew, pushed many different branches, but they are all connected.
Do you think this is a common misconception of country music, that people think that all this is just one thing? People like to use the expression "traditional country", but the tradition really seems to be that of evolution.
DD: This is the tradition.
KB: It's the change. Is there some kind of rock & roll that you have been covering for years? No, but the differences, the different nuances, is the whole spectrum. So we have all these people in country music across different parts of the spectrum. There are erased boundaries between artists coming and going. The most significant for us, in our fourth episode, is the fact that when Ray Charles was entrusted with the creative control of an album for the first time in his glorious career, Modern sounds in country and western musicwhich is a huge success. And the single from this album, "I can not stop liking", dominates the airwaves this summer. It was an incredible phenomenon. Which tells you that cross-pollination is complete. And this was one of the film's celebrations, was for us to explode our own definitions, at least initially, close and allow that to be a lot of things.
DD: I understand that talking about trade is one of them, wanting to label things. We do not consider this as a movie about, oh, "the big bad labels". It's also the industry we follow, which allows people to hear it. If it were not the case for the record companies and the radio, it is still that he would do it person to person. This is what makes cross-pollination possible.
And really, it seems that many of the men and women you cover who had a long career in the campaign also did not adhere strictly to a sound. It's like a survival tactic.
KB: What happens is that you recognize some raw talent … and most often, the trade, or simply the accidents of their intersection with the business, traps them without them fully expressing what they are. So you have a lot of people like Loretta Lynn, who is herself and comes to Nashville and runs tires for a while, until you say, "It's not the sound of Nashville. . You are yourself Be yourself. And suddenly, she explodes. Willie Nelson never finds traction in Nashville and must return to Texas to do what he will do.
You have interviews with people like Merle Haggard, Little Jimmy Dickens and Cowboy Jack Clement, who are now all gone. When you are working on a project like this, is there a sense of urgency, time passing?
Julie Dunfey: Yes, and we are very aware of the age and situation of people. Harold Bradley and Little Jimmy Dickens were the first two interviews we had, at the request of people who said they had to be obtained.
DD: We started interviewing people in 2012. We interviewed Ralph Stanley very early. We have Cowboy Jack in his little office, ten steps from his room.
KB: There is a constriction in your heart about this, that of this 101 [interviewees] that we have lost 20 and that you are desperate that no one comes before the broadcast. At the same time, we feel so privileged to have them. Like Merle, which is one of the most important, if not the biggest, strengths in our film. We're in the editing room saying, "Did Merle comment on this?" You want to bring him in because he feels like God, you know. As Ralph Emery said, "He's a handsome Hollywood guy who looks like Warren Beatty and that's the whole thing. He can write, he can sing, he is beautiful. In the end, you see someone who is somehow back to Okie as his father was, with hat and mustaches all over. But in his eyes, that glow and flicker that live beyond him. I'm still choked watching any comment.
DD: In fact, one of the great joys of the project is to meet and for us to interview people whose career we want to follow, but [also] had a lot to say about things totally unrelated to their life and career. So Merle is probably the best example, and Marty Stuart is a great example. Ketch Secor, whose life we do not even cover because he is too young, or Rhiannon Giddens.
KB: Or Willie. So Willie does not speak, right? He is the death of any interview and I was on View in a separate segment with him. And I watched people just paralyzed because Willie had written a book about anecdotes of the road. And they said, "So what's your favorite anecdote?" And Willie, "You can read the book." Finally, after years of stalking, we were allowed to interview him on a bus on Friday afternoon, in rush hour, where the bus should be on for air conditioning. So we reduce our three and a half pages of questions to reduce the essential elements. But like Merle, he wanted to talk about Ernest Tubb. He wanted to talk about all the people who came before. So, if you went through these places, he enlivened and helped us understand something, and he realized: [he is] a lead to these times earlier.
DD: When we started this – our normal thing is, ok, who are the 20 historians, the list of historians and people who have written books and biographies of people? And these are often the people we rely on, like camera interviews. But because we wanted to have Jimmy Dickens in his lifetime and those people, we started to accumulate a vast library of people who talked about country music with intelligence, but with this small angle they are they even musical artists.
It seems like you have a good opportunity here to reach people who have not paid much attention to country music and who may have dismissed it altogether. What do you think of this tendency to not treat it seriously?
KB: It is partly cultural, partly very rich, partly in taste. I brought in a Californian friend who literally said, "Ken, do I love all your stuff except country music?" At the end of the second episode, he was in tears. At the end of the 8th episode, it was a puddle of water. Whenever I see him, he always looks like a deer caught in the headlights because he had been so ill-prepared for the emotional collapse of what the accumulation of stories, the accumulation of songs, the accumulation of art have done. That's what we think we want to get. We are a particularly divided country in which we are more than happy to fly over a group of people that we suppose to be the basis of country music, forgetting that it is the dominant music in America at the moment.
JD: I arrived at the project thinking that I knew nothing about country music. And I started to discover, in fact I do it. I was in college in the 70s, so I knew the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, I knew Willie, I knew Waylon. I had all the albums of Emmylou. I thought, "Oh, this country?" As I began to know the deep story and understand the roots, I became an odious convert. But to answer your question, I've been surprised over the years … people I've known for a very long time, like a friend of mine who works on Wall Street. When I told him what I was working on, he said, "Oh, I'm a big fan of Bob Wills." I thought, "How did I not know that about you? ? "He knew so much about country music.
Earlier you mentioned the presence of Ketch Secor and Rhiannon Giddens in the series, even though this story does not cover any of their work. Why did you choose these artists?
KB: They are young, passionate about music now, but they felt compelled to understand where the music came from. It's wonderful that the people who appear most often in Episode 1, the oldest period, are the youngest: Rhiannon and Ketch. They took the initiative to find out what was going on in Galax, Virginia, when Pops Stoneman and Fiddlin's John Carson and others were at the beginning of this music, and could help us understand a relationship that goes back even further through an African and African group. a European tradition of the banjo and a violin. These are people today who have a good knowledge, maybe more than anyone – I mean, I would never challenge Marty [Stuart’s] the supremacy to understand what's going on in the history of country music. They saved our bacon in the first episode.
Ken, I saw that you were asked where country music ended as an art, and your answer was, "There is no end." This story is still being written. According to you, who of the contemporary landscape is likely to be part of these same conversations in 25 to 30 years?
KB: We are historians, amateurs as we can be. But we are interested in what we know and in the goals of what we have done. We felt the temptation BaseballI felt the temptation Jazz do the same thing. And we can not hurt and we can not make a firm decision because history involves a sort of triangulation that only perspective – that is, the passage of time – allows. Is it 20 years old, 25 years old? Is it 30. I'm not sure. But I know that you lose a level of comfort when you get too close to the present because it's your province.
DD: We could all have people we tend to listen to more or love more than others, but that's not the point. Here is what I am going to tell you is that there are people who are playing very well today and who are going to do that. And there are people playing today and we do not know much who will be there too.
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