Ken Burns' Country Music

Well, when Ken Burns goes big with a music genre -- first jazz, now country -- there's nothing you can do except be grateful for the celebration of the art form and then start bitching and moaning about the many ways he fell short. It's what these projects were made for. Since it's impossible to adequately capture the music in 16 or 20 hours or whatever, it becomes great sport to point out where he went wrong and scratch your head over why he chose to highlight what he did. It's like sports radio for music nerds. I mean, I've studied jazz for 45 years and I can barely wrap my head around it. My advice to the listener is to use Country Music as a starting point, and keep moving past the great artists that he was limited to introducing.

In a way, Country Music was more successful than Jazz. In the latter, Burns leaned too heavily on Wynton Marsalis, who has always had a weird obsession with what or what does not constitute "real jazz." Thus, huge swaths of the music from free jazz to fusion were slighted, as was anything that happened after 1970. With Country, Burns does a better job of presenting the music as incredibly diverse and always evolving. This is in part because his talking heads like Dwight Yoakum and Roseanne Cash experienced their own great success while existing outside the country mainstream. And insiders like Marty Stuart and Vince Gill have big ears and like it all. Here are some more observations.

1. The talking heads Burns worked with were sometimes just too enthusiastic and credulous. Was it the songwriter Larry Gatling who said that Kris Kristofferson was not only the best writer in country music, but also in Western Civilization? Whoa, Nellie!

2. And there was too much of the talking heads singing or playing snatches of the songs they love. Frankly, this device was probably used so much because it's just too damn hard or expensive to get the rights to the best performance clips. Too often these snatches get over on the emotion or affection of the talking head for a given piece. Fine, I love them, too. But it comes off as too fanboy. The thing to do if you like someone is to go on YouTube and fine great performance clips from Austin City Limits and the like. Really dig in and see what made the artist tick. Perfect example: Look up the Merle Haggard ACL from the 80s. He was actually in his prime as a performer then.

3. This gets to the next point. Since the series was chronological, we are introduced to artists at the point they broke through. So Haggard was introduced to us in the 1960s segment, and then received no further development. But it's not like the music just moves in chronological steps. Haggard continued to change and develop as an artist right up to his death a couple years ago. So if you were a fan of someone like Haggard, when the New Traditionalist came along in the 90s there was no real reason to get too excited about them, since you had never stopped listening to the deep stuff in the first place. Country Music makes it seem like everybody had forgotten about the roots, and now those roots were being revived. Yes, revived for some people perhaps. But for the true music fan, that stuff had never stopped happening.

4. This got me wondering if the topic would have been better handled thematically. Burns and his team probably considered this, and decided that chronological, while imperfect, was the best way to go. But if it were handled thematically, you could see how a stream or river of the music developed over time. So you could have a two hour episode on mountain music, for example, which would enable us to see how that music has thrived and diversified right up to the present. Instead of having to lean on just Bill Monroe and Ricky Skaggs, you could learn about the incredibly vibrant modern variations that build on the innovations of groups like New Grass Revival, groups like the Infamous Stringdusters or Old Crow Medicine Show. There's a whole scene around these groups. This goes for all the streams. Or consider Alt-Country. We briefly learned about Gram Parsons and got a lot of Emmylou Harris, which is cool. We learned about Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. But they represent just the tip of the iceberg of a still thriving genre. I mean, Lucinda Williams didn't even get a shout out!

5. One thing I learned is how cool Dolly Parton is. She knew what she was doing and what she wanted to achieve every step of the way. Like she said, she would get called a dumb blonde, to which she would reply, I'm not dumb, and I'm not a blond either! What a voice. It's powerful with being overbearing; it has a cutting edge to it without being shrill or annoying. I think it's because she has strong chi.

6. And how cool is Willie Nelson? Holy shit, how about those songs he wrote when he was a Nashville songwriter? Exhibit A: "Crazy." It's hard to believe that was written "by human hand." It seems like it must have dropped from the heavens. The story about how Patsy Cline came to record it was excellent. And her recording of it is one of the great moments not only in country music but in American music. I think Burns had that play over the credits of that episode. Spine tingling. One thing "Crazy" does is show us how Willie's love of the Great American Songbook informed his work. When he later recorded "Stardust" he made it explicit. But way back before that you could hear how the rising and falling contours of a song like "Crazy," moving so elegantly through the chord changes, owes so much to the influence of the great composers of Tin Pan Alley like Hoagy Carmichael. For this post's video I chose Willie's "I Just Destroyed the World I'm Living In." I listen to it over and over again just to hear him sing this part:

But fools in love are taught by fate
We never learn till it's too late
And I've Just destroyed the world I'm livin' in