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Tell a lie long enough and it starts to feel the truth. Say it even longer and this is part of the story.
Throughout Country Music, Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan's new omnibus genre documentary, there are moments of tension between the stories that Nashville likes to tell about itself – some true, others less – and reality.
And although, by far, this series of eight games and 16 hours – which begins Sunday on PBS – marks the beginning party line of the kindwhen seen closely, it reveals the breaks exposed to the view.
Anxiety about the breed has been a constant in country music for decades, right up to this year's Lil Nas X Ball League. By positioning country music as essentially the music of the white rural working class, Nashville has simplified – making this steamroller – the roots of the genre and the way it has always been engaged in extensive cultural dialogue.
But at the very beginning of "Country Music", it is recognized that the songs of slaves are part of the raw materials of the first countries. And then, remember that the banjo has its roots in stringed instruments of West Africa. The series shows how A.P. Carter, one of the founders of the Carter family, went with Lesley Riddle, a black man, to find and write songs in the Appalachian Mountains. And he explains how Hank Williams's mentor was Rufus Payne, a black blues musician.
This continues unabated, drawing an impractical story for a genre generally unwelcoming for black performers, regardless of the success of Charley Pride, Darius Rucker or DeFord Bailey, the first black performer of the Grand Ole Opry. Time and again, "country music" exposes what is too often overlooked: this country music has never evolved in isolation.
Each episode of this documentary touches on a different period, from early Fiddlin 'John Carson recordings in the 1920s to Garth Brooks' pop ascension in the 1990s. Burns used this multi-episode approach on other American institutions and on decisive historical events: "The Civil War", "The Vietnam War" and "Jazz". These are subjects that deserve rigor and patience, hence the length of the movies. . But country music, in particular, requires a mix of respect and skepticism, because often its story is one in which the controllers try to crush the counter-stories while never breaking a warm smile.
"Country Music" has its eyes riveted on the tension between gender and imagines itself as a no-nonsense platform for rural storytelling in America and as an extremely salable racket where people from all over the country, from all walks of life class levels, do a little cosplay.
Minnie Pearl, of "Hee Haw", came from a wealthy family and lived in a stately home next to the governor's mansion. Nudie Cohn, the tailor whose embroidered costumes became the country's star in the 1960s and beyond, was born Nuta Kotlyarenko in Kiev and worked in a Hollywood store. The number of life insurance ads sprinkled on the photos of the first episodes is a reminder of how much the country music broadcast depended on its sponsors. A salesman recalled having determined which houses were in agreement with the Grand Ole Opry this weekend, then tried to sell them insurance Monday morning.
The only constant of this film is Nashville's repeated efforts to repel new ideas, such as that of a body that refuses an organ transplant. Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Charlie Pride and Hank Williams Jr. are icons of the genre who have faced each other for the first time in resistance. because their desire to make music different from the norm of their time, ended up setting new standards.
These moments mark an otherwise simple and often told story of the birth and growth of country music: The 1927 Bristol Sessions, in which Ralph Peer recorded for the first time the Carter family, Jimmie Rodgers and many others; the rapid rise and accelerated disappearance of Hank Williams; the feminist power of Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton; Johnny Cash's roller coaster life; the importance of bluegrass, country country, outlaw, southern rock and pop country.
It is a tense story and, by design, incomplete – 16 hours are enough time to tell a long story, but not always deep. But since this story is painted in broad strokes, it is particularly important to attract attention the inventions and elisions that fly over every era of music.
Throughout the film, it is remembered that in Nashville, institutional memory is almost comically short. The anxiety aroused by the invasion of country music by Olivia Newton-John in the mid-1970s evoked in the film was eerily reminiscent of the anxiety aroused by the almost top passage of the table of country songs by pop singer Bebe Rexha, for a year his collaboration with Florida Georgia Line. The current battle for performers to be heard and promoted is repeated about once a decade in documentary. And many times, those who seem to be rebels – Waylon Jennings, Haggard, Buck Owens – are in fact the ones who are most interested in the traditions of the genre, bustling against a company town specializing in the smoothing of asperities, a phenomenon that echoes the recent frictions felt by artists such as Kacey Musgraves and Sturgill Simpson.
"Country Music" moves with the uniform tempo of Burns' other documentaries, making the handle of disturbing moments – light, sometimes sad – all the more striking: Mel Tillis describing the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the 1960s describing wisecracking, "You could make butter on this damn thing"; all that comes out of the mouth of the journalist and gadfly Hazel Smith, who, when she was office manager for the Hillbilly Central studio where Jennings and others have recorded, coined the phrase "illegal music".
At a moving moment, Dwight Yoakam tries to sing Haggard "Hold Things Together", about a father who raises his children after leaving his wife. Yoakam crosses the front row and then gathers for 12 seconds before he can pull out the next one.
The raw pulsation of songs like this – fortunately, there is a lot of music in this documentary – is rooted, a wink at the triumph of a genre that often advances on its own on the way. clarity. But rather than just celebrating these creative summits, "Country Music" clearly shows that the history of the genre is only a pocket version of the story of the musical experience American: people try out poses and costumes, borrowing at each turn, pointing to others who try similar things and, as soon as things become complacent, waving for something new.
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