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VSCountry music has had an identity crisis since it came out of the cradle. Call it diffuse or call it elastic, but it has always worked on two tracks: one was rough and one was smooth, one rooted in tradition, the other more modern.
Think of this happy August 1927 in Bristol, Tenn., When, two days apart, Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter family auditioned for the Victor Talking Machine Company (which would eventually become RCA Records). Ralph Peer, record producer and discoverer of the record company, immediately signed the two acts. It was a great week for country music. But the music of Rodgers and Carters, although similar, is based on different traditions. Rodgers seemed smoother, more commercial, like Tin Pan Alley injected with blues and a yodel. The Carters spoke more spirituals and traditional mountain music. But both called the white working public that record companies were just beginning to cultivate. So who was going to meddle with the stylistic differences when the records would sell?
Together, over the course of a century, these two strands sewed a durable quilt and wide enough to accommodate Bill Monroe and Lynn Anderson, Bakersfield's sound and country, violins and syrupy violins. Sometimes the two strains disagreed and sometimes the tension between the two genius works created. Another word for this, of course, is schizophrenic.
If you would like to see this study in several musical personalities displayed with fascinating details, watch Ken Burns' eight-part documentary about country music that will debut tonight (September 15th) on your local PBS affiliate. It's not as fun and surreal as any given performance from Grand Ole Opry or even Hee Hawbecause Burns just did not do anything wrong, but if you need a basic course in your country, that's it.
Burns covers the titans, leaving well-deserved legends like Rodgers, Hank Williams and Patsy Cline, and maybe a little too much for Johnny Cash, although you can see how the creators of the doc need Cash to connect disparate parts of their story: Cash, not only married to the Carter family, becoming a de facto member of the royal family of the genre, but also seeking to bring people like Bob Dylan into the country, gave historical concerts in Folsom and San Quentin jails, cause Native Americans, and also for many years was just a big hard to break pills.
And although Cash has never been the musical equal of singer-songwriters such as Haggard or Parton, it's at least a welcome exception to the rule that silently guides this documentary: the success on the radio.
Sometimes this thought seems almost stupid: if you were successful, you were important. Let the cash register be your guide. This is surely the impetus that has almost always motivated Nashville's musical establishment, but it does not need to influence as much. But so, and so Garth Brooks, incredibly popular, but musically uninteresting, gets an embarrassing amount of time on the screen, while Bill Monroe, one of the wildest but most awesome geniuses of any American music, occasionally receives a respectful nod.
Another point that Burns only makes implicitly and that I wish I had deepened: more than any other genre, the country is the creation of radio and the record business. Of course, the success of the charts determines who is sold and promoted in all genres. But almost every genre, from blues to jazz to rock and roll, existed as musical styles. before be engulfed by the music industry. By that I mean that jazz was strong before being published on the radio and that it would have continued to be jazz, whether the radio and the record directors were careful or not. On the other hand, the country did not exist as a category before the radio invented it more or less. People like the Carter family have played for themselves and their neighbors. It was all homemade. They were not professional musicians until the radio and RCA said so. Thus, the medium through which music has reached its audience has always had a disproportionate influence on the direction of music.
An ironic note to all of this: Chet Atkins, the music producer and record director most responsible for making the country as palatable to the public, burst into country music as an unknown guitarist supporting Mother Maybelle Carter and her Three girls.
All those who are very interested in the subject already know who will be the most intelligent: Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Rosanne Cash and Emmylou Harris. But Burns has discovered unlikely commentators who sometimes threaten to steal the show. Who could have known if Brenda Lee spoke so well, or Jeannie Seely, Ray Benson, Carlene Carter or Charlie Pride? Country music to his surprises.
But best of all is Marty Stuart, who, in addition to being a great musician and articulate music historian to whom he has devoted his life, also has a great story: when he was still a boy, he had told his mother was going to get married. the country's star Connie Smith one day, and several decades later, he did just that.
Looking at the doc, there were more times than I could count and would have liked Burns to come and shoot a Marty Stuart movie talking. His improvised remarks are just as insightful as anything in the voice-over script written by Dayton Duncan and read by Peter Coyote. As Shelby Foote was Burns Civil warMarty Stuart too Country music.
It is Stuart's responsibility to emphasize the aforementioned dichotomy between Jimmie Rodgers' blues and refinement and traditional Carters gospel music. It is Stuart who points out that Maybelle Carter has practically invented the country guitar sound.
Beginning the fifth episode, Stuart describes the musical melting pot of the Grand Ole Opry scene in the middle of the century: "All his children had come to the Mother Church of Country Music. It was almost like a badge of honor that you had to bring your culture with you to the table. That's why Bob Wills and his guys brought us Western music. That's why Hank Williams brought the South with him from honky tonks. Johnny Cash brought the black soil of Arkansas. Bill Monroe extracted music from bluegrass music from Kentucky. Willie Nelson brought his poetry from Texas. Patsy Cline brought her the heartache of Virginia. I mean, it was the most wonderful parade of sons and daughters in America that brought their hearts, souls and experiences, and it gave us a great era for country music. "
The episode five is perhaps the best part of the series. Covering the years when Haggard, Parton, Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn and George Jones and Tammy Wynette dominated the radio's playlists, it illustrates the moment when popularity and musical genius were only one. After this strong moment, the series, like the music it covers, loses steam.
I wish I could claim a friend's comment that all modern countries are from … eagles. It's just so unbearable: you still have your steel pedal and a violin here and there, but today's music serves only one flavor, and that's vanilla. You hardly find anything weird in the country: no recitation, no psychotic falsetto of Bill Monroe, no cheesy humor, no qualities or eccentricities that make the country unique, even though it's alienates respectable listeners from the middle class. And it's no coincidence that you will not find any of the Aboriginal geniuses that inspired the songs of Hank Williams, Merle Haggard or Dolly Parton. Aside from a few artists like Sturgill Simpson and Margo Price, most of the contemporary country stars that I hear all seem to resonate as if they had just been playing a party party.
I guess Burns and his team came to the same conclusion, because their story ends somewhere in the '90s, around the same time. Johnny Cash collaborated with producer Rick Rubin to record three dummies featuring a man who looks eternity in the eyes and never blinks. It's a dark moment but appropriate to close.
Or maybe they did not find an elegant way to say that the contemporary country is just not very interesting. Because sometimes you have the feeling while watching Country music that they were afraid to offend no matter who. Nowhere is this more awkwardly obvious than in the cases where the doc comes up against the subject of race. The elephant in this room is that this country is the music of the whites and the African-American artists brought to testify the contrary, even when they say sensible things, sound terribly like tokens. Because no matter how many country songs Ray Charles has sung and no matter how many hits in Charley Pride, the country is all white. The artists were white. And so were their audiences. Similarly, the often ugly, conservative and sometimes outright racist impulses expressed by more than a few interpreters in the 1960s and 1970s are almost completely ignored. We do not hear that Marty Robbins is recording "Is not I Right," a song that mocks civil rights activists, or Guy Drake, whose "Welfare Cadillac" is ranked fifth in the list of countries in the world. 1970.
"What gets lost in this approach is the strange strangeness and sanctuary of crazies hiding in every corner of Nashville."
In his zeal to understand all the important and important things about the country – his words deal with real adult problems ("The Pill", "D-I-V-O-R-C-E"); it expresses dreams and the disappointed populism of the working class; the performers and their audiences are on an equal footing, just like the family – that sometimes covers the floor too often (do we really need to hear the long and sad story of George and Tammy? again?)
What gets lost in this approach is the strange strangeness and sanctuary of crazies hiding in every corner of Nashville. You will not find much of it here, even if it's all locked up in the country's DNA. Whenever Roy Acuff appears on the screen, I can not help but remember that Opryland, the suburban amusement park that has replaced the former Ryman Auditorium at downtown Nashville, offered him a small house on the grounds of Opryland where he lived a hall of presidents both audio-animatronic and wavering. Country music Treats Acuff as an old statesman, maybe he was, but the guy lived in a theme park, it's the Batshit madness that's crucial in the story.
Burns never lets vanilla go until eleven o'clock. More than once, he made me laugh out loud. That's when Bill Anderson explains how these hot, heavy, glittery Nudie costumes can make you sweat by 10 pounds as soon as you step out in this dazzling light of the stage. And congratulations for including the story of speed fanatic Roger Miller: when a developer asked Miller's manager how long Roger had been "fit" and said he had not worked with Roger only for a year and a half. Before that, he did not know.
Burns did not have to let Dwight Yoakam explain how Buck Owens used the opening lyrics of the songs to kick off and set the pace: "I have. Eu.A. Tiger. Two. Three. Four. But I'm so glad it's here. We are also pleased to have seen how much Owens has been striving to create his high-pitched, high-pitched sound to make it compatible with radios, from playing recordings to car radio speakers directly. in the studio. So c & # 39; why these songs sound like that.
On many occasions, the documentary illuminates a light where it did not have to, where it was simply guided by love and affection. It might have been necessary to ignore the Maddox Brothers and Rose, these crazy Dust Bowl migrants who turned into "The World's Most Colored Hillbilly Group", but thank God, someone in this project loved the Maddox. And Bob Wills and Patsy Montana.
Country music refuses to define his subject far beyond flabby and big ideas that the genre contains multitudes and you know it when you see it. Call it shy, but who can blame Burns and company? Trying to pin down a country is like fighting a fat man dipped in lard. In terms of self-definition, the country has always been in conflict with itself. It's stupid and deep, scary maudlin and deep, really emotional, often in the same song. What makes "He stopped loving her today" is the perfect country song.
Written by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman, produced by country master Billy Sherrill and sung by George Jones, this disc released in 1980 is Jones' first hit No. 1 in six years, which has not surprised anyone. 39; other than him, since he hated what he called "That morbid son of a bitch" that "nobody will buy."
Basically, it's a gimmick song with a particularity: we discover in the chorus that he stopped loving it because he died. There are sirupy violins, a harmonica, and a steel guitar in the background, accompanied by Lady woo-woo support vocals, a reciting couplet somewhere in the middle, and in one way or another, the voice of George Jones links this excessive mess, because, because he's George Jones and he can sing whatever and seem to believe that he absolutely believes every word, and you as well. He does not explain why he can sing like nobody before and why no one has ever managed to copy his style.
"He stopped loving her today" you dare not take it seriously, and double you to say it campy. It's smooth but yet honest, so openly sentimental–in his way strangely poker-faced–and he pulls so seriously on your heart that he defies the critics. It is one of those perfect works of art that sound as if they had existed forever, as if they existed in the ether, waiting for someone to come and get them.
There is no explanation for a song like that, or the genre it so brilliantly illustrates. How can such a banal and manipulative thing be so beautiful? Answer that and you will have managed to seduce the countries. But if you are like us, you will die trying.
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