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Country music, Ken Burns' PBS docuseries, engaging in a musical adventure from hollers to honkytonks to hit charts, are a lot of things. It's a long time, which is a fact considering the author's authorship – with a time of over 16 hours, the running time of this megillah of eight episodes falls between Burns' look at the Second World War world (The war) and his recent exploration of the conflict in Vietnam (Vietnam War). It is a tribute to artists with colorful nicknames like "The Singing Brakeman" and "The Hillbilly Shakespeare", as well as those who can be identified by a single nickname: Willie, Dolly, Merle, Emmylou, Waylon, Reba, Garth. It's a love letter to something that's old enough and big enough to encompass 78-track recordings of age-old folk songs and 64-track platinum albums sold by the millions. (The five-CD soundtrack is also a good beginner for Country 101.) And finally, it's definitely a Ken Burns production in every way, from form to magnifying glass, up to slow zooms on sepia photographs and testimonials of walnut soup; you did not live until you heard the renowned narrator of the filmmaker, Peter Coyote, pronounce in his worn-out baritone the phrase "back and original hay beans".
Most importantly, this epic and essential study (which will be presented on September 15) is both a history lesson of an American art form and the American 20th century itself. Like Burns Deep Diving in 2001 Jazz, it puts at the center of the cultural and geographical roots of music. You are never allowed to forget that this Sturm und Twang was forged in the flame-torch fusion of the American South, incorporating melodies of English / Irish / Scottish ballads sung in the Appalachians and instruments brought by European immigrants and African slaves. The earliest recordings of what was called Hill-Billy Music shared the labels with "Race Music," as well as a kind of sneaky blue scorn on the part of the so-called respectable society. The mass popularity made them both too big to be ignored or rejected. (Both would help form rock and roll.) The old notions of picking and smiling rural "primitives" are being shown in the living rooms through technology, namely radio. Suddenly, regional music is the music of the American working class. Songs inspired by Western cowboys, minstrels, and wandering medicine shows located below the Mason-Dixon range are popular in Canada thanks to a dance in the barn cast from … Chicago.
And although the essence of the core activities is presented in the first episode – each subsequent installment covers a timeline ranging from four to twelve years – all Country musicThe chapters seem to have an eye on the past as they project themselves into the future. The Carter family staple, "Will the circle be intact?" Is either verified, played on the soundtrack, or briefly sung by interviewees in seven of the eight episodes; In the second part, Johnny Cash appears as a toddler and stirs this deadly reel as an old man in the eighth part. Hear modern musicians give an impression of poetry on Jimmie Rogers, Hank Williams and Grand Old Opry O.G. Roy Acuff and bluegrass pioneers, Bill Monroe and Ernest Tubbs, keep the lineage online. From time to time, one of the talking heads will start singing an old song right after Burns has given us an original verse and the time will collapse in an instant. The artists are gone. The music is alive, again and again here.
And while the phrase "country music" may be reminiscent of some type of chord, it may be quick bluegrass failures; maybe it's Garth Brooks' C & W arena – Country music strives to exploit Baskin-Robbins and offer viewers as much flavor as possible. The acoustic style practiced by Monroe, Ricky Skaggs et al. and the explosion of Music City at the end of the 80s is treated with a magnifying glass. Thus, to varying degrees, the lone solitary sound, Western Swing, Countrypolitan, the neo-traditionalists, the Nashville sound, the Bakersfield sound, the Outlaw era, the country rock and some other subgenera. Two Cashes – Johnny and Roseanne – have mouths on the screen, as do Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Marty Stuart, Dwight Yoakam, Vince Gill and the brilliant, irreplaceable Merle Haggard. The series stops in 1996, relegating the Dixie Chicks, Taylor Swift and Sturgill Simpson, among others, to the rapid appearance in a climax. You can probably indicate omissions if you wish (anywhere in any country of the Depression, in the country of the Red Earth, etc.?), But why do you have a lot of land when there is so much ground covered, and if wonderfully?
It is a considerable effort to try to describe the dozens of evolutions and the legion of MVP, let alone to use it to convey the attitude of our country with regard to prejudices, protest movements and political turnarounds. You can tell when Burns found a story like that of Deford Bailey, an African-American musician who went from the Grand Old Opry to an outcast, or that of Charley Pride, who defeated his racist colleagues, that "I'm not sure." he thinks he can use as a microcosm for a month. given historical moment. And you can also feel the perverse effect that he tends to keep the silent majority conservative trend in country music to get back to Johnny Cash digging Bob Dylan. There are times when this topographic map of "a complicated chorus of American voices … coming together to tell a complicated American story" loses direction or bypasses detours you hope to see go down a little further. Yet, the general effect of seeing a foreign art become an important part of our daily soundscape, and leaving thousands of different flowers to bloom from the rocky soil of its origins, is overwhelming. After eight episodes, 16 hours and a hundred different stories told with four chords in three-minute bursts, you turn off your TV with the impression of knowing why calling this country music has a double meaning.
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